Axel Olrik

Axel Olrik (3 July 1864 – 17 February 1917) was a Danish folklorist and scholar of mediaeval historiography, and a pioneer in the methodical study of oral narrative.

In 1886, he won the university gold medal for an essay on the age of the Eddic poems;[2] he received his Master of Arts in Nordic Philology in 1887 and his Ph.D. in 1892.

[1] Grundtvig had amalgamated what he considered useful features from various versions of a folksong or ballad to produce a long, complex whole; Olrik, in contrast, sought to trace the history of the oral texts back to simple originals.

He was also the first president of Danmarks Folkeminder, an association founded in 1908, and set up its committees for the study of folklore material and of placenames, both of which are now research institutes at the University of Copenhagen.

Olrik's Ph.D. dissertation, Forsøg på en tvedeling af kilderne til Sakses oldhistorie ("Attempts at a two-part division of the sources for Saxo's history of the Danes"), was on the sources of Saxo Grammaticus' Latin history of the Danes, Gesta Danorum.

[3] His unfinished work on the study of oral narrative was published posthumously in 1921 by Ellekilde as Nogle grundsætninger for sagnforskning.