ABSTRACT
Language use was socially and geographically complex. School teachers and religious instructors in eighteenth-century Norway were usually native Danish speakers who could also manage Norwegian. The Norwegian-Icelandic written language of the middle ages the language of the sagas had fallen into decay by the sixteenth century when Danish was the dominant written language. Danish was the language of the towns and of administration; Norwegian dialects belonged to the peasantry. Oral and literate culture interacted in these sorts of environments. Oral culture often provided the basis for what was written down, while printed texts fed back into the oral tradition to be retold and perhaps subtly changed. Interactions of this kind are clear in much of the ballad literature collected by amateur ethnographers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most important difference in cultural practices between men and women was arguably not orality versus literacy.
