Background
Alexander Haggerty Krappe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1884.
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Alexander Krappe
Edit Profilelinguist translator university professor
Education
University of Chicago. University of Iowa.
Career
Along with Francis Peabody Magoun, he was the first translator of folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm into the English language. A.H Krappe is described as a folklorist, linguist, teacher, translator of scientific and other materials, a Roman philologist, a comparative mythologist, a classicist and Scandinavianist. Despite Krappe"s contributions and academic writing, his work is largely ignored in the modern Folklore discipline as he staunchly denied the existence of American Folklore.
Krappe received his education in the Leibniz und Siemen"s Oberealschuel in Charlottenberg, Berlin.
Thus Krappe spent 1915-1916 studying medieval history and Romance languages at the University of Berlin. Krappe went on to enter the University of Iowa in Iowa City on a graduate fellowship, and received his Master of Arts with a major in French and a minor in Italian.
The capstone of his Master of Arts, his thesis was entitled "The Chronology of the old French Chanson de Geste." In January 1918, he began doctoral work at the University of Chicago on another graduate fellowship. In 1919, Krappe received a Doctor of Philosophy His work in university established his interest in epic and medieval literature.
In 1919, Krappe married Edith Smith, the daughter of Folklorist Grace Partridge Smith.
Krappe died on November 30, 1947 in Iowa City, Iowa, leaving three book-length manuscripts. The most significant of these, and only one published, was a translation of Grimm"s Collected Fairy Tales in conjunction with Francis Peabody Magoun. In his book The Science of Folklore he stated
"Folklore is a historical science, having its own methods of research and admitting of the same system of checks and verifications as any other.
From this follows that it may assume the rank of an ancillary science to any or all of them, and it has done so repeatedly, notably to the various philogies, history, ethnography, and the history of religion."
Krappe"s work also extended into the field of folksong, his own scholarly definition
"The folksong is a song, i.e a lyric poem with melody, which originated anonymously, among unlettered folk in times past and which remained in currency for a considerable time, as a rule for centuries.
. The American Kentucky Home, though it is supposed to have originated in circle of a somewhat darker hue than is popular in certain sections of the country, is a genuine folksong of both colored and white people"
This also serves as a prime example of Krappe"s unpopularity among Folklorists and anthropologists, as Krappe"s work many times shows him to be racist and sexist.
