The book Samuels sang, together with the 3 albums Petter Dass-salmene, Kjempevisene and Siste sanger, is a tribute to one of Norway’s largest – and so far unknown – sources of traditional folk songs. Samuel Hansen Hellen (1813–1892) was a vagabond born on the island Nøtterøy. In 1868 and 1869 the well known folk music collector Ludvig Mathias Lindeman wrote down forty of the songs Samuel Hellen had learned on his way. Twelve of them had texts by the famous priest and poet Petter Dass, making Samuel the largest source of Dass’ hymn melodies. Another remarkable feature of Samuel’s is that so many of his texts are from printed sources – a strange thing for a wanderer. Beside Dass’ hymns the texts come from a collection of medieval ballads first printed in Denmark in 1591, called Hundreviseboka (later Kjempeviseboka) – making Hellen a unique and very interesting supplier of ballad melodies. Furthermore a lot of his melodies cover blank spots on the Norwegian “folk music map”.
