Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 30 to 34 A little more than a hundred years ago, a number of European scholars began to record stories being told in peasant cottages and compile them into the first great collections of European folk tales. Written evidence exists to prove that the folk tales they recorded existed long before then though. Collections of sermons from the 12th to the ...

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 30 to 34

A little more than a hundred years ago, a number of European scholars began to record stories being told in peasant cottages and compile them into the first great collections of European folk tales. Written evidence exists to prove that the folk tales they recorded existed long before then though. Collections of sermons from the 12th to the 15th century show that medieval preachers knew of some of the same stories as those recorded by the 19th century folklorists.

The collections of folk tales made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries provide a rare opportunity to make contact with the illiterate masses who have disappeared into the pass without leaving a trace. To reject folk tales as historical evidence because they cannot be dated and situated with precision like other historical documents is to turn one’s back on one of the few points of entry into the previous centuries. But to attempt to penetrate that world is to face a daunting set of obstacles, the greatest of which is the impossibility of listening in on the story tellers. No matter how accurate they may be the versions of the tales recorded in writing cannot convey the effects that the storytellers must have used to bring the stories to life: the dramatic pauses, the sly glances, the use of gestures to set scenes, and the use of sounds to punctuate actions. All of those devices shaped the meaning of the tales, and all of them elude the historian. He cannot be sure that the limp and lifeless text he holds between the covers of a book provides an accurate account of the performance that took place in earlier times

What problems of folk tale collections does the author discuss?