Parallelism and Orders of Signification (Parallelism Dynamics I)

This essay sets out an approach to parallelism in verbal art as a semiotic phenomenon that can operate at multiple orders (or levels) of signification. It examines parallelism in the sounds through which words are communicated, in language communicated by those sounds, in symbols or minimal units of narration communicated through language, and then in more complex units of narration communicated through those symbols or units. Attention is given to how these different levels of parallelism interrelate and may diverge, while revealing that parallelism at all of these levels reflects a single semiotic phenomenon.Abstract from website.Frog is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow and Associate Professor in Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki. He completed his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies at the University College London in 2010 and his Docentship (Habilitation) in Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki in 2013. He specializes in theory and methods related to the study of oral poetry and mythology, working mainly with Finno-Karelian kalevalaic poetry and Old Norse poetry and prose

Mythological Names and dróttkvætt Formulae I: When is a Valkyrie Like a Spear?

This article explores patterns of language use in oral poetry within a variety of semantic formula. Such a formula may vary its surface texture in relation to phonic demands of the metrical environment in which it is realized. Metrically entangled kennings in Old Norse dróttkvætt poetry provide material for a series of case studies focusing on variation in realizing formulae of this type. Old Norse kennings present a semantic formula of a particular type which is valuable as an example owing to the extremes of textural variation that it enables. Focus will be on variation between two broad semantic categories in expressing the formula’s consistent unit of meaning that are otherwise unambiguously distinct: proper names for mythological beings and poetic terms for weapons and armour. This article introduces an approach to kennings as semantic formulae and includes an illustrative case study on kennings meaning ‘battle’ in the last three metrical positions of a dróttkvætt line. The case study is simultaneously used to demonstrate the degree of integration of mythological proper names in the poetic register. This article contains only the first case study of a series. It provides foundations for examining variation in the associative links exhibited by names of mythic beings as a category according to the metrical positions in which a battle-kenning is realized

Multimedial Parallelism in Ritual Performance (Parallelism Dynamics II)

This article approaches parallelism as a semiotic phenomenon that can operate across verbal art and other media in performance. It presents an approach to different media and the uniting performance mode as construing "metered frames." Multimedial parallelism is analyzed as a phenomenon resulting from the coordination of expressions in relation to these frames to form members of parallel groups. The focus is on rituals that involve interaction with the unseen world. Discussion of parallelism between speech and empirical aspects of performance extends to the potential for presumed parallelism between speech and unseen objects, agents, and forces. John Miles Foley's concept of "performance arena" is extended to performers' and audiences' perceptions and expectations about "reality" in ritual performance. The mapping of otherworld locations and cosmology onto empirical spaces in performance is also discussed.Abstract from website.Frog is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow and Associate Professor in Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki. He completed his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies at the University College London in 2010 and his Docentship (Habilitation) in Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki in 2013. He specializes in theory and methods related to the study of oral poetry and mythology, working mainly with Finno-Karelian kalevalaic poetry and Old Norse poetry and prose

Narratiiv kui ravi: riituse-etendus ja narratiivi aktualiseerumine kogemusena

This paper addresses theoretical issues of narrative in an attempt to approach the semantics of understanding underlying the performance of certain healing rites. The first section of the paper introduces the term narrative power to refer to the cultural load developed by narratives and narrative strategies and develops a framework forapproaching healing rite performance as the application of strategies which actualize narrative as experience. The Finno-Karelian tietäjä tradition is discussed in relation to shamanic rite performance and memorized traditions of incantations, particularly those which incorporate historiolae. The European incantation tradition exhibits a fixed text approach which may bear continuities in strategies of application but continuities between performance and the healing event are ambiguous, open to interpretation, and the tradition does not require ‘understanding’ at all. Shamanic traditions are incredibly diverse, but they present an opposite extreme of subjective, internalized understandings of the mythic world and strategies for manipulating narrative power as an effective means of negotiating the recovery of a patient in interaction with the unseen world. The rites of the tietäjä have evolved between these two sets of strategies. The poetic meter inclines individual lines of verse to crystallize and somewhat flexible constellations of lines emerge as familiar compositional units in incantations and other genres. The degree to which rite performance was a variable emergent narrative nearer shamanic rites or a consistently reproduced – if verbally flexible – narrative more akin to the strategies of the European incantation would be dependent on the individual tietäjä, even if in the cultural milieu emphasis was placed on understanding the unseen world and the significance ofelements manipulated in the incantations. These traditions have been addressed here in generalizations in order to offer an overview of strategies applied and also how those strategies both interact with and affect other phenomena in the tradition ecology which for centuries may have been shaping a remarkable range of traditions and aspects of the worldview more generally.However, it must be remembered that these traditions have always been dynamic rather than uniform, and it is through the flexibility and openness to reinterpretation that the narrative power of these traditions could persist as viable instruments for crisis resolution through centuries of cultural change

Parallelism and Orders of Signification (Parallelism Dynamics I)

Peer reviewe

Parallelism in verbal art and performance : an introduction

Frog is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow and Associate Professor in Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki. He completed his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies at the University College London in 2010 and his Docentship (Habilitation) in Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki in 2013. He specializes in theory and methods related to the study of oral poetry and mythology, working mainly with Finno-Karelian kalevalaic poetry and Old Norse poetry and prose.Lotte Tarkka is Professor of Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her theoretical and methodological interests include oral poetics, theories of genre, intertextuality in oral poetry, processes of traditionalization and authorization, vernacular and mythic imagination, and reconstructive performance studies. She specializes in the study of Finnic oral traditions, especially poetry in the Kalevala-meter, Elias Lönnrot’s epic, the Kalevala, and Viena Karelian culture.Parallelism has been considered a fundamental feature of artistic expression. Robert Lowth (1753:180) coined the term parallelismus membrorum (“parallelism of members”) to describe a variety of different types of equivalence or resemblance that he observed between verses in Biblical Hebrew. Lowth’s study is in many respects the foundation of research on parallelism,2 although his terminology only began to spread across the nineteenth century. The concept expanded considerably during the twentieth century, especially through the far-reaching influences of Roman Jakobson. From early in his career, Jakobson looked at parallelism as an abstract text-structuring principle of “le rapprochement de deux unités” (Jakobson 1977 [1919]: 25) (“the bringing together of two units;” translations following a citation are by the present authors), later referred to in English as “recurrent returns” (1981 [1966]:98). Jakobson saw parallelism not only at the level of words, syntax, or meanings of verses as discussed by Lowth, but also at the level of sounds and rhythms within and across verses as well as in larger, complex structures. The breadth of Jakobson’s perspective allowed textual parallelism to connect fluidly with parallelism in music and other forms of expression. His views are the foundation for advancing the concept from language to a general semiotic phenomenon—a phenomenon observable within and across all sorts of media. Parallelism has become a central term and concept on discussions of literature, poetics, and beyond, and yet the phenomenon is so basic, so pervasive, that it is challenging to pin down.--Page 203.Frog, in collaboration with Lotte Tarkka

Who Am I and What Am I Doing Here? : Learning to Take Yourself and Your Experiences Seriously

Doing fieldwork is itself a learning process, and it can be a profoundly educational one, yet it can simultaneously be bewildering, terrifying, and the situation itself can produce an existential crisis. This modest essay talks about my own experiences with such issues. It is organized through a series of cases that include encounters with a ‘last singer’ of kalevalaic poetry in Finland, drum-dancers in East Greenland, a ram-sacrifice in the Republic of Karelia, and a perambulation into digital ethnography. Everyone’s experiences with fieldwork are unique, but these examples illustrate how your imagination of what ‘fieldwork’ is and who is qualified to do it can be a stumbling block that you unwittingly throw in front of yourself. A key point here is that anyone can do fieldwork, and, especially when you are just starting out, it is normal to feel stressed and uncertain, to blunder through situations and make mistakes. I set out my own experiences here with the hope that others can learn lessons from them more quickly than I did. The highlights of these lessons are quite basic: get permissions with full disclosure; take better notes; be aware of ethical issues; if you are there to learn from others, be prepared to find your way collaboratively; don’t underestimate the value of your experiences; and remember to breathe

Baldr and Lemminkäinen. Approaching the evolution of mythological narrative through the activating power of expression. A case study in Germanic and Finno-Karelian cultural contact and exchange

The orientation of this study is to explore what the sources for each narrative tradition can (and cannot) tell us about their respective histories, in order to reach a point at which it becomes possible to discuss a relationship between them and the significance of that relationship. This is not intended as an exhaustive study of every element of each source or every aspect of each tradition. It will present a basic introduction to sources for each tradition (§3-4) followed by a basic context for approaching the possibility of a cultural exchange (§5-7). The APE and its “powers” are introduced with specific examples from both traditions (§8-13). This will be followed by sections on the activation and manipulation of “identities” from the level of cultural figures to textual and extra-textual entities (§14-16) followed by relationships of traditions to individuals and social groups who perform them, and the impact which this has on the evolution of tradition as a social process (§17-18). The study will then address more specific issues in relationships between source and application in the medieval and iconographic representations of the Baldr-Cycle where so little comparative material is available to provide a context (§19). This will move into issues of persistence and change in the broader tradition, opening the discussion of intertextual reference and the evolution of traditions (§20-22). The Baldr-Cycle and Lemminkäisen virsi will each be reviewed (§23-24). It will be shown that Lemminkäisen virsi most likely emerged as a direct adaptation of a version of the Baldr-Cycle as a consequence of contacts with Germanic culture in the first millennium of the present era, probably during the Viking Age. Lemminkäinen appears to have been established as a cultural figure at that time, and the adaptation was most likely intended to impact how Lemminkäinen was regarded as a cultural figure. The value of the Baldr-Cycle in this application appears attributable to existing features in the tradition ecology which allowed its motif-complexes to generate significant and relevant meanings (§25). This study is a case study approaching the evolution of mythological narrative as a historical process occurring through a conjunction of individual applications and social processes. This case study demonstrates the value of the APE and offers insight into the history of cultural contact and exchange in the Circum-Baltic region

The Finnic Tetrameter – A Creolization of Poetic Form?

This article presents a new theory on the origins of the common Finnic tetrameter as a poetic form (also called the Kalevala-meter, regilaul meter, etc.). It argues that this verse form emerged as a creolization of the North Germanic alliterative verse form during a period of intensive language contacts, and that the Finnic ethnopoetic ecology made it isosyllabic. Previous theories have focused on the trochaic, tetrametric structure and viewed other features of poetic form as secondary or incidental. This is the first theory to offer a metrically driven explanation for the distinctive features of the poetic form: the systematic placement of lexically stressed short syllables in metrically unstressed positions and systematic yet unmetricalized use of verse-internal alliteration. The emergence of the poetic form may be viewed simply in terms of hybridization, but its formation as a central mode for epic and ritual poetry demands consideration of social factors. Creolization is considered a social process of hybridization at the level of sign systems that is characterized by a salient asymmetrical relation of power, authority or other value in the cultural sign systems being reconfigured from the perspective of the society or groups involved. An argument is presented that North Germanic contacts also produced systematic verse-internal alliteration in Finnic languages. Discussion then turns to the distinction between the origin and spread of the poetic form. The poetic form’s uniformity across Finnic language areas in spite of its ‘foreign’ metrical features along with the range of genres with which it was used are considered indicators of the poetic form’s spread with language, forming an argument that the tetrameter emerged within an environment that also produced Late Proto-Finnic, and then spread with Late Proto-Finnic language and culture through areas where other Finnic language forms were spoken

Transitions and Transformations

Non peer reviewe