Perspectives to the Relations between the Estonian Folklore Archives and the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society

The origin of the relations between Finnish and Estonian folklorists goes far back to the days of Elias Lönnrot and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald in the first half of the 19th century. In this article, however, I shall concentrate on those decades since the 1930s, when the two archives, the Estonian Folklore Archives and the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society have existed as institutions. I shall highlight some events, joint projects, historical turning points, and pay attention to individuals, who have had more influence on developing these relations. There were periods of time when the contacts were not possible between the institutions, but still, the continuity of relations existed between individuals. My point of view is micro-historical, as the study of micro-history is interested on the small scale level on the individual, in opposition to macro-history that concentrates on the great changes brought along by political events, on the history of “great men and women”, as well as on the history of institutions. In the history of the folklore archives in Finland and Estonia, we can recognise both of those levels and pay attention to the way how they are intertwined

Suomenlahden ulkosaaret muistoissa

Kirja-arvostelu: Ulla-Maija von Hertzen (toim.): Kotisaaret. Suursaari, Lavansaari, Tytärsaari, Seiskari. WSOY 2008

Songs and Writings : Oral and Literary Cultures in Early-Modern Finland

Laulut ja kirjoitukset: suullinen ja kirjallinen kulttuuri uuden ajan alun Suomessa (Songs and writings: oral and literary culture in early-modern Finland) has been written at the crossroads of historical and folkloristic studies. Our purpose is to study the interface of literary and oral cultures in early modern Finland, focusing on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book renews the understanding of exchange between the learned culture of clergymen and the culture of commoners, or “folk”. What happened when the Reformation changed the position of the vernacular language to literary and ecclesiastical, and when folk beliefs seem to have become an object for more intensive surveillance and correction? How did clergymen understand and use the versatile labels of popular belief, paganism, superstition and Catholic fermentation? Why did they choose particular song languages, poetic modes and melodies for their Lutheran hymns and literary poems, and why did they avoid oral poetics in certain contexts while accentuating it in others? How were the hagiographical traditions representing the international medieval literary or “great” tradition adapted to “small” folk traditions, and how did they persist and change after the Reformation? What happened to the cult of the Virgin Mary in local oral traditions? This book studies the relations and mutual influences of oral and literary cultures in Finland during the long period stretching from late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The Reformation, the process of turning vernacular languages into literary ones, the rise of new early-modern territorial principalities, and the reorganisation of the whole Baltic Sea area in the sixteenth century and after all affected both people’s everyday lives and the spheres of the sacred. The learned elites became interested in folk beliefs and practices as they started to argue about and order their own religious practices in a new way. Lutheran congregational singing spread from the German area to the northern Baltic Sea regions. The first Finnish sixteenth-century reformers admired the new Germanic models and avoided the Finnic vernacular Kalevala-metre idiom, while their successors picked up many vernacular traits, most notably alliteration, in their ecclesiastical poetry and hymns. Over the following centuries, the new features introduced via new Lutheran hymns such as accentual metres, end-rhymes and strophic structures were infusing into oral folk poetry, although this took place also via secular oral and literary routes. On the other hand, seventeenth-century scholars cultivated a new academic interest in what they understood as “ancient Finnish poetry”. The main source materials studied in this book are from the Reformation period and immediately after, when Finnish clergymen wrote their first comments and depictions of folk beliefs and worked to create Lutheran hymns in Finnish, and also largely from the nineteenth century, when most Finnish folk poetry and older oral traditions were collected. These later folklore materials are used here to shed light on the transformations of folk beliefs and poetic forms during the centuries that followed the Reformation. The emphasis is on the areas which formed the old medieval diocese of Turku (Swedish Åbo) or what the Swedish rulers called the province of Österland (Lat. Osterlandia, later Finlandia) west from the border of Nöteborg (Finnish Pähkinäsaari) between Sweden and the Grand Duchy of Novgorod in 1323. In addition, some other sources, especially from the Finnic and Scandinavian areas, are used as comparative material.Peer reviewe

Laulut ja kirjoitukset: Suullinen ja kirjallinen kulttuuri uuden ajan alun Suomessa

"Songs and writings: oral and literary cultures in early-modern Finland renews the understanding of exchange between the learned culture of clergymen and the culture of commoners, or “folk”. What happened when the Reformation changed the position of the oral vernacular language to literary and ecclesiastical, and when folk beliefs seem to have become an object for more intensive surveillance and correction? How did clergymen understand and use the versatile labels of popular belief, paganism, superstition and Catholic fermentation? Why did they choose particular song languages, poetic modes and melodies for their Lutheran hymns and literary poems, and why did they avoid oral poetics in certain contexts while accentuating it in others? How were the hagiographical traditions representing the international medieval literary or “great” tradition adapted to “small” folk traditions, and how did they persist and change after the Reformation? What happened to the cult of the Virgin Mary in local oral traditions? The first Finnish 16th-century reformers admired the new Germanic models of Lutheran congregational hymns and avoided the Finnic vernacular Kalevala-metre idiom, while their successors picked up many vernacular traits, most notably alliteration, in their ecclesiastical poetry and hymns. Over the following centuries, the new features introduced via new Lutheran hymns such as accentual metres, end-rhymes and strophic structures were infusing into oral folk poetry, although this took place also via secular oral and literary routes. On the other hand, seventeenth-century scholars cultivated a new academic interest in what they understood as “ancient Finnish poetry”. The book has an extensive English Summary for the international readership.