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Topic
Year
Young Brockmann on poetics
One of the challenges in the reconstruction of the poetological program of Reiner Brockmann (1609–1648), the author of the first secular poems in Estonian, is the absence of personalia from his youth. Therefore it is difficult to decide which of his poetic principles had been acquired in Germany and which of them evolved in Estonia. Three Brockmann’s autographs from September 1629 to October 1633 are retained in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library in Hannover, among the correspondence of the German scholarly family Meibom of the early modern era. In addition, Brockmann published 1630 a greeting poem on the occasion of the…
Variation in the partitive plural sid- and si-endings
This study investigates the choice between the partitive plural case sid– and si-endings as manifested in Internet Estonian. The sid-ending is grammatically correct in Standard Estonian, whereas the si-ending is not. However, the si-ending is known to occur in student essays as well as in online communications. The research question examined in this study was which words exhibit more variation in terms of the sid– and si-endings. The words were considered from the aspects of inflectional type, part of speech, phrase analogy, and position in the turn.
The material analysed comes from new media texts available in the text corpora of…
The material analysed comes from new media texts available in the text corpora of…
Soil and garden in the poetry of Debora Vaarandi
Soil constitutes the living ground from which cultures stem, alongside with all other manifestations of life. Soil has been an important trope in the poetry of Debora Vaarandi (1916–2007), one of the leading poets of mid-20th century Estonia. She grew up in the countryside and agricultural work was an essential part of her life experience. Political conditions left their mark on Vaarandi’s poems: in her propagandistic poetry of the 1950s soil appears only as an emblem of socialist agriculture. The poem „Dear soil. . . .” (1954) marks a turning point; from there on, an intimate and emotionally enriching bond with soil appears…
Two gardens and several soils
The garden as a literary trope has a time-honoured tradition behind it. Its classic manifestations include locus amoenus, a pleasant and delightful space in perpetual bloom, as well as hortus conclusus,an enclosed leafy space bearing religious connotations. Gardening as an occupation has been compared to a continuation of God’s work of creation on earth. However, these traditional tropes need not pay much attention to soil that has a crucial role in the cycle of matter between the living and the nonliving parts of the environment and makes the cultivation of surface vegetation possible.
In the early poetry of the Estonian author…
In the early poetry of the Estonian author…
Matthias Johann Eisen and his coworkers defining the folklore on Seven Moseses
The article is focused on the folktale publication „Seven Moseses. An Attempt to Explain the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses” (1896) compiled by Matthias Johann Eisen. According to Estonian folklore, the original Bible contained seven books of Moses, and although the 6th and 7th were removed from the official version long ago, some of the copies are still in use – and there are a lot of folktales telling about people who own the book and the deeds they do with the help of it.
Eisen started to amass materials for his publication in 1893 – as usual at the…
Eisen started to amass materials for his publication in 1893 – as usual at the…
Airootsi – the literary mindscape of Lauri Pilter
Ever since his first book Lauri Pilter has associated his narratives with personally meaningful places. Gradually his interlacing of fact and fiction has caused a network of real places develop into a literary mindscape fictitiously called Airootsi. In real landscape its counterpart could be seen in the Noarootsi peninsula, Western Estonia. Noarootsi is also the initial name of Pilter’s mindscape. Gradually, however, some odd place names start appearing, which blurs the possible correspondence between literary and real geography.
In the framework of different interpretations of landscape, literary mindscape and Umwelt, the article analyses the literary mappings of Noarootsi and the gradual…
In the framework of different interpretations of landscape, literary mindscape and Umwelt, the article analyses the literary mappings of Noarootsi and the gradual…
Origin of the a(h)i- ~ ä(h)i-initial toponyms in South Estonia
The paper starts with a detailed survey of the study history of the place names with ahi– ~ ähi-and ai– ~ äi-stems, which are used in South Estonia. Linguists have associated the ahi-initial toponyms (for example Ahja, Aheru), some of which have changed into ähi-and even ai– ~ äi-initial words, with the Mulgi dialect word ahikotus ’sacrificial place’. The meaning of the Estonian protoform *ahti : *ahδi– (Finno-Ugric *ašt-) has been reconstructed as ’sacrifice’, which interpretation has lately been discredited. This paper gives additional proof that the semantic development of *ahti suggested by Paul Ariste (2010 [1937]) is quite veracious.…
„Or, as the joke goes, …”
Old jokes (sometimes only reduced to the punch-line), also known as lame jokes, are true pieces of folklore that circulate among people and are shared by communities. These are short narratives ending in a predictable punch-line that does not provide any novelty to the listeners. They are often published in volumes of joke collections or in the Varia section of newspapers.
Although with regard to jokes predictability is a drawback, petrified jokes can also provide joy of recognition instead of discovery and function as an enhancer of group cohesion. Quoting lines from known jokes defines the borders between in-group and out-group…
Although with regard to jokes predictability is a drawback, petrified jokes can also provide joy of recognition instead of discovery and function as an enhancer of group cohesion. Quoting lines from known jokes defines the borders between in-group and out-group…
The Ludza fairy tales collected by Paulopriit Voolaine
The article analyses the fairy tales collected from the environs of Ludza town, Latvia, in 1925–1937 by Paulopriit Voolaine. The collected material was sent by him to the Academic Mother Tongue Society, to M. J. Eisen’s Scholarship Fellows collection and to the Estonian Folklore Archives. In the 1920s his interest was focused on the Estonian narrative tradition of the Ludza enclave, but in the 1930s he also collected the folklore of other peoples inhabiting the region. As, for historical and political reasons, the Latgale region of Latvia has been rather multicultural Voolaine’s material is excellent for cross-ethnic comparative analysis. The…
The tall tales told by Jaagup Puu
The subjects and style of the stories told by Jaagup Puu (1879–1964) are analysed. Jaagup’s stories could be classified under tall tales like those in ATU 1875–1999. Jaagup used to narrate about his own life experiences, using exaggerations and fantasy bordering on the absurd. This socially poor and meagre-looking man would tell his stories, if possible, for two or three hours on end, emplotting the facts and events of his personal life, developing the story in great length, adding intermediate episodes, contaminations and comments. His stories are full of exaggerations, manipulation with numbers and dimensions, comical situations, abundant dialogue, similes,…
The figure of Leiger in the narrative tradition of Hiiumaa
The article discusses the tradition about Leiger, the central figure of the giant and hero legends of Hiiumaa, covering the history of collecting, studying and publishing of the relevant folklore, as well as the historical, cultural, ethnic and mythological factors behind this popular figure and his specific local traits. Since 1890, seventy six legends or shorter tradition records of giants’ activities on the Isle of Hiiumaa have arrived in the Estonian Folklore Archives at the Estonian Literary Museum. A comparison of the giant stories collected from the parishes of Emmaste, Käina, Pühalepa and Reigi with those from other regions reveals…
What did the Seto people read?
Poor education and illiteracy belong to the leitmotifs of the description of Seto culture, which have passed on from the times of Jakob Hurt and Oskar Kallas to the 20th century. On the one hand this has been regarded as a shortcoming behind the economic and cultural backwardness of the community. On the other hand, the cultural space uncorrupted by modern institutions enabled archaization and exotization of the Seto people.
As most of the Setos were indeed illiterate in the early decades of the 20th century it was assumed that the tradition recorded from them was still untouched by influences of…
As most of the Setos were indeed illiterate in the early decades of the 20th century it was assumed that the tradition recorded from them was still untouched by influences of…
A legend of a lake born of a marriage between a brother and sister
A popular Estonian legend, known above all in southern Estonia and the West-Estonian islands is analysed. The legend tells about a brother and sister from a higher stratum of society, who are intent on getting married to one another. Despite a special permission obtained from the Pope, at the big moment the house of the ceremony, with all the wedding guests, disappears under the ground and a lake appears instead. The only one to survive is a brother of the couple’s mother. Most of the 20th-century records refer the legend to Lake Valgjärv of Koorküla.
According to several historical documents, the…
According to several historical documents, the…
As legend becomes fiction
In contemporary folkloristics legend is usually conceptualised as a believable narrative genre telling about extraordinary events and supernatural encounters. The veracity of legends is achieved through the rhetoric of factualization and verification and by blending the genre with social and physical details of everyday life. The article discusses some discursive changes occurring in legends as the genre is transferred from the sphere of oral communication to that of book-lore, media and academic folkloristics. Fr. R. Faehlmann and Fr. R. Kreutzwald were among the first authors in Estonia who started a literary project of turning legends into a genre of fiction.…
Typological reality of the Estonian treasure tale tradition
The article gives an overview of the content units – motifs and episodes – found in Estonian treasure tales. The main aim of the study was to find a method to cover the regional repertoire of the theme in all its diversity. This can be achieved by using a typological approach to search through the no less than 3000 relevant texts from the Estonian Folklore Archives for similar core motifs (motif groups) and use them as a basis for classifying the texts. The analysis, based on a previous classification of the treasure tales into 86 groups, continues the classical folkloristic…
The endless and unending folk tale
The introductory article of the special issue on folk narratives includes a chain tale „Peas Won’t Go into Bag”, classifiable under the tale type ATU 2030, where in order to get things right a funny piece of violence is required to be enacted on increasingly bigger recusant animals. This is a cumulative story told to the author of the article by a special informant met at a tale-collecting fieldwork. There is nothing unusual in story-telling, despite the frequently idealized portrayals of the great story-tellers of old, sometimes deliberately contrasting with the modern tradition. Actually, most of us are able to…