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…

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 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 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…

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…

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…

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.…

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 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…

The article investigates questions concerning home and domestication in Johannes Semper’s and Tõnu Õnnepalu’s work. Both authors have participated in „domesticating” Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu in Estonian. Semper is known to be the first ever Estonian translator of Proust. His translation of the infamous excerpt of madeleine cake introduced Proust’s work to Estonian readers already in 1923. Tõnu Õnnepalu’s translation of Le Temps retrouvé (2004) is up until now the last published translation from the Recherche and also the only part of the novel completely translated into Estonian.
Both authors-translators have rather opposing approaches to the relations of foreign and domestic, which…

 
In 1917 two great female sonneteers published their debut poetry collections: Marie Under in Estonia and Edna St. Vincent Millay in US. Both poets gave voice to the desiring and self-conscious New Woman in their sonnets: their sonnet series are openly erotic and sensual, their female personas do not believe in eternal love and desire sensuous pleasure now and here.
The first part of the article gives an short overview of Petrarchism and female sonneteers, who have given voice to the woman in this primarily masculine discourse. It also points out the different cultural contexts of Millay’s and Under’s desiring sonnet…

The article discusses the chances of elucidating the underlying mechanisms of the emergence of modern Estonian culture, based on a linguistic comparison of the runo verse and the old translations of Lutheran hymns, and presents a few preliminary results of this approach. Modern Estonian-language culture emerged in the 19th century as a hybrid combining the old genuine traditional oral culture and the newer European written culture mediated by Germans. In the mind of a 18th-century Estonian peasant those two cultures still led a relatively independent existence. The old genuine culture was, among other things, represented by the runo songs (regilaul)…

The labelling of the adversary in the propaganda war is a process of two steps. To exchange a personal name for a befitting nickname you have, first, to introduce and inculcate a – mostly implicit, covert – by-name which is apposite thanks to not only external features of the adversary or his actual behaviour (NN ‹ caligula; in Estonian the personal character name is spelled with a minuscule). A surficial nickname will not stick in the face of a possible change of appearance or occupation. Secondly, you have to generalize the character name to a type name (caligula ‹ Tyrant;…

Jan Kaus’s approach to Tallinn in his prose is analysed. Using mapping, description, history, memory and memories of the place Kaus depicts the town through the views of different characters, while the motifs are often the same. The article examines whether the author prefers to describe the town or rather concentrates on the feelings and sense of identity of its inhabitants and on how it manifests in their interpretation of their town. As to the ways used to bring Tallinn home to the reader Kaus often chooses to convey a subtle cognitive milieu or atmosphere, connecting peoples’ fates with the…