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…

This study proves, more than ever, that in addition to Joosep Freimann’s and Gustav Malts’ manuscripts as well as articles critical of Maltsevism, which appeared in the newspaper „Perno Postimees”, important material for constructing Maltsevism was acquired by borrowing the term „re-born” from Free Church and Baptist spirituality. Eduard Vilde investigated the spirituality of the Free and Baptist congregations born in Estonia in the 1880s, trying to discover the basic pattern of spirituality of the Maltsevians formed in the late 1850s. However, the construction of a picture of Maltsevism with „re-birth”, practice of rebaptism and an independent practice of the…

A. H. Tammsaare was drawn to the musical tonality of prose. Importantly though, he did not wholeheartedly embrace sound patterning as a mode of writing. Rather, he preferred a semantic widening of ordinary language within a comprehensively holistic „spherical music”. Still, in his novels, we can detect a deliberate use of rhythmic motion also in sentences. This is evident primarily in the wealth of lexical and syntactic repetitions resulting in a parallelism of patterns. An obvious, although discreet rhythmic design emerges in the thesis-antithesis-synthesis parataxis whose core words are the adversative and coordinating conjunction aga (‘but’) and the integrative ometi…