It is common knowledge that the theory of ternary quantity degrees of Estonian sounds was created by Mihkel Veske (1843–1890) and first published in his book about Estonian phonetics in 1879. However, Ado Grenzstein (1849–1916), an outstanding man of letters of the late 19th century, had published an article with a number of linguistic suggestions, including an idea of three contrasting lengths of Estonian sounds, both vowels and consonants, in the newspaper Postimees at the end of 1876. The argumentation and even the examples presented by Grenzstein are astonishingly similar to those of Veske published a few years later without…

The article describes a system for automatic reading and broadcasting subtitles, based on synthetic speech files generated from TV subtitle files and transmitted to the television ether through a separate audio channel. Owing to the recent progress in the development of speech technology (speech synthesis and speech recognition) and the growing popularity of digital television, people with special linguistic needs such as those suffering from visual or reading impairments, can access various services connected with mass media. The software solution of spoken subtitles consists of two logical components, namely, an interface of automatic reading and voice editing and another interface…

This article introduces the concept of itinerant kingship, which is a relatively universal phenomenon in pre-modern societies where several relatively large territorial units were united under one political power, however, without extensive bureaucracy. Therefore this power was forced to regularly visit the subordinate territories in order to collect taxes, exercise judicial power and maintain political subordination. The political power under question did not necessarily have to be a king nor even a sovereign, it could be anyone exercising power over distant enough territories that needed the personal presence of the ruler to control them. Examples of such a system include…

The article gives an overview of the Finnish literature of the current century. The focus lies on poetry and prose, leaving out drama, children’s and youth literature, and comics. What is observed as general trends are genre shift and mixing, disspation of a single ’I’ or narrator, a loss of the boundary from between fact and fiction, intertextuality, and the use of a wide range of topics defying taboos. It is pointed out that modern Finnish literature is personified and the name of an author will typically become a brand.
In prose the salient topics include war, history, the role of…

The article focuses on a nominal phrase or compound word invented by the translators of the first versified Estonian church hymnal (1656). Although the German versions of Lutheran church hymns had end rhyme, the hymns used to be translated into Estonian in prose and without any rhyme up to the mid-17th century. The translators of the hymnal of 1656 were the first to employ meter and rhyme following the strict versification rules established by Martin Opitz. In order to find pure rhymes various tricks were used. In five hymns, the frequent verb form on (’is, are, have, has’) was rhymed…

Usually urban themes are not to be anticipated in older Estonian folk song.This is, firstly, because the songs presumably date back to more than two thousand years. Secondly, the background and typical themes refer regilaul to an agrarian culture. The tradition of singing in regilaul style receded from active use after the mid-19th century, with the advance of extensive changes in the economy, education and population behaviour in the present-day Estonian territory. At a closer look, however, some figures involving town names as well as mentions of urban themes can be observed. In Estonia, the first townships emerged in the…

The study looks at the choice of Estonian partitive case forms in modern Estonian usage by inflectional classes. In particular, the analysis is focused on the inflectional classes containing alternative parallel forms. The material analyzed comes from new media texts available in the text corpora of the University of Tartu. The preference of certain forms is explained according to the theory of natural morphology and the frequency of use. In partitive singular, the preference of using a vowel ending vs the t-ending  was investigated. In partitive plural, the use of a vowel ending vs the sid-ending was studied. The si-ending,…

The present paper is concerned with a process observed in contemporary written Estonian that results in the development of complex postpositions. Traditionally, the category of postpositions in Estonian consists of nothing but simple items. However, in actual language use, there are numerous examples that are analyzable as complex postpositions. In this account, we aim to explain the development of complex postpositions both theoretically and empirically.
In our analysis, we draw on the schema of cyclic development of Estonian function words proposed by Habicht and Penjam (2007). It is shown that the development of complex postpositions is similar to that of complex…

This article examines exile trauma and the poetics of its representation in Bernard Kangro’s novel „The Blue Gate” (Sinine värav). Exile was first thematized in Bernard Kangro’s poetry, in the first collection he published in Sweden, „The Burned Tree” (1945). However, it was not until 1957, in the novel „The Blue Gate” that exile became a thematic concern in his prose. The working through of his personal trauma in prose fiction, instead of the so-called pure autobiographical genres continued throughout Kangro’s Tartu novels, culminating in his Joonatan trilogy in the beginning of the 1970s. The main reason for this sequence may…

The first part of the article deals with the theoretical problem of historical fiction as a means of exploring the historical past. According to the consensual view in the theory of fiction, fictional worlds are inhabited only by fictional entities, so that the Tallinn of Jaan Kross’ historical novels is a fictional Tallinn, although one with a factual counterpart. In this view historical novels cannot be used for exploring the past. In the best case they can be used as sources about the times of their composition. On the other hand there is a tradition represented by certain novelists as…

The article assumes that history is kept in cultural memory by reduplication into different languages or media. Each new duplicate version includes a variable part influenced by its author’s contemporary socio-cultural background as well as by the particular medium or language used. On the other hand, transmedia analysis enables to find the invariable core contained in all of the versions.
One of the repeatable wholes in Estonian cultural memory is made up of the artistic texts mediating the escapes over the sea in 1944. The article analyses fragments of three relevant works, namely, August Gailit’s novel Üle rahutu vee („Over troubled…

The historical novels by Rudolf Sirge provide an opportunity to examine the question how we could and should read the literary works from the Soviet time that have a certain literary value, but which do not fit into the contemporary ideological framework or the „regime of truth”, in a situation where the complicated codes of reception of those times are hidden from us. The paper deals with two cases: first, a comparison of Rahu! Leiba! Maad! („Peace! Bread! Land!”, 1929), a naturalist novel about the revolutionary times of 1917–1918, and its later version Tulukesed luhal („Lights on the River Plain”,…

While the interwar literatures of the big, established European nation states afforded historical fiction but a marginal position, the genre did not lose its functionality for the new nations. The late 1930s witnessed a new rise of the Estonian historical novel. This article analyses two of the most emblematic examples of this boom, namely, the Estonian Viking novels Urmas ja Merike („Urmas and Merike”, 1935–1936) by Karl August Hindrey and Läänemere isandad („The Lords of the Baltic Sea”, 1936) by August Mälk. Examining the relations between historical fiction and national history, it contextualizes those works on the background of two…

Aino Kallas (1878–1956) is considered a Finnish as well as an Estonian author. Her borderline status between the two cultures and her ambivalent oeuvre continue to provide substance for diverse literary historical interpretations, neither has reader interest waned, which has even led to talk of a renaissance of Aino Kallas. The article discusses the writer’s relations with (Estonian) history on which her masterpieces were based. Aino Kallas arrived at the themes from the 14th–17th centuries after a creative crisis making her realize that lack of the blood bond prevented her from delving into specifically Estonian problems and that realism was…

This article examines the social relations of gender in Eduard Vilde’s historical novel Mahtra sõda („The Mahtra War”, 1902), focused on the widespread peasant rebellions of 1858 in northern Estland. It is argued that gender is a major axis for the representation of village life as the novel analyzes the intrusion of colonial violence into a peasant family through sexual abuse of young women who worked as servants at the manor and their forced marriages, emphasizing that women’s survival strategies and resistance are shown in the context of gendered social relations. The Trauerspiel of the Mahtra rebellion draws close attention…

Balthasar Russow’s Livonian Chronicle was not only popular at the time when it was written, but continues to fascinate the readers up to the present. This article is firstly sketching the circumstances of the multiplication of Russow’s own text, secondly mapping the uses of Russow’s Livonian Chronicle in historical fiction and folklore, and thirdly pointing at some features of the chronicle which may lay behind its popularity throughout the centuries.
Both, in the Baltic German and Estonian literature there are numerous examples, where the material from the chronicle has been used in fiction (e.g. Theodor Herman Pantenius, Eduard Bornhöhe, Enn Kippel,…

Juudit, ehk Jamaika saare viimsed Maroonlased („Juudit”, or the Last Maroons of Jamaica”, 1870) was published at the height of the Estonian 19th-century ‘National Awakening’ by one of its leading activists, Lydia Koidula (1843–1886). Probably an adaptation of an unknown German source, the novella is set on Jamaica in 1795, in the wake of the French Revolution. It ties the political plot of the Second Maroon War, which was fought by a group of runaway slaves against the planters and the British military, with a fictional inter-racial love-intrigue. The novella transmits a number of earlier thematic and formal patterns associated…

During the past 150 years historical fiction has been one of the key „memory forms” contributing to the making and consolidation of Estonian cultural memory and national history. Nevertheless, it has rarely been studied from that perspective. The introductory article to the special issue on the Estonian historical novel and cultural memory firstly gives an overview of the concept of cultural memory and discusses the perspectives it opens up for the study of the Estonian historical novel. It also suggests some new ways to explore the relationship of historical fiction with other media of cultural memory such as historiography, politics…