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Paper short abstract

This paper will discuss the ecosystem of folklore invented by research history. By concentrating on folklore scholars in Finland it will shed light on ideological concepts and emphasis of oral lyric songs in terms of articulation of nature and female.

Paper long abstract

This paper will discuss the ecosystem of folklore invented by research history. By concentrating on folklore scholars in Finland it will shed light on ideological concepts and emphasis of oral lyric songs in terms of articulation of nature and female. Finnish-Karelian folk lyric has been defined as a female poetry of sorrow and loneliness and further, this perception has created one of the mental landscapes of ‘Finnishness’. Folk poetry collector, editor, Elias Lönnrot framed the Kanteletar, an oral-literary publication of folk lyric poetry (1840), by a motto song, the song of lonely who identifies herself with birds. The choice illustrates not only poetical but ideological ambitions in textualizing oral songs into written form. Furthermore, attempts to conceptualize oral singers as “bird of elegia” or “forest rose of Karelia” by later scholars have together designated an interpretative frame, an imagined ecosystem of the folk lyric poetry. Equivalent to nature, the forest has been considered a romantic, gendered and mysterious place for the singer's longing. The so-called “forest romance” repeated in folklore studies has engendered an articulation of lyric poetry as poetry of nature and female fragility to the readers. Taking the ecofeminist perspective as a theoretical frame, the paper seeks to disentangle the gendered and ideological bias of folk lyric. It will ask to what extent lyric poetry has been invented by a certain environment of vulnerability and desire of nature and of female in folklore studies and what kind of impacts it has had on the knowledge of folklore.