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Paper short abstract

On the basis of folklore and vegetation history data, this transdisciplinary study explores connections between surrounding nature and cultural expression, to highlight how oral poetry encodes and transmits environmental knowledge across time and space.

Paper long abstract

Common Finnic oral poetry – often called runosong – is known in most Finnic traditions. On the basis of linguistic history and prevalence of the poetic form over the large Finnic area, it is assumed that it emerged before the final divergence of Finnic languages around 2000 years ago, and spread along with the Finnic peoples and languages. Poem texts have been documented massively, mostly during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Oral poetry has admittedly been a central tool in historical oral cultures to store the information and to convey knowledge. Despite variation that enables recurrent updating and adaptation of poems and motifs, the runosong as a form is remarkably conservative, retaining archaic expressions. Yet, while the texts cover a wide range of topics relevant to pre-modern cultural settings, it remains extremely difficult to establish the age or origins of any individual content element. Furthermore, it is not easy to approach practical and symbolic meanings of versatile poetic expressions in a wide set of varying texts. Our aim is to evaluate these questions by computational contextual reading, using trees as our case.

Deeply embedded in human life in the Finnic region, tree species occur abundantly in runosongs. We examine the tree references in a large runosong corpus and compare their regional variation and poetic associations with vegetation history of the region. This allows us to trace connections between surrounding nature and cultural expression, and to highlight how oral poetry encodes and transmits environmental knowledge across time, and possibly also space.