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Accepted Paper:
Re-telling reindeer theft – historical documents and the poetics of an autobiographical song
Lotte Tarkka
(University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
Martiska Karjalainen was a Karelian runosinger, Elias Lönnrot’s informant and a thief. An analysis of his autobiographical song uses various ethnographic sources and official documents to unveil how “tricstering”, mythology and poetics make sense of and validate controversial patterns of agency.
Paper long abstract:
The paper re-tells the story of Martiska Karjalainen (1768-1840), a Karelian runosinger and one of Elias Lönnrot’s key-informants for the Kalevala.The posteriority knowns him as a notorius criminal drawn to excessive alcohol use – a singer whose songs were plenty but too disorganized to be used in the national epic. An analysis of Martiska’s autobiographical song uses various ethnographic and oral history sources as well as official documents to unveil an intricate poetics of validating cultural patterns of agency, “tricstering” and mythologizing historical realities. Rather than a fragmented, boastful and intoxicated chronicle on a life of reindeer thieving, court sessions and imprisonment, the song is a poetically coherent and mythologically resonant testimony. It situates the Viena Karelian practice of reindeer thieving and the choices made by one individual in multiple social contexts as well as on the arena of state politics, as the case of Martiska’s court case was made a precedent for the settlement border disputes and the conflict-ridden relations between Russia and its autonomous grandduchy, Finland. Detailed textual analysis, multiple contextualization, data triangulation and recentering marginalized performances offers new insights on the life of poetry and the lives of the poem-makers in the early nineteenth century and beyond.