Paper short abstract:

In research of Finnic oral poetry, the main focus has been on epic, mythological and ritual genres. At the level of the whole recorded corpus, what genres and motifs are shared across the Finnic region, and how does this affect our understanding of what is characteristic to this wide oral tradition?

Paper long abstract:

In the research of Finnic oral poetry – often called runosongs or Kalevalaic poetry – the focus has been on epic, mythological and ritual genres. Yet, in respect of the whole Finnic corpus, epics appear to be quite marginal, highlighted due to selective interests of (past) collectors and researchers. The most famous epic songs were mostly recorded from Russian and Finnish Karelia.

All in all, there are over 240 000 digitized runosong texts in Estonian and Finnish archives, representing numerous genres from epic and charms to lyric, ritual poetry, lullabies, etc. The material is too vast to make any encompassing manual analysis of the complex variation of tradition, although this was what the early 20th-century scholars tried, one poetic type at a time, until it was made clear that this geographical-historical approach was not able to do what it aimed at. Since then, research has mostly focused on local traditions, individual singers, performances, and characteristics of the poetic language – building also grounds for new comparative approaches. In the FILTER-project (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/filter-project/), we combine computational and folkloristic, quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand the multilevel variation Finnic oral poetry.

In this paper, we detect and analyse similarities between Estonian, Karelian, Izhorian, Votic and Finnish oral poetry. What kinds of genres, motifs and formulas appear in several regions and languages, and how does this affect our understanding of what is actually characteristic or essential to this wide poetic tradition?