Paper Short Abstract:

The paper discusses two Finnish 19th century folklore collectors, C.A. Gottlund and E. Lönnrot and their conflicting strategies of textualizing sexual folk poetry. The schism centered on the validity of erotic folklore in the construction of national culture and representation of folk mentality.

Paper Abstract:

Oral sexual poems in the Kalevala-meter were sung and collected in Finland and Karelia until the 20th century. Folklore collectors, most of them male, shared an ambiguous stance towards vernacular expressions of sexuality: they were both vulgar and uncannily attractive. Two of the 19th century collectors, a specialist in erotica and an academic outcast C.A. Gottlund, and Elias Lönnrot who compiled the national epic Kalevala, had a fiercely antagonistic relationship. Much of the controversy centered on the aesthetic value of the men’s respective literary products. At the same the men shared an interest in vernacular erotica and its textualization.

Both men collected and edited a notable amount of erotic oral poems but only Gottlund published the outcome of this work. The paper discusses the differing motives of these processes of textualization as well as their outcomes: Gottlund’s explicit and rough folk poetry editions and a literary quasi-epic on the one hand, and Lönnrot’s unpublished erotic manuscript and the de-sexualized published collection of edited oral poems (the Kanteletar) on the other. Gottlund argumented for a truthful representation of vernacular mentality and local dialects whereas Lönnrot strived for a reconstruction of the ancient mentality of the Finnish folk and the standardization of dialects into one national language. Representation of vernacular erotica was thus entangled not only with notions on decency but also with the politics of heritage, language, and the national.