Collectors were “outsiders” who learned how to collect poetry not by instruction or even necessarily by example, but by simply by going out and “doing” it. Instructions for collection were not put forward until 1891 (see Hautala 1968, Siikala 2002c; Tarkka 2005:32ff.; Stark 2006:116ff.). Mytho-heroic poetry was often found among Old Believers, a conservative form of Orthodox Christianity which resisted the reforms of Patriarch Nikon.77 Collectors were viewed by them as “pagan”, or even “Swedish pagans”, and potentially infectious.78 Singers might view poems, genres or singing as “sinful”, or be unwilling to perform because it was socially unacceptable in their community (Siikala 2002b:32-33; Tarkka 2005:41-42). Epic poetry was associated strongly with tietäjät, the ethnic ritual specialist and wielder incantations (§7.4), and collectors met resistance and problems related to fears about losing or transferring
75
Compare the persistence of the farcical Þrymsqviða narrative (§16.4.2).
76 Even in Ingria where conventions were most flexible, epic appears to have maintained an exceptional
status in reproduction (cf. Timonen 2000:653, 2004:287)
77
For an overview of the Old Believers in English, see Pentikäinen 1978:100-120
78 Tarkka 2004:23. E.g. M.A. Castrén had difficulty getting food in one village of Old Believers because it
was believed he would contaminate their dishes and utensils (Pentikäinen 1999:125). On the fluid boundary between spiritual and physical “health” see Stark 2002, 2006.
magical power in the interview (Siikala 2002c, Tarkka 2005).79 Each individual developed his or her own relationship to the traditions and each household or village community held singing in different social regard (§8.3, §17). The poetry and its language were foreign to the collectors and had to be learned.80 The core corpus reflects a full spectrum of these issues. A basic understanding of the corpus is essential for approaching the data.
Kalevala has a very important relationship to the corpus. Lönnrot collected the most LV
variants prior to the publication of the first edition of Kalevala (Old Kalevala). This publication stimulated a tremendous collection effort. Collectors treated epic as the most desirable genre for documentation (Siikala 2002c; 2003:4-5). The position of LV and Lemminkäinen in Kalevala not only ensured its status as a song worthy of documentation, it also led to LV being actively sought and collectors would inquire after it specifically. In some cases it is clear that LV was specifically requested or the singer was asked directly if s/he knew the song of Lemminkäinen‟s Death/Resurrection. Consequently, many performances simply terminated when memory failed, or dissolve into a prose summary of the content. Although this supplies us with many more variants of LV than we would otherwise have, many of these may derive from people who were either not skilled in epic, or were simply not particularly interested in performing it.81
The collector‟s conceptions of “quality” and “value” often did not correspond to the conceptions of the singing communities. Their biases affected whom they interviewed, but there is rarely any indication of the relative skill of the singer attached to what was documented, or whether the singer was skilled in one genre or group of genres but not in others. As a corpus, the variants reflect what people (das Volk) knew and were able to
79 Roper (2008:182) reports encountering a similar phenomenon among the Setu in 1996: “we were in the
unusual situation for folklorists of arriving too early, while the belief system was still intact.” This can also be compared to strategies in performances intended for cultural tourism in which the shaman omits an essential element from the ritual, such as a head-dress, and the performance is considered “harmless” as a display without magical consequence.
80
The Kalevala was largely inaccessible to the contemporary literati, who had to wait for the first translation (into Swedish – Haavio 1952:22).
81 In 1879, Iivana Iknattainen followed 303 lines of LV with the statement, “Sitä olis vielä, kyllä minä
recall in the awkward circumstance of being asked to sing a particular song by a strange foreigner. The proportion of LV variants to the broader corpus does not necessarily reflect its cultural activity in relation to other songs, or epic in relation to other genres.
A tremendous number of variants present only fragmentary texts. Early documentation was done by hand (normally with a fountain pen) requiring a significant amount of effort for the documentation of a whole poem. D.E.D. Europaeus, for example, was sometimes listening to several performances of LV in a single day.82 Forty-seven of the variants/items in Figure 5 are transcriptions by Europaeus‟s in 1845 and 1846. Many of these are quite literally field notes. Virtanen (1968:55) points out that “a researcher can usually say without difficulty to which song particular lines belong” (cf. Tarkka 2005:65- 67). Collectors used this as a strategy in notation, not only using abbreviations but indicating whole sequences with a line or group of lines. Some transcriptions seem to skip through the sung poem like a stone (e.g. I1.35). The preserved texts often exhibit no interest in documenting a “whole” performance and may only note a particular line or lines, often for the purpose of noting an unusual word, line, motif or its associations, or the organization of a narrative whole. These fragmentary sources offer indications of what was performed, but they are ambiguous concerning what was not performed. It is often unclear whether a fragmentary-looking or truncated transcription is due to the singer or the documentation. Priority was on poetic text rather than narrative content: the absence of a concluding episode may be due to either the singer or collector stopping because the poetic text could no longer be remembered, although it may have been possible to continue in prose.
Much of the collection prior to 1850 was generally oriented toward or in response to the
Kalevala or Lönnrot‟s other projects. For example, neither Castrén nor Cajan
documented variants which they felt had already been published in Kalevala. In many cases they only took brief notes with specific reference to Kalevala’s song number or song and line number (Kaukonen 1979:98-99, 140-141; Tarkka 2005:56-61). This period
82 On his third collection journey, which lasted a year, Europaeus collected 1,300 kalevalaic poems, 55
of collection in particular was oriented toward the exceptional (especially the exceptional associated with “quality”). Variants which were felt to have already been sufficiently documented might be noted with only a few lines, if they were noted at all. The songs were understood as the voice of das Volk: collectors were interested in lines and songs, with little or no consideration for who sang them or their applications. Many singers are never identified, nor is any indication given of their skills, although familiarity with the documentation strategies of the individual collector may offer some insight (cf. Salminen 1906).
The barrier of dialect and poetic register, and the challenge of transcription make the competence of the collector an additional factor which is significant, particularly in the documentation of whole poems. Rapid transcription was an acquired skill which was accompanied by developed systems of abbreviations. Early collectors did not necessarily distinguish between sung and dictated performance. As in many traditions,83 dictated versions are generally shorter in kalevalaic poetry. In several variants a dictated form becomes evident through the introduction of pronouns, variation in inflections of tense or case and enunciation which make lines unmetrical (cf. Supplement 2; Salminen 1934:200-203). This may advance into a more general inclination toward prose. The length of the performance may also become shorter in the shift of emphasis from “song” to the communication of content (see §15), eliminating parallelism, minimizing multiforms, and reducing dialogues. However, it should be emphasized that the impacts of dictated versus sung performance on the product is highly dependent on the individual singer and context, and there may also be differences according to region.
The halting dictations facilitated documenting whole poems, but they could also result in the singer becoming confused or frustrated. Many performances also exhibit a pattern of becoming increasingly abbreviated toward the end, which may be a symptom of losing interest in the performance/dictation. A performer‟s priorities and assumptions about the knowledge and understanding of the poetic tradition and the contents of its narratives could also impact the form and mode of performance, for example simplifying the
presentation and inserting extra-metrical explicatory information in order to make it more accessible to the collector.84 The bull-in-a-china-shop strategies of collection could also result in chaotic performances by otherwise skilled singers. For example, Borenius interviewed Hökkä-Petri and Onuhrie Lesonen in Venehjärvi in both 1871 and 1877. The 1871 performances of both singers appear both confused and weak; the 1877 performances are both fully developed and approximately twice as long.85 The quality of an individual “text‟-variant is not necessarily indicative of the knowledge and skill of the performer.
The volume of the corpus and range of supplementary information available makes it possible to construct a “thick corpus”. It is possible to develop an understanding of LV within the tradition ecology and the relationship of individual variants to local and regional traditions. This emphasizes that the “best” singers are not necessarily the most “traditional” (§17) and that no single variant can be considered representative of the LV tradition as a whole. It also sets the lack of variants of eddic poems in sharp relief.