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Folklore 67
It is our pleasure to present to you the latest issue of Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, with Janika Oras as the guest editor. This special issue is dedicated to oral singing traditions, with a special focus on older Finnic oral song tradition.
The first article, "Literary Kalevala-Metre and Hybrid Poetics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Finland" by Kati Kallio, examines the blurred boundaries between different oral and literary poetics in early modern Finland, presenting the examples of the first written poems following the poetic features of traditional Finnic oral poetry (in so-called Kalevala-metre with no rhymes or stanza structures) or contrasting with them.
Kristiina Ross and Ahti Lohk discuss early Estonian-language hymnal poetry in their article "Words, Forms, and Phrases in Estonian Folksongs and Hymns", revealing the essential differences of oral folksongs and written hymns, proceeding from their different cultural context, ways of conceptualisation, music, and language use.
In her article "Towards a Typology of Parallelism in Estonian Poetic Folklore", Mari Sarv introduces the current situation in the discussion on parallelism in runosongs and, comparing runosongs, proverbs, sayings, and riddles, proposes an original model for identifying the types of parallelism on the basis of semantic relations between parallel elements (words or phrases) in grammatically parallel units.
The article "Star Bride Marries a Cook: The Changing Processes in the Oral Singing Tradition and in Folk Song Collecting on the Western Estonian Island of Hiiumaa. I" by Helen Kõmmus and Taive Särg gives a detailed overview of the archival representations of the older oral singing tradition, the regilaul, earlier vocal genres and transitional forms of Hiiumaa Island, and discusses the ideological, local, and personal factors influencing their creation.
Liina Saarlo in her article "Regilaul in the Political Whirlpool: On Collecting Regilaul in Northeast Estonia in the Second Half of the 1950s" observes the changing status of the runosong in Estonian folklore studies during the first decades of the Soviet occupation, discussing the representations of the regilaul repertoire of the 1950s in Ida-Virumaa County, north-eastern Estonia.
Janika Oras in her article "Mari and Marie: Performativity and Creativity of Two Estonian Singers in the Late Nineteenth Century" analyses differences in the performativity of two outstanding female singers, shaped by the changing of song repertoire and performance situations alongside the modernisation of the society, their belonging to different generations of performers, and their different relationship with literary culture.
In her article "Emotional Transpositions: Interpreting Oral Lyric Poetry", Niina Hämäläinen searches for clues to understand the origin of the popular lyrical runosong text Armahan kulku ('The beloved's walk') by Elias Lönnrot, analysing the oral sources that the text is based on and the views and attitudes guiding their literary rendition.
The news section of the issue presents an obituary for academician Arvo Krikmann, a book review, and gives an overview of a PhD thesis defence at the University of Tartu.
