University of Helsinki
Anchor study 5, led by Frog, examines the adaptation of verbal art and mythic knowledge to written text and its continued circulation and transformations in written media. These processes are traced through the parallel cases of Old Norse eddic poetry and Finno-Karelian kalevalaic poetry, with emphasis on poetic texts. Particular attention is given to how the products of these processes were understood, the potential gaps between poetic texts as ‘things’ and their manifestations as or in physical artefacts, and how these understandings and associated evaluations changed over time in relation to different historical situations. The study has four symmetrically arranged branches of inquiry, with two branches each for eddic and kalevalaic poetry, and two branches each for early and recent collection and editing.
The first branch explores eddic poems as things that were transformed into material artefacts, as well as their circulation as hand-written manuscripts. These poems were first written down in medieval Iceland, where they were used and copied in that society. The medieval evidence is thin, but detailed philological analysis of text variation reveals dimensions of how people understood and engaged with the poems. The manuscripts themselves also present relevant indicators of how the texts were evaluated and the material artefacts in which they are preserved, with additional indicators in the few descriptions of manuscript use. This branch of inquiry then jumps ahead to the ‘discovery’ of eddic poems in the heritage construction projects of the 17th century. The boom in copying that followed reconceived the eddic poems as a work called Edda, specifically Sæmundr’s Edda after its imagined compiler. A multitude of copies are available from this period and several of the central manuscripts exhibit significant investment in the form of illuminations (i.e., illustrations). Alongside attempts to produce rigorously accurate copies, people also expanded poems, such as the version of Baldrs draumar that was increased by between one third and half of the medieval length; truncated them, such as a version of Vafþrúðnismál that had been shortened by almost 20%; reorganized them, like versions of Hávamál and Vǫluspá; as well as created new compositions that became adopted as parts of Sæmundr’s Edda.
The second branch turns to the collection and editing of the poems in publications, which began already in the 17th century and continues through the present. This branch is developed in dialogue with the first, including how people engage with the published artefacts, the texts that they contain, and also the medieval texts and artefacts in which they are preserved. Even today, for example, scholars discuss the Poetic Edda, often treated as a distinct work, although the 13th-century manuscript GKS 2365 4to is merely a core that continues to be edited, expanded, and sometimes reorganized in ways surprisingly similar to 17th-century copies.
The third branch concerns the collection, editing, and publishing of kalevalaic poetry in the 19th and 20th centuries, although it had been documented on a limited basis already earlier. This study attends to how collectors viewed what was performed as variations of socially circulating ‘texts’. Lönnrot’s Kalevala and the reception of Kalevala ‘as’ folklore holds a central position. Collectors in the mid-19th century used it as a frame of reference, treating oral poems as variants of the Kalevala’s text, and thus they might only document lines or passages they considered missing from its pages. This branch parallels the first on the manuscript circulation of eddic poetry; it differs by including the publication as well as the compilation and editing of poems in Lönnrot’s Kalevala and other works.
The fourth branch turns to the modern editing of kalevalaic poetry mainly in the 20th century up through the present. The Kalevala holds a central position in especially the early phases of these practices, having historically played a central role in the organization of materials in the archives. The quantity of the corpus itself becomes a factor impacting these processes: at around 150,000 variants and fragments, the early phases of editing and publishing the corpus established structures that have been difficult to supersede even as research interests have changed. For example, individual performers are commonly brought into focus in current research, yet the corpus remains organized by region and text type, and there is still no way to search by performer in the digitized edition of over 87,000 variants and fragments.
The materialities of both eddic and kalevalaic poetries are examined across their respective histories. Current editorial activity is considered part of these histories, reflecting recent changes in how material artefacts are approached and understood in relation to texts that they present. The respective histories reveal both continuities and changes in understandings that can often be linked to broader changes in society or intellectual culture more generally. When the histories of writing down and reproducing eddic and kalevalaic poetries are compared, they reveal patterns that offer a frame of reference for considering cases in other cultures as well.
Publications connected with this anchor study include:
- Frog. 2023 (in press). “Reanimating Extinct Oral Poems: Seventeenth-Century Scribal Performances of Medieval Scandinavian Eddic Poetry”. ISFNR Newsletter 10: 5–18.
- Ahola, Joonas, & Frog. 2023. “Kalevalan kaikukammio: Perinteen keksiminen uudelleen” [‘The Echo Chamber of the Kalevala: Re-Inventing Tradition’]. In Sanojen luonto: Kirjoituksia omaehtoisen ilmaisun poetiikasta, merkityksistä ja ympäristöistä. Ed. Kati Kallio, Heidi Henriikka Mäkelä & Venla Sykäri. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Pp. 262–295.
- Frog. 2022. “How the Hell Do You Read This? – The Evolution of Eddic Orality through Manuscript Performance”. In Old Norse Poetry in Performance. Ed. Annemari Ferreira & Brian McMahon. London: Routledge. Pp. 191–215.
- Frog. 2022. “Metrical Transcription as Scribal Performance: Reading Spaces in Eddic Poems and the Merseburg Charms”. NordMetrik News 5: 2–12.