"Said a Word, Uttered Thus": Structures and Functions of Parallelism in Arhippa Perttunen's Poems

Parallelism is one of the most outstanding features of the Finnic (or Balto-Finnic) tradition of oral poetry that is found throughout areas of present-day Estonia, Finland, and adjacent parts of Russia. Performers of this poetry speak several different but closely related languages: Finnish, Karelian, Ingrian, Votic, Estonian, and Seto. Nevertheless, the poetic idiom, or register, is quite uniform, sharing the basic characteristics of meter, non-stanzaic structure, alliteration, and parallelism, with some anticipated regional variation.1 It has various names in different languages. In Finland and Karelia, the most common designation is Kalevala-metric or kalevalaic poetry2 or runolaulu (“runo song”).3 In Estonia it is usually called regilaul or regivärss.4 The poetic form has a strikingly broad range of uses for diverse genres, such as narrative poems, lyric and ritual songs, recited incantations, proverbs, and riddles. Many genres were connected to different sorts of social situations or discourse functions and a variety of modes of performance that also varied regionally. Across diverse communities and language areas where this poetry was documented as a living tradition, the poetic form exhibits great dynamism in its continuities and historical endurance in contrast to its range of uses in different practices. When considering variation in the poetic form, the most significant historical factor has been changes in language and dialect. In both western regions of Finland and to the south near the Gulf of Finland, words became somewhat shorter, but further south in Estonia the shortening of words was greater and began earlier. The metrical form historically was based on a trochaic tetrameter with flexibility in the first foot, which means that a basic line had eight syllables, although an extra syllable or two could be added in the first two positions. Oral Tradition, 31/2 (2017): 407-424