Mind and Form in Folklore: Selected Articles

Mind and Form in Folklore: Selected Articles. By Matti Kuusi. Edited by Henno Ilomaki. Studia Fennica Folkloristica, no. 3. Helsinki: SKS, 1994. 199pp.16 plates. ISBN 951 717 7976

These two most recent additions to the Finnish Literary Society's new series "Studia Fennica Folkloristica" represent two collections of important essays and articles by Finnish folklorists. Songs beyond the Kalevala is a collection of recent articles by a group of scholars, whereas Mind and Form in Folklore represents a single author's lifetime of research.

The hundreds of thousands of index cards in the Finnish folklore archives form one of the cultural wonders of Europe. Published material from them was used to compile a 33-volume series The Ancient Poems of the Finnish People, containing over 30,000 pages of charms, epic verse, calendric songs and so on in the Kalevala metre. And this series does not represent all the folk-verse material gathered in the past two hundred or so years. As Kuusi gratefully notes, the centralisation of such material in the Finnish Literary Society's archives allows an accessibility unlike the situation "in other countries, [where] the results of poem-gathering have often been dispersed into competing archives and private collections in which the scholar must practise the skills of a diplomat to ferret the material he needs." Perhaps it is this very wealth of accessible material which has ensured that Finnish scholars are mercifully free of the "folkloriographical trend," the writing about the writings on folklore, which is apparent to an excessive degree in their English counterparts. For proof of the existence of this tendency here, simply consider whether the ratio of the number of articles in recent English journals on heroic unsung scholars, or villainous folklorists, or methodology or folkloristic theory, as against the number of articles on items of English folklore itself, is healthy or decadent. If we had had, or if we should come to have, a central folklore archive in this country, then presumably the primary concern of scholars here would have been, or would turn out to be, folklore itself.

But, then again, even such archival treasures as the Finnish Literary Society hold are sometimes overlooked. The joint editors of Songs beyond the Kalevala write in their introduction of how the general rejection of historical folklore in the 1960s and 1970s led to concentration on contemporary urban and overseas cultures at the expense of this wealth of old material, which "remained the exclusive right of a few researchers representing the classical Finnish school." One of the main reasons for a resurgence of scholarly interest in "Kalevala poetry" is the writings of Matti Kuusi on this subject (incidentally, "Kalevala poetry" seems to be a term the editors want both to embrace and to go beyond, as the title of Siikala and Vakimo's volume implies: an example in itself of the continuing repercussions of Lonnrot's epochal intervention one-and-a-half centuries ago).

When Kuusi died on 16 January this year, two months short of his 84th birthday, Wolfgang Mieder in his tribute bracketed him together with B.J. Whiting, Archer Taylor and Grigorij Permjakov as one of "the four paremiological giants." Thus it may come as a surprise that less than half the pages in Kuusi's Selected Articles deal with proverbs. Kuusi was also a student of Kalevala poetry; after all, some of the Finnish proverbs are in Kalevala metre, and can be considered, stylistically, in the light of other Kalevala-poetry analysis.

One of his main concerns in such analyses has been to examine the "temporal depth" of Kalevala poetry, by establishing the relative chronological precedence of various lines and parts of such poetry, according to his notions of successive periods with their own characteristic styles. He believed that style and structure are less prone to change than motifs are. Thus, by establishing when certain forms of parallelism or syntactic patterning--or certain types of motif as found in authentic and representative texts--became, in his words, "fashionable" or "period-specific," one will have a "literary historical" perspective on such verse. So he divides "ancient Kalevala epic" into five stylistic periods.

How, though, can we be sure that the material is "ancient" to begin with? This whole "literary historical" enterprise directed toward oral forms is a somewhat different venture than--say--deciding which of two literary poems is the turn-of-the-century one and which the postwar one. In this case there will have been previous experience of many firmly dateable works from these periods. Furthermore, it is a different venture from--say--approximately dating Beowulf, when the physical age of the manuscript already tells us it must be at least 900 years old. In contrast, Finnish folk verse was not written down till recent times. Thus the naive outside observer may well find it incredible to be told, for example, that a song recorded in the late-nineteenth century, but which may well have a somewhat "primitive" or timeless feel to it, can be partially dated back to the Bronze Age on the basis of stylistic considerations and in the absence of any corroborative written records. Isn't one of the main characteristics of oral verse its variability, including the replacement of syntactic templates, over time? Comments such as: "[if] a common plot ... and stylistic features ... are only dimly discernible ... the radical difference between the redactions points to a very distant ancient source," or "not every poem is the age of its subject nor of its stylistic features," may be significant theoretical amendments, but given the characteristic variability of oral verse, they need to be more fully developed. More generally, we can ask whether such theories as to dating are capable of being proven false (as Popper demands of a scientific theory)?