Kirjalikud jäljed eesti regilaulukorpuses

Written traces in the Estonian runosong corpus Authenticity, antiquity, and orality have traditionally been regarded as hallmarks of the Estonian runosong (regilaul). Yet these songs were collected during a period of modernization in Estonian society, when, among other changes, a transition from oral to written culture was taking place. Oral and written cultures have often been viewed as fundamentally different, even oppositional. Written culture is thought to transform oral modes of thought irreversibly. For this reason, folklorists have viewed the rise of written culture as a key factor in the decline of oral traditions and archaic genres: as society modernized, the runosong was replaced by the rhymed stanzaic song, which was perceived as foreign and inauthentic by the elite. The idealized image of a runo singer has been associated with social marginality, exceptional memory, a readiness to improvise, and an affective communicative style, whereas literacy was considered irrelevant. Alongside the collection process, runosongs were continually published in print – both in scholarly publications and in school textbooks or popular song booklets. Consequently, printed versions of runosongs re-entered oral tradition: they were read, memorized, and reinterpreted in performance. The identification of written sources for archived songs and the verification of the authenticity of contributors’ submissions have long been central to Estonian folklorists’ philological work, which has relied on extensive reading and informed intuition. Contemporary corpus-based research now offers new opportunities for such analysis. This article employs the computational similarity-based user interface Runoregi (runoregi.fi) of the Finno-Ugric runosong joint database FILTER to explore the traces that written sources and literacy have left in the Estonian runosong corpus. Today, it is no longer appropriate to label contributors who copied songs from books as “forgers”. Instead, the focus should be on understanding why they copied and which books they used. Songs originating from printed sources do not simply indicate imitation but reveal the multifaceted processes and mechanisms of re-folklorization within folklore.