Both sorrow and joy permeate the old forms of lyric poetry, gathered from singers in the 19th-century Karelia. But who is the singer, the collective I, behind the lyric songs; what can we know about him or her?
     The national epic, the Kalevala, rises from this rich oral folk tradition, but Finnish-Karelian-Ingrian Kalevala-metre lyric songs form a genre that has hitherto been marginal in research.
     Senni Timonen has set out to approach this genre, paying special attention to gender, the individual, and emotion.

Hoi on hoi on huolellista,
hoi on huolen kantajoa!
Eipä muut muretta tunne,
kanna karvasta sy'äntä
kuin pitäjät piilokihlan,
salakaupan kannattajat.
- - -
Sy'än on kylmä kyyhkyläisen
syö'essä kylän kekoja,
kylmempi minun sitäi.
Alahall' on allin mieli
ui'essa vilua vettä,
jäänalaista järkyttäissä -
alempana mun sitäi
perehessä vierahassa,
toisessa emon alassa.

Ei ole sitä sisärta,
ei sitä emoni lasta,
jollenka sanon sanani,
haastan mielihaikiani.
Kuin minä sanon savulle,
savu pihtipuoliselle,
pihtipuoliset pihalle,
piha kaikelle kylälle.
Vieras viieksi sanovi,
kyläläinen kymmeneksi.
Kuin haastan havunvesoille,
pakisen pajun lehille,
ne ei haasta kellenkänä.

Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot,
VII2 1788 ('The ancient poems of the Finnish people', 1908-1948,
33 volumes)

Alas for one full of care
alas for a care-bearer!
  Others feel no grief
  bear no bitter heart
as those with a hidden love
  with a secret bond.

  The dove's heart is cold
feeding from the village ricks:
  mine is colder yet.
The calloo's spirits are low
swimming in chilly water
churning it below the ice:
  mine are lower yet
  in a strange family
on another mother-kin.

  There is no sister
  not a mother's child
who I can tell my tale to
can speak my sorrow of mind.
  If I tell the smoke
the smoke will tell the doorpost
the doorpost will tell the yard
and the yard all the village:
a stranger will tell five times
and a villager ten times.
If I speak to the fir-shoots
chatter to the willow-leaves
they will speak to nobody.

The narrator is thus saying: No one else knows sorrow like I do; I am more miserable than the birds freezing out in the ice and snow; I cannot tell my troubles to these spiteful people - I go into the forest, I talk to the trees.
     This lyric song from an unknown singer was recorded by the folk-poetry collector D.E.D. Europaeus in 1845 in Ilomantsi in Finnish Karelia; ancient Kalevala-metre oral lyric was still very much alive at the time. In the same area in the 1830s, Elias Lönnrot, the compiler of the national epic Kalevala, found the lyrical materials on which he based the folk-poetry collection Kanteletar (1840).
     These themes recur frequently in the old Finno-Karelian, Kalevala-metre folk lyric materials: they repeat in very similar forms, a verse or two longer or shorter, in the same sorts of woeful contexts - the orphan, the slave, the homeless, the daughter-in-law, the widow, the slandered, both in men's and women's songs. They have been preserved in this form for hundreds, some perhaps thousands of years in Savo, Karelia and Ingria.
     The lyrical aspect has been left largely in the shadow of the epic in Finnish folkloristics; folk poetry has generally been studied from the point of view of mythological and heroic themes more relevant in terms of the nation's identity.

So why did I concentrate on lyric? The first reason, I remember clearly, was the savage beauty of poetic language focused on everyday environments. It enchanted me.
     Finding a research topic and methodology was nevertheless difficult. How to approach that beauty? I skirted the same basic problem: the lyrics that have survived represent tradition: recurring, abiding, heritable, solidified. But the inquisitive mind searches for something more: movement, conflict, the fleeting moment, creativity, change. How to find something new in something old? How to see life in a fossilised artefact?
     Many earlier researchers have found the life of these folk lyrics through matters of form, analysing the style, metre, structure, metaphor and the two-thousand-year history of development of the lyrical canon they reveal. I myself looked for solutions elsewhere; I tried to listen both to myself as well as to contemporary discussions about women, feelings and the subject - in other words, who is speaking in a song.
     The first thing that opens up the life of a lyric to me is the singer. Although folk songs are traditional, the singer also expresses his/her own identity in them. His/her voice can be heard in the text's small, shifting details, additions and conflations, which contain references to him/herself as the subject of the song. For example, in the poem presented above there are two passages that deviate from similar texts: the speaker refers to himself as someone 'with a secret bond,' someone who has a hidden relationship; he says he lives 'in a strange family, on another mother-kin,' or in other words, that he doesn't have his own home. These details and the village's history have led me to identify the text's performer as Jyrki Sissonen (1805-1886), a kantele player and farm hand, who after losing his hereditary estate lived under the feet of the more wealthy, and who a few years earlier had acknowledged an illegitimate child. In this song he has expressed the anguish of his own unique, current marginality.
     Another way to find movement was to problematise the genre itself, lyric. What on earth is it? A written system's artificial project for oral culture? Perhaps not exactly, but through questioning this, I began to contemplate the singers' own ways of perceiving the types of singing. In their usage, how are the things we experience as lyrical organised? Traces of classes of singing turned up whose criteria differ from our own. For example, the last section of the poem quoted above - speaking to the trees - in some regional classification systems is part of the forest tune, a class that cannot be found as such in the texts, because it is always formed in a new way in the locale of its implementation, the forest. This classification's components are the singer's mental state, the rhythm of his gait, his way of stretching syllables as he sings, the melodies, the forest's voice (the sounds of the wind, the birds, the trees, echoes, and rapids), the colours and shapes of the trees and earth, and, at last, the freely changing words of the songs that intertwine with all of this.
     A third way to see new in the old was revealed by the texts themselves. The more I read, the more I started to detect the dynamic nuances in these ancient, fossilised forms. They appeared as cracks in 'reality,' as fantastic images of fortune and happiness. I began to call these sections utopias. In the sample song, the reference to utopia happens right at the end of the song, in the forest-melody-like thought: although I cannot talk to people, I will not give up, I will create a listener for myself - the forest. In many areas this topic is developed richly, revealing a joyful utopia line by line. How glorious the spring, how dazzling the sun, how green the buds burst from the branches when I go into the forest, when I speak to the trees!
     The radical, creative element of the poetic utopia shatters the often oppressive reality described in the songs and in its place conjures a new, shining state of things. The song's speaker knows the unreality of the idea, uses the conditional, the word jos ('if'), denials and reservations, but all the same makes the impossible possible in the song. By creating utopias, he rises above that which is.
     In the forest utopia, humanity's cruelty is overcome. In other utopias set in the wilderness or elsewhere in natural surroundings the harshness of other conditions of life is nullified: privation, hunger, the weight of everyday life. The singer dreams of miraculous lands that glow with colour and overflow with food and drink. Those distant lands can just as easily be projected into the future as the past:

Hyvä oli siellä ollakseni,
lempi liehaellakseni,
puut siellä punalle paistoi,
puut punalle, maat sinelle,
hopealle hongan oksat,
kullalle kukat kanervan;
siell' oli mäet simaiset,
kalliot kananmunaiset,
mettä vuoti kuivat kuuset,
maitoa mahot petäjät,
aian nurkat voita lypsi,
seipähät valoi olutta.

Twas good for me to be there
pleasant for me to flit there:
  the trees there shone red
the trees red and the lands blue
  silver the fir boughs
gold the flower of the heather;
there the hills were full of mead
and the cliffs full of hen's eggs;
honey oozed from dry spruces
  milk from rotten pines
from fence corners butter dripped
  from the stages beer poured.

(Kalevala 29:577-587)

The singer can also create a utopian world by consciously using the future tense: 'When I get going in song - / I will sing groves to bread-lands / glade-sides to wheat-lands / hills to rye puddings / little slopes to pies'. One of the singer's creations is the miraculous oak tree. The entire utopian forest is concentrated in this one single tree, on whose branches hang apples and golden coins and cuckoo-birds whose calls turn to gold. In research, this tree is connected to images of the world tree and interpreted as a representation of a paradise located at the centre of the world. From the perspective of the utopia, the tree's unfailing bounty creates a synthesis of the material (fruit, liquids) and the immaterial (art: the cuckoo's song), an unadulterated experience of joy. This description - like utopias in general - is constructed on the one hand from the real and the experienced, and on the -other from fantastic, imagined elements. Utopia grows out of reality, but trans-cends it.

The lyrics' images of utopia can be examined from many perspectives, for example based on gender. In men's songs, the singers build miraculous buildings (homelessness is rejected!) and marry three women (monogamy is rejected!). In the women's songs, the singers build female fortresses without men in the middle of the sea (forced marriage is rejected! freedom is made possible!) and remember happy childhood times with their mothers, in beds that dripped butter, milk and cream. Both women and men have nurtured romantic utopias, which are represented most clearly in the songs by the 'meeting utopias.' Their idea is simply that an impossible-seeming journey to another's presence is miraculously overcome: with the wings of a bird, the power of the wind.
     And courage - the most familiar 'meeting utopia' from folk lyric is the love song 'Jos mun tuttuni tulisi' ('If the One I Know Came Now'), which has been translated into many languages; in it, the speaker expresses her desire to meet her beloved even at the utmost cost, by subjecting herself to mortal dangers (wolves, bears). Here the utopia - the imagined, 'impossible' meeting - reveals more clearly than usual its one fundamental dimension: the presence of a horror, a dystopia. In it are revealed the risks of the utopian position. 'Hope is the opposite of security,' said Ernst Bloch, a utopian philosopher. 'The category of danger is always within it.'
     The imagery in the poem 'If the One I Know Came Now' is mysterious, ambiguous. Thus, the singers have been able to just as easily express the feelings which can befall women, men, parents, children, siblings, the living or the dead. The singer may choose to speak of her father, who is in the grave:

Kaik on luont suuri Luoja:
meret on luont, metsät luont,
oikee on otavan tehnt,
pannut päivän paistamaa,
kuun yöl valostammaa.
Ei uo tuota Luoja luont:
isän tulla Tuonelast,
emon hauvast havaita.

Luulisin issoin tulloo,
virstan vastaa mänisin;
jos olis ojan ylitse,
sipulista sillan saisin,
unilaukoist latoisin.
Niin mie kättä käppäjäisin,
vaikk' ois käärme kämmenel;
niin mie suuta suikkajaisin,
vaikk' ois suu suven veres.

(Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot, IV 3165)

The great Lord has made all things
made the seas, made the forests
set the Great Bear in its place
     put the sun to shine
the moon to shed light by night
but the Lord has not made this -
father come from Tuonela
mother from the grave rise.

If I thought father would come
I'd go a mile to meet him:
if he were up from the pit
I'd build a bridge of onions
I'd make one of leeks.
I would seize him by the hand
though a snake were in his palm
I'd snatch a kiss from his mouth
though his mouth bled from a wolf.

In this song, an old Ingrian woman dramatically expresses that level of utopianism that rocks the stability of the world. The seas and forests, the moon and sun represent the order God created, tradition, permanence, accepting reality. The image of a parent rising from the grave is something completely different: a glimpse at the possibility of a new creation and order; orientation to the future.

I am currently reading Rober Musil's work The Man without Qualities. The novel's main figure is characterised by a sense of possibility: 'Whoever has it,' Musil states, 'does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen.' Fundamentally, he is also realistic: 'his ideas, to the extent that they are not idle fantasies, are nothing but realities as yet unborn'.
     Musil is referring to modern man, but this is a basic human attitude. It is precisely the sense of the possible that makes a person a person - and art, art. The utopian dimension of Kalevala-metre lyric is a pre-modern poetic expression of that sense.
     The singers drew the materials for their utopias from an age-old reserve of imagination. But they also infused them with themselves: their own unique experiences, the ephemeral elements of their own genres, and their longing for a better life.

Translated by Owen Witesman
Poems translated by Keith Bosley

Senni Timonen: Minä, tila, tunne. Näkökulmia kalevalamittaiseen
kansanlyriikkaan ('Self, space, emotion. Aspects of Kalevala-metre folk lyric'). Doctoral thesis; -published by the Finnish Literature Society, 2004
For information on the Kalevala, see www.finlit.fi/english

Translations by Keith Bosley:
The Kalevala. Oxford University Press, 1989
I will Sing of What I Know. Fifty lyrics, ritual songs and ballads from the Kanteletar. Finnish Literature Society, 1990
Skating on the Sea. Poetry from Finland. Bloodaxe Books, 1997
Finnish Folk Poetry. Epic. An Anthology in Finnish and English, edited and translated by Matti Kuusi, Keith Bosley, Michael Branch. Finnish Literature Society, 1977