Bridging Northern and Southern Traditions in the Finnic Corpus of Oral Poetry

Historical Finnic oral poetry – called runolaulu, regilaul, or Kalevalaic poetry – makes a versatile corpus across several related languages, representing numerous genres from epic and charms to lyric, ritual poetry, lullabies, and so forth. Despite the first comparative efforts and collaborations already at the end of the nineteenth century, the local traditions in Northern and Southern Finnic languages have mostly been analysed within national research traditions. Data-driven approaches have a potential to reveal new perspectives to this multilingual tradition, especially to the less studied parts, and the overall characteristics of it. Yet, due to the multilevel linguistic, poetic, and cultural variation of the data, the use of computational methods is complicated and, typically, necessitates interlaying quantitative analyses with close reading and source-critical approaches.

In this paper, we introduce some results at the intersection of Northern and Southern Finnic song text corpora discovered with the help of similarity detection analyses. Our approach consolidates the idea of the complex interplay of divergence and commonality of regional runosong traditions. While often having particular features not found in other parts of the Finnic area, the regional traditions are also connected to one another by similar formulas, motifs, poem types and themes, and, at the same time, distinct in their variations, uses and interpretations of these. We hope that our tools also help others in examining these further.