‘Turning Simple Speech into Beautiful Song’: Imitative Poetics and the Combination of Registers in Ilo-Laulu Jesuxesta (1690)

Ilo-Laulu Jesuxesta (‘Joyous song of Jesus’) is an epic poem of 2265 lines about the life of Christ written by the Lutheran minister Matthias Salamnius (1640–91) and published in the town of Turku (in Finnish, Åbo in Swedish) in 1690. It is the first long literary poem composed in the traditional non-rhymed metre of Finnish oral poetry, known as Kalevala-metre or runo-song metre, and intended for wide popular use. The composition demonstrates a deep knowledge of both Lutheran theology and oral poetics.

Apart from the Lutheran hymnals, Ilo-Laulu Jesuxesta is the most important poetical work written in Finnish during the early-modern period. Altogether nineteen editions of the poem are known; nine were published during the eighteenth century in Turku and in Stockholm, and seven during the nineteenth century in Turku and in Helsinki. The latest editions are from the 1960s. Ilo-Laulu Jesuxesta was also used as a song, and it affected oral traditions.

Here, we analyse the poem in relation to seventeenth-century understandings of oral and literary genres, and as a part of a complex intertextual network, referring to discussions especially in literary and folklore studies. The focus is on seventeenth-century textual relationships via the concepts of genre, register and intertextuality. As a theoretical concept, we understand genre as a means of communication and interpretation, with both social and aesthetic dimensions. As socially maintained open categories, genres are subject to redefinition and alteration. Moreover, works of oral or literary tradition can make use of a variety of different generic features, and may serve various generic purposes. We also use the concept of register, meaning socially situated styles of communication, based on shared conventions within a speech community. We approach the features of the poem not merely as elements representing different poetic and literary traditions, but as poetic and communicative resources.