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The Finnish Four-Beat Line (or is it five?)

by Catherine Madsen

Most Americans’ first exposure to Baltic is secondhand, through Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1855). Longfellow, who had learned a little Finnish, borrowed the four-beat meter of the (the Finnish national epic collected by Elias Lönnrot and first published in 1835) for his own epic based on Ojibwe legends. Trochaic tetrameter is natural to Finnish, whose words are generally accented on the first syllable, but it can quickly become tiresome in English; after a page or two of Hiawatha, in spite of Longfellow’s fresh and sensitive imagery, the reader’s head is pounding THUMPa THUMPa THUMPa THUMPa. (Apparently Longfellow had been told that the rhythm was similar to that of Ojibwe oratory, but had no direct experience of that form.) The secret of runo singing is in the music: what looks like 4/4 on the page (whether you’re reading “Veli kulta, veikkoseni” or “By the shore of Gitche Gumee”) is often sung in 5/4, with the last two syllables having . The rhythmic change makes for a whole different kind of incantation.

Runo singing (or runolaulu) originated in the areas now known as Finland, Karelia, Ingria and Estonia, and is estimated to be at least a thousand years old. It became particularly identified with Finland through the Kalevala, but since the borders of Karelia and Ingria are not coextensive with present-day Finland, questions may arise about cultural origins versus national boundaries. Heidi Haapoja-Mäkelä’s article explores this dynamic, examining the fraught concept of cultural appropriation in the light of specifically Baltic history. Considering that Finland is lucky to have national boundaries at all—having been controlled at one point by Sweden and at another by Russia—the boundaries may not be the central question.

A runo song could tell a story or serve as a kind of roast. In fact, the first recorded legend concerning runo singing is the duel of insults between the wizard Väinämöinen and the upstart youth Joukahainen in Runo 3 of the Kalevala, which ends with the upstart’s being sung into a swamp up to the armpits. The entire epic is composed of wonder-tales that were sung around the countryside by ordinary people—tales of the creation of the world, the invention of the pikebone kantele, the making and theft of the marvelous Sampo, and finally Väinämöinen’s departure, vanquished by another (very young) upstart whose father was a lingonberry. Runo singing was traditionally accompanied on the kantele, as in this well-known lullaby “ .” (For a glimpse of Estonian lullaby tradition, see Mari Sarv’s “ .”)

Contemporary runo singing has introduced both new stories and new instrumentation. , singing a traditional runo song about the origin of the kantele, actually has it accompanied by Pekka Kuusisto on electric violin with special effects. The kantele band often uses the runo rhythm with vocal harmonies. has produced modern runo songs of tremendous energy and vocal complexity; her quartet (The Time of the Wolf) is named for her song cycle about a young woman who escapes an abusive marriage by calling upon the powers of nature (two sections are shown here in a choreographed version). Kantele master Arja Kastinen has collaborated with two important runo singers; she made two CDs with the late Taito Hoffrén, including recorded in the amazing acoustical space of the in Oslo, and is producing an of runo song and kantele videos with Anna-Kaisa Liedes.

A classical rhythm, joined at the roots with its own language, can handle the whole range of experience. The nearest English equivalent would be iambic pentameter; like Shakespeare's plays, runo singing encompasses the sublime and the ridiculous, the comic and the tragic, the physical and the metaphysical, the practical and the fanciful. Both the old songs and the new have an earthy magic.

 

 

 

 

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