ABSTRACT
This chapter informs the examinations which follow, both of other peasant performers, and of the literate author, Elias Lonnrot. In particular, ethnopoetics is concerned with the analysis of structurally and linguistically encoded artistry intact in verbatim texts collected from traditional narrators or singers. Differences in orthography from collector to collector reflect varying judgments about the importance of recording the songs in the singer’s dialect; clearly, some normalization of the texts occurred in the work of all three collectors, although Lonnrot regularized language the most. The stepped indentation of the final five lines indicates the existence of strict parallelism—in other words, the lines “belong” together as a group, and the singer has expressed this fact through stylistic features. Matched by similar systems determining the variation of melody and prosody, they constitute an integral part of Arhippa’s aesthetic system, a system sensed by Lonnrot but lost, seemingly unavoidably, in the Kalevala.
