Kalevipoja mõõk pärimuslikul maastikul. Faehlmanni müstifikatsioon ja romantiline historism
Kalevipoeg’s Sword in the Landscape of Oral Tradition

Summary/Abstract: In 1839 Friedrich Robert Faehlmann (1798–1850) presented a paper to the Learned Estonian society, affirming the existence of oral tradition focused on an epic hero called kalevipoeg. among other things he mentioned, for the first time, the story of kalevipoeg’s sword that fell into a river and caused the death of the hero. the paper was written in a quasi-autobiographical style, suggesting that Faehlmann himself had heard the story from an anonymous storyteller (sagenmann). However, while carefully localizing all the other stories, the storyteller fails to mention the place where the sword actually fell and cut off the hero’s legs. this failure attracts attention and appears to be even more paradoxical, as the storyteller urges young men to visit the place, because the sword might offer himself to a potential successor of the hero. moreover, the character of the storyteller looks suspicious. He obviously expresses the historicist views of the rebellious and romantic Baltic Germans, who claimed the Estonians to be a nation and possess a proper history. the author of the paper seeks to identify with the storyteller, appropriating the title also for himself (”Ich, als sagenmann”). However, the allegorical image of a sword as ”an instrument proper to the knight, who is the defender of the forces of light against the forces of darkness” (juan Eduardo Cirlot), is ill-fitted in the context of Estonian oral tradition. moreover, cosmological motifs expressing the idea of the creation of landscape in primordial times have a tendency to reappear whenever a place seems to be suitable for the mythical act. But the story of kalevipoeg’s sword has never been profusely retold or remodelled, even after it started spreading in literature via kreutzwald’s epic ”kalevipoeg”. When the legend was finally localized in 1851, after Faehlmann’s death, it pointed to an inconspicuous place without any visual significance. the scholar presenting the paper failed to tell unambiguously whether he had heard the story as a child or much later from some villager, alleged specialist of the local folklore. thus we can suppose that the story of kalevipoeg’s sword is an ideologically motivated Baltic German fiction and not a myth found from Estonian oral tradition.

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