Eesti filoloogia sünd ja kirikulaulude tõlked
Hymn translations and the history of Estonian philology

Summary/Abstract: In the development of Estonian philology, two phases can be distinguished: the phase of the so-called external view, when the meta-language of philological discussions was German, and the phase of the internal view, when since the 19th century, Estonian began to be used as the meta-language for speaking and writing about the Estonian language and folklore as well as about the emerging literature. The emergence of Estonian authors’ literature and literary criticism presupposed a literary language expressive enough to describe the emotional life and trains of thought of the 19th century, but at the same time familiar enough to the mostly peasant audience of Estonian texts. Literary Estonian was first developed by German pastors and up to the 19th century most of the texts created in this variety remained unaccustomed for the Estonian target group. Hymns were the only kind of literature Estonians had had to learn by heart and actually pronounce already since the 16th century. In the 18th century, Pietist pastors composed a hymnary where the figurative system of the original German hymns was intentionally simplified. The variety of the Pietist hymnal combined a short list of literary figures of speech with idioms of the spoken vernacular. The hymnal became extremely popular and had a great impact on the figurative thinking of Estonians. Following the example of contemporary German poetry, the same figurative language was partly used by the first educated Estonian poets during the National Awakening in the 19th century. The article argues that it was precisely the 18th-century Pietist hymns that had made the language familiar to the grassroots, thus providing the emerging Estonian literature with a vast audience and paving the way for the second, internal-view phase of Estonian philology.

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