Laulik tekstikesksetes regilaulu-uurimustes
Folk singer’s image in text-based studies of early Estonian folk songs

Summary/Abstract: Since the late 18th century, early Estonian folk song has been discussed with the focus either on its text or on its performing situation. In the 19th and early 20th centuries folk song was mostly understood as poetry (“oral literature”). This can only be expected as the recitative singing style was combined with a richly figurative text. In the 1930s, two trends could be discerned in professional Estonian folkloristics: one philological (comparative analysis of song texts) and the other ethnological (an approach based on the living environment, with the focus on the singer and performance). The main question of the article is how the ethnological perspective may have affected the further development of text-focused research. For the purposes of this study the revealing changes are traced in the singer’s concept.In the 1930s-1950s, the singer was regarded as a hypothetical author of the folk song (Eduard Laugaste). Changes appeared in the 1950s-1960s: (1) The figurative language of folk song was started to be studied on the repertoire of one particular singer at a time (Udo Kolk); (2) analyses of songs were supplemented with biographies of their performers (Hilja Kokamägi, Ottilie Kõiva). Also, ‘laulik’ was given a four-point definition emphasising, inter alia, the creative aspect of singing (Kõiva 1964). The fieldwork of the 1960s–1970s produced new information (e.g. notes of conversations between scholar and singer, singer’s own comments on the songs presented etc.) providing a substantial basis for the new perspectives discovered and implemented in the research of the 2000s. Although at the turn of the 21st century researchers availed themselves of methods of text analysis developed earlier, they focused their attention not on the comparison of song texts but rather on the creative method of the folk singer (Saarlo, Hagu). Since the 1990s, the development of folkloristics has been strongly affected by interdisciplinarity. Three domains can be discerned: (1) feminist studies (Kristiina Ehin, Andreas Kalkun), (2) historical context (Tiiu Jaago, Andreas Kalkun), (3) life writing (Kalkun, Janika Oras). On the whole it can be observed how the boundary between the researcher and the object of research is dissipating. Increasingly, the singer is depicted not so much via her role of singing songs important for the archive or research as via her everyday life in the community.

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