VÄRSIMÕÕT JA HÕIMUTUNDED: KVANTITEEDIREEGLID EESTI REGILAULUS
Metre and Sense of Kinship: Rules of Quantity in the Estonian regilaul

Summary/Abstract: The 20th-century descriptions of the metre of the Estonian regilaul verse are reviewed and juxtaposed with the results of verse analysis. As is revealed by statistics, here the Kalevala metre occurs mixed with the syllabic-accentual metre, i.e. all over Estonian territory both principles participate in the rhythmic structure of the regilaul verse. Although the original verse pattern of the Estonian regilaul can, hypothetically, be seen in the Kalevala metre, and its historical development is, indeed, closely bound with rules of quantity, the song material recorded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is ruled by word stress rather than by quantity. The article demonstrates that in the wake of the earlier studies of the Finnish runos and supported by an upsurge of the kinship ideology in the early 20th century, the rules of quantity characteristic of the Kalevala metre gained a disproportionally dominant position, sounding normative in the canonical description of the Estonian regilaul verse. As verse analysis used to be extremely cumbersome in the pre-computer era and the only in-depth analysis of the structure of the regilaul verse, authored by Walter Anderson in 1935, was based on the material of just one parish (Kolga-Jaani), the belief in the general validity of the rule of quantity in the Estonian discourse of the regilaul became established for a whole century.

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