Narrative expectations and the Sampo song

Scandinavian Studies, Fall, 2001 by Thomas A. DuBois

THE NOTION OF "narrative expectations" presents interesting challenges and implications for the student of traditional song. any of the modern scholar's initial assumptions regarding the complex relation between narrative expectation and narrative experience are predicated on the example of reading, particularly the reading of a new or unfamiliar piece of prose. Such an experience presupposes ideas of novelty and individual interpretation which in fact differ markedly from the ways in which narrative folksongs have been traditionally received and experienced in living oral traditions. In these, a song is seldom experienced as "new" even if each performance contains new touches or emphases. Hearing a song for the first time is not the norm nor is it viewed as the ideal. In the case of Finnish and Karelian Kalevalaic folksong--the musical tradition that formed the basis and source for Elias Lonnrot's epic Kalevala (1835, revised 1849)--songs were steeped in traditional understandings, performance ideals, and familial associations that assumed prior knowledge of the song being performed. These traditions of interpretation and assessment made the experience of a narrative song quite a different thing from what a reader from outside the tradition might experience in confronting a printed version of a song for the first time. In this paper, I compare the understandings which nineteenth-century Karelian peasants shared concerning songs about the mythical Sampo with those evident in Elias Lonnrot's Kalevala. While Lonnrot uses the Sampo song as the backbone of an epic that relies on reader-based narrative expectations, Karelian singers and audiences of the nineteenth century experienced the same songs within an interpretive framework informed by narrative, customary, and ecological details. The fundamentally different nature of this form of expectation is the heart of what I hope to illustrate, for it helps account for the rich and complex ways in which oral traditions maintain elements of repertoire and meaning over time.

I choose the Sampo song as an example for this study because its details are likely to be familiar to readers of the Kalevala. The stirring and mysterious tale of the creation, theft, and eventual loss of the all-giving Sampo is memorable to anyone who has read Lonnrot's epic and often stirs considerable interest in what the Sampo actually is, i.e., in how Karelian peasants understood their songs. As Kaarle Krohn demonstrated already in 1927, however, Lonnrot based his version of this song on only two impressive but rather unique renditions: that of Ontrei Malinen from 1833, and that of Arhippa Pertunnen from 1834. (1) Lonnrot himself collected many other versions of the Sampo song prior to the publication of the Kalevala, many of which differ markedly in detail from the versions used in Lonnrot's work. These other versions have been published in the first volume of the authoritative anthology of Finnish folk song Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (abbreviated SKVR), along with more than 120 different notations of the song made by folklorists before and after Lonnrot in the same area of Karelia. For the purpose of this paper, I will examine the plot and character features of all of Lonnrot's recorded Sampo songs from Viena (Dvina, Archangel) Karelia (SKVR 1(1): 30, 51, 54, 55, 63c, 79, 80, 95, 96, 97, 105, 106, 107, 108). After first examining what elements of plot and character are most widespread in these songs, I survey Karelian customs and beliefs which helped explicate details of the songs within Karelian folk culture. Together, I argue, these features of plot and association helped create an understanding of the Sampo song that acted as a powerful normative force in folk interpretations.

By speaking of"normative" of course, I do not mean"uniform" nor do I mean "original." Singers and audiences of folk songs often share a normative model of a song, a model against which they evaluate or appreciate any new performance. The aesthetic and interpretive experience of a folk song in its traditional context comes in part from recognising how the singer has taken traditional material and adapted or embodied it. The norm helps predict the range of variations and shapes the form of new performances, but it seldom exists without a good deal of variation from performance to performance. The "original" form of a folk song, on the other hand, is the object of theoretical reconstruction, often based in part on the norm, but often finding evidence in stray details from a single variant or two, as anyone knowledgeable in historical-geographic research would attest. Thus, my study is far more limited and humbler than the monumental attempts at understanding the Sampo song authored by Finnish folklorists from Krohn (1927) to Setala (1932) to Haavio (1952) to Kuusi (1977b). I am not trying here to answer the "riddle of the Sampo" as Setala so aptly put it, nor to discover its "original" meaning. My question is more synchronic and more limited, but ultimately, I believe, just as intriguing.