Votian and ingrian folk songs

The singer recounts how her brother built a fine boat. The singer herself helped to set it afloat and found rowers. This variant here describes how old people rowed the boat. They had no strength to do that and turned to God for help. Young rowers would row so that the oars would bend.

Finnish researcher Matti Kuusi has argued that the song about the boat voyage, which is known in the entire Baltic-Finnic runo song area, is a mythical story about the building of the first boat and the first voyage (Kuusi 1963: 150–153ff; 1980: 225–226). The boat builder is no ordinary human—he could be Väinämöinen or the son of God and the boat cannot be built without a special tree or spell. In the southern regions, where epic ballads were often sung by women, the boat was built by the singer’s brother, making the narration much more realistic. The earliest layer of the song is represented by the image of old and young rowers, which was known in the area from Karelia to Estonia. In the northern runo song area, the hasty voyage continues on the back of a pike and the pike’s teeth are used to craft a psaltery. Instead of hitting the back of the pike, the boat might also hit a rock beneath a city. In the southern regions, the boat voyage is not associated with making a psaltery. The Estonian variant sometimes concludes with trading in a rich city, but the ending may also be embedded with stories about the birth of fishes or catching sacred fish.