Regilaulu juured
ja kujunemine

Roots and development
of runosong

Both of the swinging songs we have chosen represent mythical songs. The first describes the world pillar which upholds the arch of the sky, as well as mythical knitting maidens. In the creation song, a bird arisen here on our own beach from sea foam hatches chicks that turn into the sun, the moon and the stones. The mythos of a world egg hatched by a bird is certainly older than runosong. We do not know whether it was known here already before the arrival of the Finno-Ugric languages (which, according to the newest research by geneticists, linguists and archeologists happened circa 2500 years ago), or whether it was brought along from the East together with the Finnic language. It is also not entirely impossible that this creation myth could be a cultural loan learned later than the origin of runosong.

According to linguist Mikko Korhonen, the metre of runosong could not have emerged earlier than in the Finnic proto-language. It was then that syllables became an important unit of language rhythm and a verse system based on counting syllables could develop. Finnish folklorist Frog has lately presented a theory that runosong emerged as a result of the contact of the earlier Finnic verse culture and the alliterative poetry of Germanic peoples. People with the Finno-Ugric gene component were met on arrival in Northern and Western Estonia by tribes who had arrived here some centuries earlier from Scandinavia and probably spoke an early Paleo-Germanic language (much of the agricultural and nautical vocabulary in Finnic languages is of Germanic origin). According to archeologist Valter Lang’s theory, the rich and viable culture that emerged on the blending of these cultures in Northern Estonia gave rise to the Late Proto-Finnic which from this pool spread further and diverged into the separate Finnic languages. The emergence of runosong could indeed have occurred as a result of this linguistic and cultural contact in Northern Estonia, from where it spread along with the population to further Finnic areas.