Estonian Narrative Charms in European Context

Abstract

The Estonian Folklore Archives in Tartu have been described as ‘a cultural marvel’,² and for charms-scholars at least this statement is not hyperbole. The card indexes there hold the texts of at least 10,000 verbal charms. In fact, the total figure maybe substantially larger.³ But, in any event, the holdings are still one of the largest collections of charms in Europe. The overwhelmingly most common form of charm to be found in the Estonian archives is the direct address, something which is also the case in the even larger charms holdings of the Finnish Folklore Archives in Helsinki.⁴ Narrative charms and comparison charms, on the other hand, form less than ten per cent of both corpora, whereas in other parts of Europe, we might expect narrative charms and comparison charms to represent something more like 25–50 per cent of the corpus. For example, in the English charms corpus I put together (Roper 2005), 35 per cent of the texts were narrative charms. Nevertheless, as the Estonian corpus is so large, although narrative charms may be a fractional presence, the absolute size of that fraction is still quite substantial — I identified just short of eight hundred such texts in the archive.⁵ The following discussion is intended to provide an overview of these Estonian-language narrative charms, which form an interesting set in that they are found in a Baltic Finnic culture, which has also experienced significant and prolonged contacts with Swedes, Finns, Russians, Latvians and Germans.

I am grateful to both the British Academy and the Estonian Academy of Sci?ences for enabling me to make an individual research visit to the Estonian Folklore Archives in Tartu in May 2006 to undertake research there. Everyone who undertakes research on Estonian verbal charms is indebted to Mare K?iva both for her studies and assistance, and that I am no exception. And I should also say that I am indebted to Jaan Puhvel and Laura Stark for assistance in putting this chapter together.