In a research project funded by the Academy of Finland called Oral Poetry, Mythic Knowledge, and Vernacular Imagination. Interfaces of Individual Expression and Collective Traditions in Pre-modern Northeast Europe, Lotte Tarkka and her colleagues continue the classical line of Finnish folkloristics, which is based on text-based comparative research. The Project’s researchers are studying pre-modern oral traditions in the multi-ethnic outskirts of Northeast Europe; peripheries which are characterised by rich cultural contacts. Comparative research on Baltic Finnic, ancient Scandinavian and Siberian traditions gives a clearer picture of European cultural heritage and particularly its north-eastern dimension.

Poetic languages attached to myths, rituals and belief systems act within mythic knowledge structures. Nevertheless, this focus on knowledge does not cover the meanings behind mythic poetry. The project aims to examine mythology as an experienced reality which cannot be understood without the concept of imagination. Vernacular imagination mediated levels of experience and expression, and within its framework key ideas and values were applied and passed on from one generation to another. Individuals interpreted mythical knowledge when they acted collectively. In this process, the slowly-changing structures of worldviews began to yield: even the most sacred of stories were varied and renewed. Tarkka describes this tension between continuity and innovation as the resilience of tradition.

As part of this research project, Tarkka has written on mythology and poetry: the problem of the Sampo that has baffled folklorists for centuries, the pre-modern relationship with nature, parallelism, the poetics of quoting, and the relationship between the afterlife and imagination. The material is familiar to her from her doctoral dissertation, where she placed the poetry collected from the rune singers of one Karelian county into its historical and communal context.

The material for her dissertation is also the basis for a work in progress, a microhistorical monograph on Smötkyn Riiko (1869-1942), a sage from Viena, Eastern Karelia. The monograph has a plot: it follows the life of the sage from the Karelian uprising and the formation of Soviet Karelia to the Second World War. Known by many names, called the last rune singer, and a guerrilla recruited as a double agent, Riiko also posed for Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and it was Gallen-Kallela who recorded his poetry. In connection with the monograph, a historically significant corpus of 50 poems in the Kalevala-metre performed by Riiko will be published, some of which Tarkka managed to transcribe from the badly damaged cylinders of a parlograph. There is also a theoretical significance to the story. It aims to define the characteristics of folk poetry at the intersection of oral and written culture, the power structures involved in the collection of tradition, and the nationalistic ideology of tradition in the first half of the 20th century.