Discussing the Supernatural in Contemporary Finland: Discourses, Genres, and Forums

Discussing the Supernatural in Contemporary Finland: Discourses, Genres, and Forums

Author(s): Kaarina Koski / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Keywords: Christian; discourse; experience; interpretation; legitimacy; mental; scientific; spiritual; supernatural

The supernatural is a debated issue on the Internet even though people generally avoid face-to-face discussion about it. This article1 gives an analytical overview of discussions about the supernatural in contemporary Finland. The research material consists of a sample of Finnish media and online discussions about the supernatural, as well as letters describing and interpreting personal experiences. Texts published on different forums show different generic features of style, content, and the traditionality of expression and interpretations. The texts can be entertaining or argue about moral and ontological issues, about the emergence of these experiences in human mind, or the status and sanity of people who have had these experiences. Opinions and interpretations on all forums draw on various discourses, of which five are presented. The science-oriented and mental discourses seek for natural explanations. The spiritual reality is accounted for, albeit in different forms, in the popular Christian, fundamental Christian, and alternative spiritual discourses. The discourses can be combined in various ways. The experiencers themselves primarily seek legitimate interpretations and sometimes they modify or stretch the collectively accepted scientific or Christian worldview to fit their experiences. However, sometimes the experiences lead to a change of the worldview. The sciences are also criticised for their narrow attitude.

Meet the Demonological Character: Two Types of Narrative Structures

Meet the Demonological Character: Two Types of Narrative Structures

Author(s): Victoria Chervaneva / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Keywords: demonological character; demonological narrative; function; name; narrative organisation; reference

The article describes the system of character nomination in oral demonological narratives about the dead. The syntagmatic level, i.e. the methods of introducing demonic characters and the linguistic tools employed for this purpose, are given particular attention. I also attempt to explain the role this naming system plays in the organisation of a demonological narrative, and show the relationship between character references and storyline of the text.

A Broader and Deeper Idea of Fairy Tale: Reassessing Concept, Meaning, and Function of the Most Debated Genre in Folk Narrative Research

A Broader and Deeper Idea of Fairy Tale: Reassessing Concept, Meaning, and Function of the Most Debated Genre in Folk Narrative Research

Author(s): Vito Carrassi / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Keywords: belief; classification; etymology; fairies; fairy tale; Ireland; narrative genres; otherness; supernatural; worldview

In this essay I try to argue a broader and deeper notion of fairy tale, beginning from an overview of some of the key terminologies and classifications devised and employed by folk-narrative research, passing through an etymological and semantic scrutiny of the word ‘fairy’, and developing, eventually, a structural analysis purposely framed within the historical-cultural context of the Irish tradition. What I attempt to let emerge – challenging to some extent the established concepts and theories – is a more comprehensive narrative category, characterised by a specific epistemological and ontological value, through which a sort of intermediate, neutral space is modelled, where boundaries are crossed and elements more or less heterogeneous are connected. Thus, the fairy tale can express a multi-dimensional worldview and the potential for a more complex idea of reality.

Ghosts, Troubles, Difficulties, and Challenges: Narratives About Unexplainable Phenomena in Contemporary Denmark

Ghosts, Troubles, Difficulties, and Challenges: Narratives About Unexplainable Phenomena in Contemporary Denmark

Author(s): Kirsten Marie Raahauge / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Keywords: anthropology; fieldwork; ghost; haunting; limit of reason; narrative; residual category; sensation

Many people experience something that they cannot explain, often they hear something that is not there as a visible fact. The sensation of hearing, for example, someone who is walking through your apartment, when no one is there as far as your eyes can see, poses a problem to the witness, especially if he or she does not think that this kind of occurrence is possible. Based on my fieldwork on haunted houses in Denmark today, this article deals with the narratives of people who have experiences that they cannot explain and that they consider to be on the limits of reason. Many of them do not consider ‘ghosts’ or ‘haunting’ as a possible explanation. This causes difficulties when they narrate and contextualise their experience, and typically they present ambiguous narratives and stress their disbelief at and bewilderment with the experiences. Still, as I will try to show in my article, their bewilderment and the way they use the notions ‘ghost’ and ‘haunting’ point to possible reinterpretations of these notions, so that the narrative mediation shapes not only the experience but also the ways that ‘ghosts’ and ‘haunting’ are reinterpreted in contemporary Denmark.

Mediumship and the Economy of Luck and Fate: Contemporary Chinese Belief Trends Behind the Filmic Folklore

Mediumship and the Economy of Luck and Fate: Contemporary Chinese Belief Trends Behind the Filmic Folklore

Author(s): Huai Bao / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Keywords: divination; economy of luck and fate; filmic folklore; fuji; mediumship; supernatural

This study explores the pen spirit, a mediumistic game simplified out of fuji, which is shown in a number of popular horror films in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). While Chinese literary works in the past often made reference to fuji as an ancient Chinese mediumistic ritual, the communist government has suppressed expressions on the supernatural in publications and official media, but not in films – at least not in the popular pen spirit series. What is a pen spirit? Why is it so popular in China, especially among Chinese youngsters? Is there a ‘cultural obsession’ among the Chinese with fate, luck, and divination? This study seeks to discover the evolution of the pen spirit and the socio-cultural psychological dimensions behind the phenomenon.

Fame after Life: The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death

Fame after Life: The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death

Author(s): Kirsten Møllegaard / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Keywords: biography; contemporary legends; death; Edgar Allan Poe; fame; gothic literature; Poe Toaster

Although contemporary legends often deal with the trials and anxieties of everyday life, a considerable body of folk narratives deals with famous historical people and the mysteries, rumors, and anecdotes ascribed to them. American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was a trend-setting author of gothic horror and dark mysteries. His short, difficult life and strange death have fueled both academic and folkloristic narratives. Where the academic narratives often analyze his fiction biographically as reflections of his life such as his impoverishment, alcoholism, and frustrated ambition, the folk narratives typically focus on his death at the age of forty. By straddling literary and popular fame, Poe-lore occupies a dynamic Spielraum in contemporary folklore because his haunted life and mysterious death, similar to the literary conventions for the gothic in literature, collapse ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The folklore of famous people is intimately – perhaps even mysteriously – tied to the perception of individual identity and the social experience of city crowds, strangers, and alienation. In Poe’s case, the intertwining of his fiction with his real-life struggles has made Poe scholarship the most biographically centered of any American writer, past or present, and produced Poe not only as a towering legend in American literature, but also as a legendary figure in the popular imagination.

A Compact Overview of the World of Ghosts and Demons

A Compact Overview of the World of Ghosts and Demons

Author(s): Reet Hiiemäe / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Christa Agnes Tuczay. Geister, Dämonen – Phantasmen. Eine Kulturgeschichte. Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2015. 252 pp.

Yet Another Collection of Udmurt Folksongs

Yet Another Collection of Udmurt Folksongs

Author(s): Madis Arukask / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Irina Pchelovodova & Nikolai Anisimov. Lymshor pal udmurt”eslen kyrӟan gur”essy / Pesni iuzhnykh udmurtov / Songs of southern Udmurts. Izhevsk & Tartu, 2015. 374 pp.

About the Links Between Phraseology and Psychology at an International Conference of Linguistics

About the Links Between Phraseology and Psychology at an International Conference of Linguistics

Author(s): Anneli Baran / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Anneli Baran writes about an international conference of linguistics, Slavofraz 2016: Phraseologie und (naive) Psychologie, which took place in Graz, Austria, on April 7–10.

International Symposium About the Power of Word in Tartu

International Symposium About the Power of Word in Tartu

Author(s): Reet Hiiemäe / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

Conference on Culinary Culture at the Estonian Literary Museum

Conference on Culinary Culture at the Estonian Literary Museum

Author(s): Liisi Laineste / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016

What is the colour of fairy tales?

Mis värvi on muinasjutt?

Author(s): Kärri Toomeos-Orglaan / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 64/2016

Keywords: beauty; corporeality; colour symbolism; fairy tale

The article presents a research of the usage of colours in Estonian fairy tales and the associations that are created by means of colours. The topic of colour usage also includes the aspect of corporeality that generates a critical discussion on the presentation of a woman in fairy tales. The symbolical meanings of different colours in fairy tales largely overlap with their meanings in folk belief and runo songs. The colours that are particularly meaningful are black, white, and red. Also, such colours as grey and gold occupy special places in fairy tales. In addition to physical description, colours are used to present characters’ or objects’ inner values, also expressing the way they differ from the ordinary, or hinting at the magical qualities they may possess. Black and white form a pair of opposites, symbolising good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death. Those meanings remain with them also in case one is being used without the other. The colour red represents health, fertility, and beauty; that is why it is frequently used in the descriptions of women. At the same time, the colour red can be used as an opposite to white, having in this case a negative meaning. Gold and other metals show the object’s magical characteristics, but at the same time also its value. Possessing a golden object can also hint at the owner’s high moral values. The colour grey represents wisdom but it can also be seen as a colour that disguises magical as ordinary.

Colour names and colours in the versions of the Snow White fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm

Värvinimed ja värvid vendade Grimmide muinasjutu “Lumivalguke” variantides

Author(s): Urmas Sutrop / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 64/2016

Keywords: oppositions; primary colour names; Snow White; structuralism; the Brothers Grimm

The article discusses three versions of the Snow White fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm (1810, 1812, and 1857), delving into the meanings of colours and colour names occurring in them as well as changes in the names and meanings. The analysis proceeds from the structural method of fairy tale study and explores the symbolic meaning oppositions of colours and their names, such as in/out, light/dark, life/death, logical/mythological. The analysis is also based on the differentiation drawing on the theory of primary colours, according to which black, white, and red are the most fundamental colour names. However, the use of colour names (semantics and symbolism) is complicated in the versions of the Snow White fairy tale, as a colour may have several oppositional meanings. It is not just simple binary oppositions. The Brothers Grimm regarded the colours black, white, and red as beautiful. Jacob Grimm depicted them as the three colours of poetry.

Colour terms and colour symbols in the subgenres of Estonian riddles

Värvisõnad ja värvisümbolid eesti mõistatuste alaliikides

Author(s): Piret Voolaid / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 64/2016

Keywords: classical riddles; colour names; colours; compound puns; conondrums; droodles; folkloristics; riddles

The article analyses colour names in the three most widely spread subgenres of Estonian riddles – classical or ordinary riddles, conondrums, and droodles – focusing on the specific features of each subgenre and their specific differences. The main questions concern the more frequent colour names by subgenres, their more general usage relations, and the use of colours in image creation. Classical riddles belong to a more archaic layer and are, by their nature, poetic descriptions of an object or a phenomenon, in which the image expresses mainly the appearance of the answer object, the facets perceived by senses. Colour names occur frequently in the image creation of riddles, serving as primary indicators in describing an object or a phenomenon and providing a hint at the answer. Classical riddles manifest the importance of colours in the semantic-lexical imagery of riddles (image stereotypes and form patterns), which can roughly be divided into two: 1. In texts with defined subjects, in which the image coincides with the syntactic subject of the descriptive sentence, the subject is often a zoological term, which is complemented by a colour (e.g. clichés such as grey/black/white ox; black pig and red piglets); yet, colour is also essential in human images (e.g. black man, red boy). 2. Texts with undefined subjects, in which the object to be guessed is presented indirectly by means of its activity, qualities, relations, places, time, etc., and colour names are applied in form stereotypes based on some kind of paradoxical differences or contradictions. Conondrums and droodles as more recent subgenres are oriented on humour; they both express cultural stereotypes and symbols by means of colours. As compared to the colour statistics of classical riddles, in conondrums the leading position is occupied by the subject-related term ‘blond’, which marks a fair-haired and fair-skinned person, and is caused by the multitude of jokes about dim-witted blondes that became popular in the second half of the 1990s. Colours play an important role in the absurd questions beginning in ‘What is…?’, as well as internationally known absurd series of elephant-questions, in which the opposition of two colour shades (light-dark, white-black) is widely spread as a humour-creating method. The colour image of the black-and-white droodles often contains the inducing of visual imagination and the occurrence of colour in both the question and answer. Text examples originate from internet databases Estonian Riddles (Krikmann & Krikmann 2012), Estonian Conondrums (Voolaid 2004), and Estonian Droodles (Voolaid 2002), based mainly on the manuscript material of the Estonian Folklore Archives as well as different publications and internet material.

Estonian colour names: Relations between structure and meaning

Moodustusviisi ja tähenduse vahekorrast eesti värvinimetustes

Author(s): Vilja Oja / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 64/2016

Keywords: base of comparison; dialect speech; Estonian; naming motives of colour; paronymy; structure of colour names

Estonian words for colours are often produced by adding an adjectival suffix to a noun stem. The most productive adjectival suffix -ne does not change the meaning of the word. The meaning of adjectives with the suffixes ‑kas and ‑jas, which occur frequently among colour names, depends on the part of speech of the derivation base. Denominal adjectives describe the colour on the basis of its similarity to an object (e.g. savikas ‘clay-coloured’ < N savi ‘clay’). If the suffix ‑kas or ‑jas (in Võru dialect -kane or -jane) has been attached to an adjective, the terms express partial hue content in a colour (e.g. hallikas ‘greyish’ < Adj. hall ‘grey’. Some moderating colour terms are derivatives with an ik- or lik-suffix. Compounds and phrasal units make up nearly 80% of all Estonian colour terms. A term consisting of two or more words can conditionally be divided into two parts: the final component is the base word, while the initial one carries the attributive function. Either component may, in turn, be a root word, a suffixed derivative, or a compound or phrase. Colours are often described by phrases in which the final component is not inflected either in case or in number. This may be either (1) a parameter word meaning ‘coloured’ (e.g. värvi, karva) or an adjectival derivative from the stem (värviline, karvaline, etc.); or (2) a moderating adverb or adjective (e.g. ‑võitu, ‑sugune, ‑poolne). A large number of Estonian colour names are motivated by the comparison with the colour of a well-known object. A closer look at such phrasal terms revealed that the combination of a part of speech and the way of compounding has a semantic function. Many colour names have their origin in a colouring substance. Borrowed foreign terms are often adapted to fit the Estonian phonetic and lexical system, and sometimes have an absolutely strange word stem (e.g. Gm Orleans > Est ordijoon, ort, etc.). Colour naming represents an open system in Estonian and everybody can find creative ways to describe colours. A new colour name is adequately understandable if it fits into the traditional system used to denote colours in Estonian.

Catechesis in Estonian Orthodox Church

Eestikeelne usuõpetus (katehhees) õigeusu kirikus

Author(s): Liina Eek / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 64/2016

Keywords: catechesis; Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church; Estonian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate; Orthodox theology

The article describes how catechesis is given to Estonian-speaking people in two Estonian Orthodox churches – the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church (EAOC) and the Estonian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate (EOCMP). An overview is also given of the opinions of Orthodox priests about the necessity of catechesis in parishes, which is deemed to be the minimum needed knowledge about Orthodox theology for being a church member, and about when the catechesis should be given (before baptism/confirmation, after that, or throughout life). Catechesis in Orthodox church is usually given before joining the church and its length, content, and methodology vary, being dependent on resources in the parish (rooms, people, etc.), on priests’ knowledge, ability, and skills to give catechesis, and finally on the interest of congregation members. Catechesis before joining the church is not obligatory in the EAOC, even though it is encouraged and its importance is stressed by the metropolitan. In the EOCMP, catechesis before joining the church is obligatory, and its length is at least a couple of meetings with the priest. The article describes how different priests solve the problem of giving catechesis. The article is based on original empirical data collected during a religious-sociological study, undertaken in 2012–2014, when 57 interviews were carried out with Estonian-speaking clergy and lay members of both Estonian Orthodox churches. Based on interviews with 18 priests, the article highlights the bottlenecks of Estonian Orthodox catechesis: churches do not have enough resources and skilled clergy for giving active catechesis in parishes, but both churches and their clergy make efforts to improve the situation. There is enough catechetic material available in Estonian, yet the problem is rather the lack of skills or willingness of some priests to give catechesis. In the EOCMP the problem could also be lack of publication opportunities or availability of information about catechetic materials in Estonian.

I could study everything – if only I had time…

Uurida võiks kõike, kui vaid aega oleks…

Author(s): Meelis Roll / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 64/2016

Meelis Roll is interviewing the director of the Estonian Literary Museum.

The role of research in the compilation of educational material on the meaning of colours and colour terms at the Estonian National Museum

Uurimistöö rollist värvide tähendust ja värvisõnu käsitleva õppematerjali loomisel Eesti Rahva Muuseumis

Author(s): Virve Tuubel,Jane Liiv / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 64/2016

Jane Liiv and Virve Tuubel give an overview of the compilation of a popular educational programme and study material concerning colours, at the permanent exhibition Estonia: Land, People, Culture, displayed at the Estonian National Museum in 1994–2015.

A compact overview of the world of ghosts and demons

Kompaktne ülevaade vaimude ja deemonite maailmast

Author(s): Reet Hiiemäe / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 64/2016

Christa Agnes Tuczay. Geister, Dämonen – Phantasmen. Eine Kulturgeschichte. Wiesbaden: Marixverlag. 2015. An overview by Reet Hiiemäe in English is available in Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, Vol. 65.

Introduction: Belief Narratives and Their Research

Introduction: Belief Narratives and Their Research

Author(s): Reet Hiiemäe / Language(s): English / Issue: 65/2016