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larryhammerAnyway, an actual report on the Kalevala.
The first thing you ought to know is that it's set firmly in the mythtime -- the sort of mythtime where, when a sorcerer calls down plagues upon her enemies, a daughter of the lord of the land of the dead gets pregnant by the wind and gives birth in the sorceress's bath-house to nine boys, who are the plagues who go "visit" the enemies. The sort of mythtime where the honeyed songs of the cuckoos can be solidified and turned into a harp's tuning pegs. The sort of mythtime where you can ask a salmon to sing at your wedding, only to learn that no, sorry, salmon can't sing.
The wierd, it pops out from every other birch of the tundra. Great fun.
Fantasy writers take note: this is an excellent object lesson in descriptions that use comparisons to in-universe objects, and so support the worldbuilding -- not just the restriction to things in the characters' world, but the variety. I'm especially taken by the ox so large it takes a month for a squirrel to run from its nose to the tip of its tail and an ermine a week to cross its yoke.*
Because the text is close to the oral tradition it's based on,** there is a lot of repetition and incremental repetition. Plus, of course, the usual sorts of formulaic language, either: passages of someone saying "I will (do some action described for six or eight lines)" followed by the narrator describing that exact same action for six or eight lines. Oral tradition lives on that sort of stuff.
While the increments on the lines of "I have six geese, there's seven geese in my yard" (not a real example) get a lot of attention, I'm more interested*** in how the repeated passages sometimes work by rule of three, sometimes rule of four, sometimes rule of five. That is, a conversation/encounter/problem will go back then forth, back then forth, then might be resolved the third or fourth or fifth time through. Three is common in western European traditional literatures, and four in native North American stories, but I've not seen five used as extensively as this. Now I'm wondering where are the statistical studies of relative frequencies worldwide.
And then there's repetitions with augmentation, such as in bridegroom tests Louhi gives Ilmarinen: for each impossible task, Ilmarinen asks Louhi's daughter how to plow the field of vipers or whatever, and she tells him do A, whereupon he goes off and does A and then B as well, where B was essential to actually succeeding.
As you might expect, a Ninja Replacement Score isn't easy to come up with. The story would not be improved if any of the main characters were replaced by ninjas -- not even Kullervo as he already functionally is one, if also a wangster. There's a couple minor character possibilities: if Untamo had been a ninja, or at least employed some, then Kullervo's family would have stayed dead, cutting the wangst quotient of the entire cycle in half. Neither of Louhi's daughters would be better as ninjas, as they're pretty impressive as it is, even the one Kullervo kills -- the story would be improved if they had names, but that's besides the point. Aino is a borderline case: I mean, turning into a mermaid or water spirit or whatever it was is kinda cool, especially when she uses this to mock Väinämöinen, and it's always entertaining when someone pulls one over the old guy -- but then, think of what she could have done if not forced into an aquatic lifestyle. I call her a toss-up.
So, NRS = 1 or 2 -- which is surprisingly high for something set in the deep mythtime.
Also, I remain amused at asking a salmon to sing.
* And then there's a hall so long you can't hear a dog bark at the other end.
** Lönnrot was a scholar before a poet, and so we have many of the transcripts he and his teacher collected -- which means we know that while he regularized the timeline and collapsed characters and added transitions and gave the Sampo what description we have of it, as vague as that is, he monkeyed with less than 5% of the whole.
*** I note, for example, Biblical uses of incremental repetition -- by way of explaining why it's less interesting.
---L.
The first thing you ought to know is that it's set firmly in the mythtime -- the sort of mythtime where, when a sorcerer calls down plagues upon her enemies, a daughter of the lord of the land of the dead gets pregnant by the wind and gives birth in the sorceress's bath-house to nine boys, who are the plagues who go "visit" the enemies. The sort of mythtime where the honeyed songs of the cuckoos can be solidified and turned into a harp's tuning pegs. The sort of mythtime where you can ask a salmon to sing at your wedding, only to learn that no, sorry, salmon can't sing.
The wierd, it pops out from every other birch of the tundra. Great fun.
Fantasy writers take note: this is an excellent object lesson in descriptions that use comparisons to in-universe objects, and so support the worldbuilding -- not just the restriction to things in the characters' world, but the variety. I'm especially taken by the ox so large it takes a month for a squirrel to run from its nose to the tip of its tail and an ermine a week to cross its yoke.*
Because the text is close to the oral tradition it's based on,** there is a lot of repetition and incremental repetition. Plus, of course, the usual sorts of formulaic language, either: passages of someone saying "I will (do some action described for six or eight lines)" followed by the narrator describing that exact same action for six or eight lines. Oral tradition lives on that sort of stuff.
While the increments on the lines of "I have six geese, there's seven geese in my yard" (not a real example) get a lot of attention, I'm more interested*** in how the repeated passages sometimes work by rule of three, sometimes rule of four, sometimes rule of five. That is, a conversation/encounter/problem will go back then forth, back then forth, then might be resolved the third or fourth or fifth time through. Three is common in western European traditional literatures, and four in native North American stories, but I've not seen five used as extensively as this. Now I'm wondering where are the statistical studies of relative frequencies worldwide.
And then there's repetitions with augmentation, such as in bridegroom tests Louhi gives Ilmarinen: for each impossible task, Ilmarinen asks Louhi's daughter how to plow the field of vipers or whatever, and she tells him do A, whereupon he goes off and does A and then B as well, where B was essential to actually succeeding.
As you might expect, a Ninja Replacement Score isn't easy to come up with. The story would not be improved if any of the main characters were replaced by ninjas -- not even Kullervo as he already functionally is one, if also a wangster. There's a couple minor character possibilities: if Untamo had been a ninja, or at least employed some, then Kullervo's family would have stayed dead, cutting the wangst quotient of the entire cycle in half. Neither of Louhi's daughters would be better as ninjas, as they're pretty impressive as it is, even the one Kullervo kills -- the story would be improved if they had names, but that's besides the point. Aino is a borderline case: I mean, turning into a mermaid or water spirit or whatever it was is kinda cool, especially when she uses this to mock Väinämöinen, and it's always entertaining when someone pulls one over the old guy -- but then, think of what she could have done if not forced into an aquatic lifestyle. I call her a toss-up.
So, NRS = 1 or 2 -- which is surprisingly high for something set in the deep mythtime.
Also, I remain amused at asking a salmon to sing.
* And then there's a hall so long you can't hear a dog bark at the other end.
** Lönnrot was a scholar before a poet, and so we have many of the transcripts he and his teacher collected -- which means we know that while he regularized the timeline and collapsed characters and added transitions and gave the Sampo what description we have of it, as vague as that is, he monkeyed with less than 5% of the whole.
*** I note, for example, Biblical uses of incremental repetition -- by way of explaining why it's less interesting.
---L.
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no subject
Date: 23 May 2011 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 23 May 2011 06:10 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 23 May 2011 09:24 pm (UTC)the honeyed songs of the cuckoos can be solidified and turned into a harp's tuning pegs.
Oh, I'd love to hold that harp.
no subject
Date: 23 May 2011 09:59 pm (UTC)It's a special harp -- Väinämöinen spends a whole canto constructing it and then playing with near-Orphic results.
---L.
no subject
Date: 27 May 2011 01:01 am (UTC)Fun, fun stories.
no subject
Date: 27 May 2011 04:13 am (UTC)---L.