| Summary: | The dissertation examines corpora of Viena Karelian Kalevala-metric incantations. More precisely, the focus is on communicative incantations, that is, incantations that involve direct communication with agents in the unseen worlds and conceived as producing results through this interaction. These are distinguished from non-communicative incantations, whether their efficacy was conceived as dependent on the innate power of the performer or their effects were imagined as mechanical outcomes of recital by anyone. In my analysis, I categorize incantations in the class of communicative incantations on text-internal linguistic evidence according to the presence of directives (requests, commands). My analysis assesses the identification of communicative incantations with ritual specialists called the tietäjät by surveying whether or not the people from whom they were recorded are mentioned as tietäjät in the ethnographic record. The results are then tested with a similar survey of informants for another type of incantations that researchers identify with tietäjät. Additionally, I examine the formal features and rhetoric in communicative incantations in order to assess whether there are differences connected to whom or what is addressed, in order to determine whether the register of these incantations is homogeneous or the performer switches between different registers. The research material consists of archived Kalevala-metric communicative incantations collected in Viena Karelia during the period 1820–1919 and published in the anthology Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (‘Ancient Poems of the Finnish People’; SKVR), and an appendix to the fourth volume of SKVR, which contains the names of the ritual specialists and singers of Viena Karelia. The methodological framework of the study draws on theories concerning genre and discursive registers. Methods are adapted from comparative folklore research for the quantitative analysis of the corpus in combination with techniques of close reading for individual items. Approaches from ...
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