Amsterdam University Press
4 Changes in the Poetics of Song during the Finnish Reformation Kati Kallio In sixteenth-century Finland, the Reformation marked not only the begin- ning of the Finnish written language, but also a slow, fundamental, and Amsterdamlong-lasting change in poetics and music. Stanzaic and rhymed poetics fijirst appeared in new Lutheran hymns and went on to take over the whole sphere of folk singing in Western Finland over a couple of centuries. The poetic features of vernacular Lutheran hymns varied by time, poet, and genre of singing, and these changes may be connected with the changes in historical and ideological contexts. The focus of this chapter is on the fijirst three important translators and creators of Finnish liturgical songs, Michael Agricola (c. 1510-1554), Jacobus Finno (c. 1540-1588), and Hemmingius of Masku (c. 1550-1619). They were all clergymen in the diocese of Turku (Swe. Åbo), consisting of the westernUniversity and southern parts of modern Finland. At the time, the area was the most eastern diocese of the Kingdom of Sweden. The language of Church was Latin, while the languages of trade and secular administration were mostly German and Swedish. From the period prior to the Reformation there are no sources of literate Finnish language or rhymed poetics. The old oral idiom, the Kalevala metre, was built on alliterative trochaic verses with no rhymes or stanzas, and sung with narrow melodies of one or two lines. The sources and contents of the early Finnish hymn melodiesPress and texts, the role of the translators, and the relationships of the fijirst hymnals to ec- clesiastical history have been analysed, but the poetics have not been given much attention.
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