Oskar Loorits: Byzantine Cultural Relations and Practical Application of Folklore Archives Ergo-Hart Västrik∗ Introduction Oskar Loorits played a significant role in Estonian folklore studies during the period before World War II as the initiator and the first director of the Estonian Folklore Archives, as well as the leading scholar in the field of Livonian and Estonian folk beliefs and mythology. Loorits is the author of 36 books and monographs, but also of ca. 200 scholarly articles on folklore, language and cultural history (Tedre 1995: 459). In addition, his bibliography includes 40 book reviews and more than 200 satirical articles and epigrams targeting a variety of shortcomings in public affairs (Luht 1966, Ribenis 2000). All in all, Loorits appeared to be an extremely energetic and prolific scientist whose scholarly work was closely connected to his activities in the field of cultural and social politics. Despite the fact that his most important monograph on Estonian folk belief Grundzüge des estnischen Volksglaubens I–III was published after World War II, when he had left Estonia and was working in Sweden, Loorits should be considered, with Walter Anderson, to be one of the most influential figures in Estonian folklore studies of the 1920s and 1930s. Oskar Loorits was born on November 9th 1900 in the rural Kõpu parish of Viljandi County (South Estonia), where his father worked as community clerk for the municipality. His philological talent was already evident at an early age in various literary experiments, personal diaries and initial endeavours to systematise his written production. In 1914 he entered a Gymnasium in the provincial centre and university town of Tartu, where he lived and worked up to the enforced emigration during World War II. During the Nazi occupation Research for this article was supported by the Estonian Science Foundation, Grant no. 5964. 204 Ergo-Hart Västrik Loorits was obliged to resign his positions at the Estonian Folklore Archives and the University of Tartu in 1942, and had to work for eighteen months in iso- lation in a rural area in western Estonia. In 1944, before the battle-front reached Estonia again, he escaped with his wife and three children to Sweden, where he worked as an archive assistant and grant-aided scholar at the Uppsala Dialect and Folklore Archives (Landsmåls- och folkminnesarkivet). Loorits died in Uppsala, Sweden on December 12th 1961, but was eventually reburied in the Tartu Raadi Cemetery in Estonia in the year 2000. Studies in philology and Livonian folklore Loorits enrolled at the University of Tartu in 1919 and studied Baltic-Finnish languages and comparative folklore under the guidance of Professors Lauri Kettunen and Walter Anderson. At first he concentrated mainly on the field of linguistics, participated enthusiastically in the activities of Akadeemiline Ema- keele Selts (Academic Society of Mother Tongue) and wrote intensively on a variety of topical language matters. By the summer of 1920 he had already participated in a lengthy fieldwork trip with Professor Kettunen to Livonian villages in Latvia where his lifetime interest in the language and folklore of this small Balto-Finnic ethnic group was kindled. In a couple of years Loorits amassed a bulky corpus of Livonian folklore — a manuscript collection (LF) of ca 10,000 items in Livonian that represented a variety of folklore genres. His personal research interests particularly focussed on folk narratives and folk beliefs; these made up about a half of the collection. Loorits’ first major publi- cation on folklore was the catalogue of Livonian folktales and legends (Livische Märchen- und Sagenvarianten, FFC 66) published in 1926. In the same year he defended his doctoral dissertation on Livonian folk beliefs, based on a massive monograph published in three volumes in 1926–1928 (Liivi rahva usund I–III. Mit einem Referat: Der Volksglaube der Liven; second printing in 1998).2 Loorits’ first monograph revealed characteristic traits of his personal style of scholarly production. He would quote many texts in full and (probably due to his background in linguistics) provided a great number of etymologies explaining cultural contacts, and cultural history in general, with the help of folklore terminology (cf. Tedre 1995: 460). He approached the Livonian material within the framework of the Finno-Ugric ethnic religions (studied concurrently, for example, by Uno Holmberg-Harva) paying particular attention to the “lower mythology” (mythological beings) reflected in folk beliefs and legends. Loorits 2 Two additional volumes (Liivi rahva usund IV–V), compiled mostly during post- war period in Sweden, were published in 2000 by the Estonian Literary Museum. Ergo-Hart Västrik 205 also pointed out many Latvian and especially Estonian parallels to the beliefs and narrative plots under scrutiny, thus exemplifying the comparative method in the analysis of folklore texts. This approach was developed further in his later studies (for example, Loorits 1931; 1935), which included Livonian folklore as well as material from the other peoples of the Baltic Sea region. Loorits’ publications on Livonian folklore (and culture in general) reflected his warm empathy for the fate of this kindred ethnic group. It is evident that Loorits did not confine his activities to “pure” academic research but parti- cipated actively in the process of reviving and supporting Livonian ethnic and national self-consciousness. He compiled several Livonian textbooks, tirelessly produced articles on the past and present of Livonian culture for Estonian and international readers, organised local branches of national institutions and helped to formulate their claims for cultural autonomy. In this context it is understandable why his only academic source publication on Livonian folklore was a voluminous collection of folk songs, which was based on his conviction that it should serve the expectations of the Livonian audience, and not the ‘Pan- Finno-Ugrian’ researchers who have claimed that the Livonian repertoire had nothing to add to the comprehension of ancient alliterative (Kalevala metric) poetry (cf. Tedre 1995: 460). Volkslieder der Liven (1936) contained 645 Livonian song types, including original Livonian texts and their full translations into German. The collection also contained short articles about his best informants and a general overview of the assimilation processes among Livonians. This monumental publication was obviously shaped to support the nation-building of Livonians, and Loorits planned to continue the series with a collection of folk tales. Loorits’ published articles included also severe criticism of Latvian state institutions that were, in his view, too passive in supporting the attempts of Livonian national activists. His energy and uncompromising position was reflected in the fact that Latvian officials decreed Loorits to be persona non grata in 1935, and he was expelled from Latvia during the Baltic congress of history in 1937 (Blumberga 2004). 206 Ergo-Hart Västrik Founding father of the Estonian Folklore Archives Oskar Loorits’ exceptional capacities as an organiser and an administrator were vividly reflected in his employment in establishing the Estonian Folklore Archives (EFA). Loorits has been regarded as the initiator of the idea of the archives, which he formulated during his trip to Helsinki in 1924, where he got acquainted with the Finnish folklore collections under the guidance of Professor Kaarle Krohn (Loorits 1937: 57). The basic reason for the foundation of the archives was to house the folklore collection of Jakob Hurt, which was kept after his death at the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki and supervised by Krohn. However, the leading folklorists involved in the process supported the idea of bringing together all private folklore collections (archives) and establishing a central national institution in order to make folklore materials available for comparative research (cf. the principles of the geographic-historical school). In designing the EFA, the examples of the Nordic and Baltic folklore archives were taken into consideration. After long discussions and several attempts to get official status, the EFA was established in 1927 as an autonomous subdivision of the Estonian National Museum, governed by a committee of representatives from the museum, the University of Tartu and the Ministry of Education (Berg 2002: 15–24).3 Oskar Loorits participated actively in the institutionalisation process of the EFA; he put together the preliminary budget of the archives (following the example of the Archives of Latvian Folklore in Riga), held negotiations with state officials, and also executed the practical task of moving the folklore collection of Jakob Hurt from Helsinki to Tartu. Therefore it was quite logical that Loorits was elected by the governing committee to be the first director of the archives. The staff of the archives soon consisted of five people and included, in addition to the director, assistants who all later became out- standing scholars: Paul Ariste, Richard Viidalepp, Herbert Tampere and Rudolf Põldmäe (for Viidalepp and Tampere, see the present reader pp. 243–258 and 275–287). From 1927 Loorits also worked as an assistant professor at the University of Tartu, where he took over the chair in 1939 after Professor Walter Anderson left for Germany. As we can read in the Loorits’ survey of the first five years of the EFA (Loorits 1932; English version Loorits 1936), the archives’ first and foremost