We examine the complex folkloric and linguistic variation of Finnic oral poetry in the transnational corpus of c. 250 000 texts in Estonian, Seto, Votic, Ingrian, Ludic, Karelian, and Finnish languages, documented in 1564–1971 and held in Estonian and Finnish archival collections, set into one database in our previous FILTER consortium. We combine methods in folkloristics, linguistics, and computational science, such as genre, poem type, motif, formula, poetic, morphological and lexical analysis, layering close and distant reading. The research takes place at the Finnish Literature Society and the University of Helsinki, in close cooperation especially with the Estonian Literary Museum and the University of Tartu. We want to gain new knowledge about the language and characteristics of oral poetry, historical relations between Finnic languages and cultures, and the temporal layers of oral tradition.

2026

2029