Otepää

Runosong collection place · ERAB corpus, Estonian Folklore Archives

Distinctive vocabulary

Words unusually characteristic of poems collected here, compared with poems collected at other places — not the most common words.

Villages, communes and other places the songs were collected in

Of the 965 poems collected in this place, 686 name a smaller place on their archive record; the remaining 279 records give no finer place, or one of a kind this list does not cover. The counts reflect how often collectors wrote an address down, not how much was sung. Names are shown as written on the records, so they span different eras’ commune divisions; a place may be where the song was written down or where the singer came from, and a name marked (?) was uncertain in the record itself. The abbreviations after the names are the archive’s own unit words: v. = vald (commune); t. = talu (farm); as. = asundus (settlement); al. = alevik (small borough). All these names, across every collection place, can be searched in the Place Name Index. Commune borders and parish borders did not coincide, so some of these places were also written down under a neighbouring collection place; those entries link to the other list.

Sample verses with parallels in other places

Verses recorded here whose close parallels appear in poems from other collection places — a trace of the shared oral tradition.

• lätsi mõtsa kõndimaie (AES, MT 118, 6) — parallel in Setumaa
• võtsõ püssä püti päältä (AES, MT 118, 6) — parallel in Setumaa
• olli kui osi murule (H III 9, 836/8 (15)) — parallel in Sangaste
• iki iki ma vaene (H III 9, 836/8 (15)) — parallel in Sangaste
• pahatsel pale punane (E 26434/5 (26)) — parallel in Karksi
• mina tunne tuima neiu (H III 10, 361/2 (18)) — parallel in Karksi
• tsõtsikene linnukene (H II 31, 598 (51)) — parallel in Paistu
• sada sarda sai liha (AES, MT 118, 6) — parallel in Paistu
• vanamiis kuuli ärä (H III 28, 643/5 (18)) — parallel in Helme
• kos vanamiis jäi (H III 21, 570/1 (5)) — parallel in Helme