Runosong Geography

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Runosong Geography

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About

Runosongs — the old Finnic oral songs called regilaul in Estonian and runolaulu in Finnish — were written down at named parishes and regions across Estonia, Finland, Ingria and Karelia. This page maps the songs' vocabulary to 803 collection places holding 276,764 poems. It is part of RunoVerse, a free exploration toolkit for these corpora.

The poems come from four corpora: ERAB (the Estonian runosong database), SKVR and JR (the Finnish-side collections), and KR (Kirjalliset Runot, Finnish runosongs from early written sources), which records no collection place and therefore adds nothing to this page's maps or counts. "Finnish (FI)" here names the corpus group, not the local language: SKVR and JR include Karelian, Izhorian and Ingrian places such as Vuokkiniemi, Suistamo and Narvusi. The All / Estonian / Finnish buttons above filter every view to one side.

Distinctive words, shown throughout, use TF-IDF scoring: a word common in one place's poems but rare at the other collection places of the same language scores high (Estonian places are scored against Estonian places, Finnish against Finnish). A wordform is a word exactly as spelled in the songs — inflected and dialect spellings count separately; "unique wordforms" counts distinct spellings.

The six view buttons

Places — Sortable table of all 803 collection places; click any row to open that place's detail panel (distinctive vocabulary, song types, links). Above the table: stat tiles with the headline counts, three highlight cards (most poems, largest vocabulary, a random place — new on every visit), and a Top-15 bar chart of the most-collected places; the cards and bars are clickable too. The table pages through the full list.

Word Search — Type a wordform to see which places use it, as a bar chart.

Compare — Pick two places and compare their distinctive-word lists: shared words and each side's own.

Map — The interactive map; its "Show:" menu offers eighteen colourings, listed below.

Toponyms — Place names found inside the verse texts, including mythological, biblical and foreign names. Auto-detected, so the list is approximate; the lowest-confidence matches (often ordinary words) are hidden by default — switch the confidence filter to "All" to include them.

Semantic — Each place's thematic profile, counted over tagged word occurrences. The category filter offers 50 categories (26 thematic + 24 emotion). Click a row for the place's top-10 category chart. Also available as a map colouring.

Map colourings (the "Show:" menu)

Statistics — One of seven per-place measures, defined at the end of this section.

Poem uniqueness — How unlike the rest of the corpus each place's poems are: every poem carries a 0–100 uniqueness percentile, and the map shades the average, median or a quartile of them.

Word frequency — Type wordforms and see where they occur; "Relative" shades by uses per 10,000 words instead of raw counts.

Translation frequency — Type an English word; the map shows the places using wordforms translated with it.

Verse search — Search whole verse lines by text or regular expression, with an exclude pattern and a Diminutives preset; "Relative" shades by the share of matching verse lines.

Collector — Where a named collector wrote poems down. The index stores each collector's top 10 places, so the map shows at most ten places per collector.

Time period — Poems by collection decade, chosen with the two sliders; pre-1800 records are excluded unless ticked.

Emotion vocabulary — Density of emotion words in 11 unified categories, with positive/negative presets. (A finer emotion split — 24 families — lives in the Semantic tab's category filter; the two counts describe different groupings.)

Verse cluster — Where a recurring verse formula occurs.

Similar poems — Enter a poem ID; the map shows where its most similar poems were collected.

Semantic category — The Semantic profile as map shading.

Dialect area — Finnish Western/Eastern and Estonian North/South dialect groups; "Other languages" covers Karelian, Ingrian, Votic, Sami and more.

Individual dialect — The same map split into single dialects.

Sarv region — Five broad runosong regions after folklorist Mari Sarv.

SKVR volume regions — Which group of the printed SKVR series (one volume per collection region) most of a place's poems are printed in: Ingria (III–V), South Karelia incl. the Karelian Isthmus (XIII), Karelia (I, II, VII), rest of Finland (VI, VIII–XII, XIV). The mixed 1997 supplement (XV) is not counted, places without SKVR poems stay uncoloured, and Finnish communities abroad are shown as diaspora.

Places named in songs — Dots for the toponyms mentioned in the verses themselves.

Villages, communes and other places — One dot per finer place written on the records; thousands of points, with its own legend on the map.

Custom CSV — Upload your own place-and-value list and map it.

The seven Statistics measures: Poem count — poems recorded at the place (a poem filed under several places counts at each). Unique wordforms — distinct spellings occurring in the place's poems. Verse count — lines of poetry. Avg words/line — word tokens divided by verse lines. Collectors (top 3 recorded) — how many of the place's leading collectors the index stores (at most three; not the full collector count). Alliteration rate — the share of verse lines whose content words begin with the same letter; lines where the match is only that two words start with (different) vowels count at reduced weight. Parallelism score — average word overlap between consecutive verse lines (0–1).

Map extras: the Parishes/Counties toggle regroups the map into counties (colour bands are recomputed, so shades are not comparable across the two views); the search box finds and highlights a place; Share copies a link that reopens the current view — the tab, the colouring with its search or filters, and on the map also the position and zoom; Export downloads the places table as CSV.

Data

803 collection places across 276,764 poems, from the SKVR, JR and ERAB corpora; the fourth corpus, KR, records no collection place. Distinctive words computed with TF-IDF scoring against the other collection places of the same language.

The map's "Villages, communes and other places" view breaks the same records down one level finer — to villages, communes and other named spots — for the records that give one; its place count is therefore in the thousands, not 803, and the two totals measure different things.

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