Recommended โ balanced by verse count with collection diversity. Longer poems rank higher.
Most unique โ poems unlike anything else in the corpus, based on vocabulary, structure, and cross-lingual comparison (uniqueness percentile).
Most traditional โ poems at the heart of widely shared traditions, with the most variants across the corpus.
Most parallel โ ranked by consecutive parallelism score (only poems with computed scores shown).
Random โ seeded shuffle, shareable via URL.
About themes
Theme categories (Incantations, Wedding, Lyric, etc.) are derived from song type classifications. The majority of poems are "Unclassified" because they lack song type data or fall under a catch-all "other" category.
About emotion words
Emotion labels are based on matching verse vocabulary against a curated wordform lexicon of 63,000 emotion words across 38 families. A poem is labeled when 3 or more wordforms from the same emotion family appear. This indicates vocabulary presence, not semantic analysis.
About these results
This page lets you browse 292,000 runosong poems from four corpora: SKVR (Finnish), JR (Finnish), KR (Literary Finnish), and ERAB (Estonian). Song type classifications cover about 55% of poems, with the Finnish SKVR corpus having the best coverage (99%). The JR corpus has no song type data.
These poems reflect historical oral traditions and may contain archaic language and themes.
Poem Profile
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Poem Reader Help
This reader shows AI-generated word-level annotations for runosong texts. The annotations are approximate and intended as a reading aid, not for scholarly citation without manual review.
Layers: Toggle annotation rows using the buttons above the poem. Each poem is shown in its original published spelling (capitalization and punctuation) by default, and every word stays clickable. Press Normalized to switch the word grid to its lowercased lookup form and reveal the standard-orthography row used for annotation. English glosses are shown by default. Full Translation and Commentary are AI-generated verse-level English translations (DeepSeek R1).
Search: Use the search field in the header to jump to poems by archive reference (e.g., “H II 1, 389”) or search for words/lemmas to find all poems containing them.
Click any word to see its full entry including translations, morphology, etymology, and dictionary definitions.
Related Poems: The sidebar shows poems similar to the current one, found by five algorithms: TF-IDF (lemma), Jaccard (wordform), Translation-pivot (cross-lingual), Verse-aggregated RRF, and Character Bigram. Click any result to navigate to that poem.
Verse Similarity: Click the expand arrow (↓) on any verse line to see its most similar verses from across the corpus, with algorithm badges (J/T/Tr/C/Se) and cross-lingual indicators. A small blue dot on the corner of an expand arrow marks a verse whose top matches include a parallel from the other corpus group (Estonian vs. the Finnish-side collections). The verse-map “N verses with parallels in ...” stat is clickable: it highlights those verses, and each highlighted verse has an ET↔FI chip that opens its closest matches at a cross-corpus parallel. Detection uses each verse's stored top matches (up to five per algorithm), so the count is not exhaustive. The Finnish-side corpora (SKVR, KR, and JR) include Karelian, Izhorian, and Ingrian material, so the label describes corpus groups rather than identifying the language of every verse. The site's dedicated Song Bridge and cross-corpus cluster browser use cluster-level analysis and therefore show different counts.
Poem Profile: The dashboard below the poem analyzes the current text (or any text you paste via Paste text). Hover any card in the statistics row for its definition: besides verse and word counts, unique words counts distinct word forms, glossed is the share of those with an English gloss, emotion the share of words from the emotion lexicon, parallel the number of detected parallelism groups (consecutive verses restating the same idea), formulaic the average verse formulaicity (0–100), and morph the share of the 65 grammatical categories the poem's word forms use. The tabs go deeper: Verse Map shows per-verse rarity, formulaicity, parallelism and formula marks, plus how many poems share each verse — the RV column from RunoVerse's own clustering (click a number to open that verse's similar verses) and the CW column from the FILTER project's clusters. Semantics covers emotions, thematic domains and Estonian–Finnish cognates; Sound & Meter alliteration, syllable meter and vocabulary rarity; Tradition song types, similar poems, substitution partners (words attested taking a given word's place in otherwise near-identical verses, with a corpus-wide count) and formula clusters; Words the poem's vocabulary and compounds; Context the collector, place and collection period. Throughout the profile, hover any label, count or badge for a plain-language explanation.
Word Detail: Click any word to see its full entry including translations, morphology, etymology, dictionary definitions, and dialectal synonyms. Links to the main lexicon for deeper exploration.
Comparison: Compare two poems side by side with shared vocabulary highlighting. Available via the compare button in the Related Poems panel.
Keyboard: Use arrow keys to move between words, Enter to open in lexicon, Esc to close panels. Press / to search, ? for help, K for the full keyboard shortcuts reference, 1โ7 to toggle layers (1 = Normalized, incl. alliteration), [ / ] for prev/next poem, { / } for browsing history back/forward.
Metadata links: In the line under the poem title, the place opens that place's profile page, the year opens the corpus timeline at its decade, and the collector's name opens everything that collector recorded.
Keyboard Shortcuts
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