Metrics in Practice

Mr Frog

doi:10.21435/SFLIT.12

Outline

Metrics in Practice

2021, In Versification: Metrics in Practice. Ed. Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi. Studia Fennica Litteraria 12. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Pp. 19–55.

https://doi.org/10.21435/SFLIT.12

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44 pages

Abstract

The Finnish Literature Society (SKS) was founded in 1831 and has, from the very beginning, engaged in publishing operations. It nowadays publishes literature in the fields of ethnology and folkloristics, linguistics, literary research and cultural history. The first volume of the Studia Fennica series appeared in 1933. Since 1992, the series has been divided into three thematic subseries: Ethnologica, Folkloristica and Linguistica. Two additional subseries were formed in 2002, Historica and Litteraria. The subseries Anthropologica was formed in 2007. In addition to its publishing activities, the Finnish Literature Society maintains research activities and infrastructures, an archive containing folklore and literary collections, a research library and promotes Finnish literature abroad.

Key takeaways
AI

Versification is a flexible concept influenced by both emic and etic perspectives on poetic forms.
The Finnish Literature Society has published various thematic subseries since its founding in 1831.
Understanding verse requires recognizing its relationship with language, performance, and cultural context.
Diverse forms of poetry emerge from historical and cultural interactions, reshaping genres over time.
Analysis of poetry benefits from examining both written texts and live performances to capture its dynamic nature.

and Jarkko Niemi Edited by Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio Versification describes the marriage of language and poetic form through which poetry is produced. Formal principles, such as metre, alliteration, rhyme, or parallelism, take precedence over syntax Versification and prosody, resulting in expressions becoming organised as verse rather than prose. The aesthetic appeal of poetry is often linked to the potential for this process to seem mysterious or almost magical, Versification not to mention the interplay of particular expressions with forms and expectations. The dynamics of versification thus draw a general Metrics in Practice interest for everyone, from enthusiasts of poetry or forms of verbal art to researchers of folklore, ethnomusicology, linguistics, literature, philology, and more. The authors of the works in the present volume explore versification from a variety of angles and in diverse cultural Edited by milieus. The focus is on metrics in practice, meaning that the authors Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio and Jarkko Niemi concentrate not so much on the analysis of the metrical systems per se as on the ways that metres are used and varied in performance by individual poets and in relationship to language. studia fennica 9789518584189 litteraria 12 isbn 978-951-858-418-9 82; 81; 86.01 www.finlit.fi/kirjat Studia Fennica studia fennica anthropologica ethnologica folkloristica historica linguistica litteraria Litteraria Studia Fennica Litteraria 12 The Finnish Literature Society (SKS) was founded in 1831 and has, from the very beginning, engaged in publishing operations. It nowadays publishes literature in the fields of ethnology and folkloristics, linguistics, literary research and cultural history. The first volume of the Studia Fennica series appeared in 1933. Since 1992, the series has been divided into three thematic subseries: Ethnologica, Folkloristica and Linguistica. Two additional subseries were formed in 2002, Historica and Litteraria. The subseries Anthropologica was formed in 2007. In addition to its publishing activities, the Finnish Literature Society maintains research activities and infrastructures, an archive containing folklore and literary collections, a research library and promotes Finnish literature abroad. Studia Fennica Editorial Board Editors-in-chief Timo Kallinen, Professor, University of Eastern Finland, Finland Katriina Siivonen, Adjunct Professor, University of Turku, Finland Karina Lukin, Title of Docent, University of Helsinki, Finland Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Title of Docent, Tampere University, Finland Laura Visapää, Title of Docent, University of Helsinki, Finland Viola Parente-Čapková, Title of Docent, University of Turku, Finland Deputy editors-in-chief Kenneth Sillander, Title of Docent, University of Helsinki, Finland Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Jyväskylä, Finland Anne Heimo, Professor, University of Turku, Finland Heini Hakosalo, Professor, University of Oulu, Finland Salla Kurhila, Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland Saija Isomaa, Title of Docent, University of Tampere, Finland Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen, Secretary General, Dr. Phil., Finnish Literature Society, Finland Kirsi Keravuori, Publishing Director, Finnish Literature Society, Finland Maija Yli-Kätkä, Secretary of the Board, Finnish Literature Society, Finland oa.finlit.fi Editorial Office SKS P.O. Box 259 FI-00171 Helsinki Versification Metrics in Practice Edited by Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio and Jarkko Niemi Finnish Literature Society • SKS • Helsinki • 2021 studia fennica litteraria 12 The publication has undergone a peer review. © 2021 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio, Jarkko Niemi, and SKS License CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International, unless otherwise specified. Cover Design: Timo Numminen EPUB: Tero Salmén ISBN 978-951-858-418-9 (Print) ISBN 978-951-858-419-6 (EPUB) ISBN 978-951-858-420-2 (PDF) ISSN 0085-6835 (Studia Fennica. Print) ISSN 2669-9605 (Studia Fennica. Online) ISSN 1458-5278 (Studia Fennica Litteraria. Print) ISSN 2669-9540 (Studia Fennica Litteraria. Online) DOI https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. To view a copy of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ A free open access version of the book is available at https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 or by scanning this QR code with your mobile device. BoD – Books on Demand, Norderstedt, Germany 2021 Table of Contents Preface 7 Hans Nollet Helsinki sive in Tartarum descendens sive Katabasis: ad urbis nomen lusus 8 Helsinki or Sinking down into Hell or Katabasis: Pun on the Name of the Town 9 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio, and Jarkko Niemi Introduction 10 I. An Overview Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio, and Jarkko Niemi Metrics in Practice 19 II. From Metre to Performance Kati Kallio Performance, Music, and Metre in Kalevala-Metric Oral Poetry 59 Jarkko Niemi Styles of Northern Uralic Sung Meters in Comparison 79 Nicolas Royer-Artuso Towards a Generative Model of Ottoman Aruz to Usul Textsetting 111 Jacqueline Pattison Ekgren and Joe Siri Ekgren “Not Singing, Not Saying” Performance Flexibility of Norwegian Stev and Re-Performance of Accentual Poetry, such as Old English and Old Norse Poetry 126 Sergei B. Klimenko, Maria V. Stanyukovich, and Galina B. Sychenko Poetic Language and Music of the hudhud ni nosi, a Yattuka Funeral Chant, the Philippines 149 5 III. Poets and Metres over Time Erika Laamanen “Do Not Think Whether This Is Poetry or Prose” Metre and Poetics in the Works of Lauri Viita 173 Hans Nollet A Case Study Dactylic Hexameter in Justus Lipsius’s Poetry 187 Hanna Karhu Many Ways to Use and Play with Rhymes The Poet Otto Manninen and the Rhymes in Finnish Rhymed Couplets 200 IV. Language and Poetic Form Janika Oras and Mari Sarv Metrics of Runosongs of the Border Area Quantity and Broken Lines in Seto Songs 217 Yelena Sesselja Helgadóttir Migration of Poetic Formulae Icelandic Post-Medieval þulur 233 Frog Metrical Entanglement The Interface of Language and Metre 249 List of Contributors 294 Abstract 297 Index of Persons 298 Index of Languages 300 Index of Poetic Terms 301 Index of Places 303 General Index 304 6 Frog https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5967-6281 Satu Grünthal https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6962-7782 Kati Kallio https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3673-1409 Jarkko Niemi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4868-2632 Metrics in Practice M etrics is often discussed in terms of abstract templates or other systems that act as frameworks in which words, sounds and sometimes semantics are arranged. Such abstractions can seem to reduce the art of composition, the aesthetics of its products or the social dynamics of a traditional practice to the simple mechanics of a child’s toy, in which square blocks should be put into square holes, round blocks into round holes, and so on. This reduction occurs through the tendency to break down poetry into constituents of words or language and abstract metrics. Poetic form becomes a primary “thing” with different-shaped slots into which linguistic blocks are fitted secondarily, in what can appear as an almost automated model. Distinguishing and abstracting poetic form are extremely important for understanding poetry yet make it easy to lose sight of the fact that poetic form cannot exist without instantiation through language. At the other end of the spectrum, the building blocks of language come to the fore with a focus on poetic products, and every word easily becomes read for its meaningfulness; aesthetics and intentionality fill the field of vision, and metre becomes incidental. Navigating between these two poles of research can be as challenging as sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. However, it becomes possible when the focus shifts to the union of abstract models of form and poetic products in the process of versification. This shift rapidly expands the field of vision from language and form to voice, music, movement, meaning- making, social contexts and so forth – that is, to a full spectrum of media and contextual factors as poetics and poetry are resituated from “things” to “practice.” The present chapter draws together some of the many threads that run through this book to outline and briefly discuss several complementary aspects of oral and literary versification. It begins, however, with the most basic question of how versification is distinguished and conceived. Attention then turns to the diversity of forms which verse takes at the levels of structure and text. This naturally leads to the question of the types of sources from which versification can be explored and how different types of sources are 19 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi able to tell us different things about the phenomenon. As a thing made of language, it is necessary to consider how verse and different types of verse engage with language and may shape it or may lead certain types of language to become emblematic of a type of verse. However, language only becomes verse in relation to articulation, which brings the discussion to performance or other representation. The roles of music and meanings are then brought forward before turning to people who use and manipulate verse – individual poets engaging with social traditions. Following this arc of topics provides an overview in relation to which the other chapters of this volume can be considered studies of particular cases and aspects of versification. What is Versification? The key question of what precisely “versification” is tends to be taken for granted. The intuitive answer seems straightforward: Versification is the process of versifying – composing in verses or expressing things in verse. Such an answer would not be incorrect, but it leads into the more fundamental question of what makes something “verse.” Distinguishing verse is crucial for determining whether someone’s composition or expression is “versifying” as opposed to something else. The thorny issue of the definition can be approached from one of two primary perspectives: the emic view, that is, how people in a particular society categorise their own language use; and the etic view, that is, how outsiders, such as researchers, distinguish such categories. Emic approaches define verse (if only implicitly) as a socially perceivable quality of text. In other words, people recognise certain uses of language rather than others as verse, and what they recognise as verse is connected with social conventions of categorising and talking about different types of language use (see also, e.g., Agha 2007; Gal & Irvine 2019). This does not mean that the categories are uniform in a language, culture, society or even in a broad community any more than what is or is not “music,” which might vary across a generational gap. The approach outlined here also does not exclude the possibility of ambiguous cases or disagreements within groups. Emic approaches often run counter to the tendency to abstract poetic forms and how they “work” as strict ideal systems. Instead, emic approaches attend to variation as symptomatic of the potential for flexibility that may also have functions or meanings in performance (Foley 2002: 33; see also Kallio, this volume). Emic terms are often brought into focus for discussing categories as they are used and perceived, from words for metres and melodies (Royer-Artuso, this volume) to vernacular uses of concepts such as “word,” which may refer to a whole formulaic expression (Foley 1996: 14–17). The same is true of vernacular descriptions and metaphors of producing poetry (Tarkka 2013; Ekgren & Ekgren, this volume), as well as descriptions that may distinguish categories, not strictly by structural or linguistic features of poetic form, but by the manner of performance (Stepanova E. 2015: 268; Stepanova & Frog 2019: 99–101). Notably, however, emic approaches tend to focus on particular forms of poetry. This is less surprising in light of observations such as that most speakers of Modern English do not include song lyrics in 20 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice the category of “poetry” – they are just “lyrics.” Most cultures lack a simple and equivalently broad concept of versification as used in scholarship. Emic approaches tend to have the greatest utility when addressing particular forms and uses of verse in a culture, language or small group, and such studies tend not to be concerned with versification generally but with versification in a particular form of verbal art. Etic approaches can be constructed according to a researcher’s needs. Nigel Fabb (2015) has proposed a universal definition for distinguishing poetry from prose according to the dominant principles of organising discourse when producing texts. In this approach, prose is understood as “text made of language that is divided into sections on the basis of syntactic or prosodic structure” (2015: 10). Poetry is distinguished by dividing a text into sections on the basis of principles or factors that are given precedence over syntactic or prosodic structure (Fabb 2015: 9). For example, poetic principles such as metre, parallelism or sound patterning like alliteration and rhyme are commonly in focus as organizing text into units – i.e., forming verses. Poetic features may be present in particular passages of other types of discourse as well, but the dominance of linguistic principles of syntax and prosody in organizing it into units determines its classification as prose (see further Fabb 2015). The etic approach circumvents questions of how local people classify types of text and does not require social contexts: a text may be uniquely organised on poetic principles without anyone in the respective society acknowledging it as a poem, yet it may still be considered poetry by the researcher. Whereas poetic principles can also be used to analyse smaller units of text, such as formulaic expressions (Frog, this volume), poetry is distinguished where an entire text is organised poetically, even if the particular poetic principles may vary through the text (Yelena Sesselja Helgadóttir, this volume). A focus on poetic principles such as metre and rhyme is, however, text- centred, with a linguistic emphasis. On the one hand, articulation into units in a written medium may be accomplished primarily through arrangement on a page or a screen. Thus, visual line breaks may be the primary principle for organising units into verses rather than a pattern in sound, such as rhyme, or a pattern in sense, such as parallelism. On the other hand, a broader range of features in performance can also be considered, such as melody or a systematic rhythm that organises utterance into units as verse no less than line breaks on a page. Both of these types of cases advance towards a parting of ways between poetry and versification, when versification is understood in the sense of formulating something in verse. Modern literary poetry also often challenges the distinction between poetry and prose, with whole genres that may be considered poetry without being organised in verses. For example, visual poetry is based on the appearance of text and its arrangement as fundamental to approaching its rhythm and meaning without necessarily forming verse units, while the prose poem is normally conceived of as lacking a verse structure. Conversely, the alphabet set to music in a children’s song arranges it in verses, but most people would not say that this makes the alphabet a poem. Defining poetry according to how it is organised at the level of language excludes prose poetry and visual poetry, 21 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi while the children’s song of the alphabet in English could be considered a poem because the verse units are organised based on rhyme (gee, pee, vee, zee). From the point of view of popular modern usage, this seems counter- intuitive because calling something “poetry” involves an aesthetic assessment or at least has aesthetic implications. From this perspective, to say that Jorge Luis Borges’ “Ragnarök” is not a poem is to devalue it, while it sounds like nonsense to claim that the alphabet is a poem because it can be sung. In research, however, an etic definition becomes a research tool that – ideally, at least – provides objective criteria for analysis and a single frame of reference that can be used across languages and cultures. However we choose to define poetry, versification can be approached according to the hierarchy of organising principles applied in arranging language into units. Such an approach also allows it to be distinguished from the discourse that ethnopoetic research has revealed to be similarly structured, such as some oral narrative traditions (Hymes 1977), but for which syntax and prosody remain primary principles of organisation. This etic type of approach operates at an abstract level, and the researcher can calibrate its scope, for example, to consider only linguistic texts, or extend it to include visual, melodic or other rhythmic structures. For some research, it might be useful to calibrate the definition to include forms of discourse that are analysable as verses through an ethnopoetic approach, even where other poetic principles are absent. Most important for an etic definition is utility, so it may be useful in some research to narrow the criteria to be specific to, for instance, verbal art in a particular language. Rather than one being “right” and the other being “wrong,” emic and etic approaches are simply useful for different things. They bring the phenomenon of versification into focus from different perspectives, but these differences also have an impact on the definition of “versification.” Versification is a phenomenon in the world, but the term and the concept are not fixed and universally prescribed. Instead, versification may be defined and adapted in different ways, which makes it a potentially flexible research tool. A Diversity of Forms Verbal art takes an apparently infinite variety of forms. This is often viewed through the lens of formal structuring principles, whether at the level of lines, larger stretches of text like couplets or stanzas, or principles applied systematically to organize a whole poem, such as a sonnet. Researchers often bring into focus particular formal features and classify them according to broad analytical categories, such as syllabic versus accentual verse, and the categories are used as tools both to analyse what is observed in a corpus and to understand variation (e.g., Oras & Sarv, this volume). Within a culture, categories are often more fluid or at least less systematic. They may only bring into focus a particular feature or a small group of them as emblematic (cf. Agha 2007: ch. 3), or the distinctions may be quite sophisticated but based on a broad number of criteria that advance well beyond the domain of metrics into features of style and rhetoric (e.g., 22 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice Snorri Sturluson 1999). The categorisations of verse form connect or even converge with text-type categories of poetic products, commonly called poetic genres. All forms of oral and literary poetry become produced and interpreted in relation to ideas about genres. According to a structuralist- typological approach, genre types are distinguishable in potentially complex systems. Extremely broad categories or supergenres, such as narrative or lyric poetry, include hierarchies of subcategories, like epic, ballad, narrative lament and so forth – and there may be a whole typology within the epic genre, another within the ballad genre, and so on. Alongside hierarchies, there may be “families” of closely related genres, while the reality of genres is complicated by hybrids and the manipulation of their accompanying forms and expectations. (Bhatia 2004; Mäntynen & Shore 2014; Frog et al. 2016.) In oral traditions, the relationship of poetic form to a type of poetry may take different forms. For example, the Finno-Karelian short-epic is composed in the common Finnic tetrameter, a poetic form that was used across a remarkably wide range of genres, from proverbs and riddles to lyric poetry and a number of varieties of narrative poetry (Kallio et al. 2017). In Viking and medieval Scandinavia, this range of genres was covered by a set of historically related metres. In the latter poetic ecology, different types of poetry were not necessarily distinguished by metre per se but by particular constellations of metre, stylistic features and language varieties, and the Scandinavian short-epic form could combine multiple metres in a single poem (Clunies Ross 2005). Russian bylinas have a comparable short-epic form with a quite flexible metre that emerged in conjunction with musical accompaniment, a poetic form in which all bylinas were composed but not used with other forms of poetry, making it emblematic of the epic tradition (Vesterholt 1973). The emergent interaction between language and music can be especially salient in improvised poetry that is organised on principles other than periodic metre, allowing dynamic flexibility in the duration of each utterance, as in North Finnic laments (see Niemi 2002; Stepanova E. 2015; Silvonen 2022). Conversely, the metre organising language may remain consistent, while the verses in performance may be restructured as subordinate to melody and performance rhythms, whether at the level of syllables (Niemi, this volume) or whole verses and parts of verses (Kallio, this volume). Moving out of a purely oral tradition, these systems of relations can open to myriads of combinations (Royer-Artuso, this volume). The relations among the verse form, its manifestations in practice and the types of text produced can be amazingly complex. The fields of both oral and written traditions have never been stable, and, in some environments, the interaction between orality and literacy can be remarkably fluid (Finnegan 1977; O’Keeffe 1990; Amodio 2004; Ready 2019). Discussions on genre have a history going back more than two millennia, the vast majority of which was characterised by viewing genres as ideal “things” to which text should correspond and that define the texts identified with them. This view of genres changed radically across the second half of the twentieth century (e.g., Tynjanow 1982; Frog et al. 2016). Poetic forms have always been in ongoing interaction with one another and with other cultural forms, and they have been affected by linguistic, social, historical 23 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi and personal features that are contemporary to the performer or the poet. Today, genres tend to be conceived of in terms of prototype categories or core types of generic forms, which are represented by their various and diverse realisations in oral and written reality. The prototype categories offer recognisable frames of reference that people may deviate from, for instance, in order to create meanings. It must be remembered that although genres are constantly in the process of change, this process is not one of degeneration. Scholarship especially on oral traditions was dominated by a discourse of devolution, viewing change in terms of “deterioration” and “corruption” (Dundes 1969). Although genres may equally atrophy or drop out of use entirely, their continuation is best seen in terms of maintenance and renewal, as can be illustrated through a brief look at the history of the ballad. Historically, ballads emerged as a poetic narrative form that spread rapidly through medieval Europe (Vargyas 1983; Colbert 1989). The poetic form is generally characterised by an end-rhymed stanzaic structure. Oral folk ballads have customarily been songs of love and death, intertwined with supernatural events. Old folk ballads are often characterised by elliptic narration that leaves aside descriptions of feelings and minor events. Listeners and performers of ballads could recognise the strong emotions the songs engage even without explicit elaboration. Typically, love presented in ballads has been disparaged and doomed to fail by the surrounding society. In the end, true lovers have been united in death, which might be symbolised, for example, by two rose bushes that grow on one of the lovers’ graves. As the genre became established, individual ballads could move between languages, being translated from one language to another within a shared genre framework (see also Vargyas 1983: 137). Although the common historical roots of Europe’s ballad traditions can be brought into focus, the poetic form evolved in different directions in the poetic ecology of each language and potentially in each local tradition. In Finland, however, the predominance of alliteration in the poetic ecology seems to have made it difficult for rhymed forms to gain a foothold. The earliest ballads are considered to have been assimilated as stories told in verse, translated completely into the Finnic tetrameter with its alliterative, stichic lines, and the rhymed stanzaic form was only adapted later (Kuusi et al. 1977: 56–57). In most of Scandinavia, the ballad form seems to have been assimilated and superseded other forms of narrative poetry, producing a prominent tradition of heroic ballads with continuity of names and narratives from the Old Germanic epic tradition, as well as producing new narratives of the same epic ballad type (Jonsson et al. 1978; Colbert 1989). In Iceland, the narrative non-rhymed genre called sagnakvæði, rooted in the common Germanic alliterative metre, persisted for many centuries (Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir 2014), and the trochaic, alliterative end- rhymed poetry called rímur, independent of the ballad form, has continued alongside it until the present day (Vésteinn Ólason 1982). The international genre of the ballad, which began orally, soon moved into a fluid relation with written culture as oral singing practices were augmented by the circulation of printed texts (see also Harris 1991). The lively activity of ballads in society led it to take a number of different local and language-specific forms. 24 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice During the era of Romanticism, the ballad’s evolution was augmented by a revival when the genre was found well-suited to aesthetic and political endeavours of the times. The awakening national movements in many European countries called for a nation’s heroic past and the “true voice” of its ancestral generations. Poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller admired folk ballads and re-invented them as a poetic literary genre suited to the needs of their contemporary societies. In the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, ballads have continued their life both as a popular song genre and as a literary poetic genre. Contemporary literary ballads are often capricious. As pointed out by Russian formalists, the more sharply a literary work deviates from a literary system, the stronger the position of, and the emphasis on, the same system in that work’s literary context. In this way, every system by nature includes the possibility of deviation and denial of itself. A poem written in free verse enhances its opposite, the rhythmic element, with its free, non-metrical elements. (Tynjanow 1982.) Continuous discourse on and modification of a genre’s history have been called repetition with a difference (Hutcheon 1991) – repetition being a medium through which a poem imitates, modifies, parodies or denies its genre. The category of ballad has varied according to the area and poetic tradition in question, sometimes encompassing a large scale of different narrative songs. Just as the genre has developed over time to encompass an increasing number of varieties of verbal art, so too has the conception of the category “ballad.” The borders between ballads, epics and lyric-epics have shifted according to scholarly and local needs. “Ballad” has sometimes been specific to varieties of historically related songs and those similar enough to them to obviate any clear distinction. The term has also been elevated to an abstraction that, with globalisation, entered into dialogue with the multitudes of poetic forms found in cultures elsewhere that have been seen as comparable in some respect to the European form. As a consequence, “ballad” has been used to describe historically unrelated traditions of narrative song that are stylistically similar to the prototypical European genre. This pattern of usage has stretched even to include poetry that generally follows the semantic patterns of Western ballads but lacks its formal features, such as stanzaic structure or end-rhyme. In some areas, “ballad” has simply become a practical term complementary to “epic,” principally based on the length of narrative poems, that is, viewing “ballads” as narrative poetry that is not of “epic” length. Consequently, outsiders view poems that may handle vernacular mythology or have ritual uses or other religious connotations through the lens of a Western genre of secular poetry (Atrey 2016: 360 n.1). In literary poetry, the term is found in titles of a number of poems, although their connections with the genre may not be evident at first sight. The terms used to distinguish categories of verbal art can influence thinking and interpretation (e.g., Leslie-Jacobsen 2017), making it important to carefully consider the effects of projecting abstract types onto traditions of different languages and cultures. However, the same impacts underlie literary authors’ identification of a work with a genre through its title, which is never without motivation; be it descriptive or ironic, the title evokes the reader’s awareness 25 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi of that genre as a frame of reference for receiving the poem (Grünthal 1997: 203–222). The ballad is still alive as both a popular song genre and as a contemporary poetic form, with various styles of versification. It functions as an example of generic development, change, variation and sustainability that is illustrative of the centuries-long tradition of one genre both as an oral and as a written poetic form in many national literatures (e.g., Grünthal 1997). This example highlights issues of terminology and its categorisation as a type of poetry that has been commonly used as a lens for approaching forms of verbal art around the world. Amid the multitude of forms of poetry worldwide, it is always necessary to consider the best way to negotiate between emic and etic categories. Emic categories may enable quite nuanced perspectives on local varieties of versification, whereas etic categories offer frames of reference, not only for comparison in research, but also for discussions about emic categories in a way that outsiders can understand (on this controversy, see, e.g., Ben-Amos 1992; Honko 1998: 24–29). When considering these issues, it is equally important to remember the potential associations and implications of the labels used and the potential of those labels to be manipulated for strategic effects. Diversity of Source Materials Questions about versification in any tradition are affected by the available source materials. The metrical traditions and cognitive processes may look rather different, depending on the oral, literary, improvised, repetitive and creative emphases, styles or backgrounds of particular poems. Certain questions can be answered where poetry is a living practice that might be limited to speculation where poetry is only preserved in archives, published works and ancient texts (e.g., Honko 1998; Sykäri 2011). Some corpora may offer “big data” from a particular period that can be analysed in other ways, especially where these have been digitised (Harvilahti 2013; Kallio et al. 2020). Nonetheless, other corpora may not be rich enough for similar synchronic analyses but may offer diachronic perspectives on the evolution of a poetic form in relation to, for example, historical language change (Russom 2017). In the present book, the range of source materials flows from historical texts to fieldwork and archival collections and on to contemporary literary poetry, although historical traditions hold a predominant position. The beginning of all poetry ultimately lies in the oral past, and the vast majority of its history remains out of reach. The oldest known poems are preserved in forms of writing, and it is impossible to unravel with certainty the relation between orality and literacy in such sources. Evidence from Ancient Greece is particularly interesting because of the rich variety of evidence, including references to what happened in the background of such texts. For example, the earliest Greek philosophers formulated their works in verse, perhaps as a memory technology, while the Homeric epics that have come down to us appear to have been filtered through standardisation projects that ultimately gave rise to authoritative written texts (Herren 2017: ch. 2; Ready 26 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice 2019). Old English alliterative poetry emerges from a vibrant environment of interaction between the inherited form of Germanic alliterative verse and scribal culture, which could also vary poems in a manuscript transmission through so-called scribal performance (Doane 1994; Amodio 2004). A text such as that of Beowulf appears to be a product of precisely this multimodal discourse, manifesting a long epic as a continuous and coherent text without evidence of the interruptions inevitable for an oral performance, which would not only require periodic breaks but even span across days. John Miles Foley (1990) addresses these not as oral but as oral-derived texts, from which we can infer that an oral tradition has provided the resources behind them, but the texts almost certainly do not represent oral performance in the manner of an ethnographic field recording. Sometimes, early texts themselves can offer glimpses of the ideology of the text in the background. Old English poetry was written and texts were copied in the same environments as those of Latin poetry, yet Latin poetry was laid out on a page in verses, whereas Old English verse was written continuously in the manner of Latin prose (O’Keeffe 1990: ch. 2). The alternative ways of writing texts reflect differences in the categories of language with which Latin and vernacular verse were identified, and “verses” as units of utterance were not conceived of as the same for both. In Old Norse (i.e., from which Scandinavian languages derive), vernacular poetry was similarly written as prose, yet it is clear that the verses were written with the aim of preserving their orally delivered metrical rhythm. Historical changes in language had caused the loss of prefixes to certain verb forms, which was accommodated in the metre by filling these positions with a meaningless syllable. These metrical fillers were also transcribed rather than reducing verses to meaning- bearing words, indicating a closer connection with oral delivery than might be expected for written text. (Frog 2022.) Whereas the prominence of literacy in most cultures today naturalises us to writing words according to conventional semantic units, an early Old High German text known as the Second Merseberg Charm reveals a form of metrical transcription, with breaks based on metrical rather than lexical units, although also breaking these units as needed at the edge of the manuscript page (Frog forthcoming). It is possible to gain insights into the ways that people understood verse in some of these early texts, but the indications are often subtle and require excavation. Patterns across cultures become visible through a broad comparative analysis, such as the spread of rhyme through European poetics (Gasparov 1996). The process is challenging to explain in detail, but it seems to arise from poetries becoming known by speakers across different languages, which is also implicit in the spread of whole genres, such as the medieval ballad (Vargyas 1983). When a phenomenon, such as rhyme, appears in literary sources, it may already have been an established category in some oral genre(s) that were not written down. Literate poets may be using features that they know from oral culture, and oral and literary culture may thrive side by side in a relation of mutual exchange. Some features of literary poetry may equally be similar to oral poetry, and sometimes the difference between oral and literary traditions blurs. Broadside ballads were printed on leaflets 27 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi and performed to certain melodies, and sometimes their authors were known by name; at the same time, variations of popular broadside ballads spread orally and became considered folksongs (Asplund 1994; Grünthal 1997). Depending on the culture, poets rely more or less on already existing models, schemes, formulae, verse forms and genres, from which they draw as malleable resources that might be used in conventional or innovative ways (see also Karhu, this volume). More recently recorded traditions may also only be accessible through archival materials, but some of these were documented with great enthusiasm and detail in the wake of Romanticism, when traditional poetry could serve in the construction of national and ethnic identities. This was the case with kalevalaic poetry in Finland, generating a corpus of around 150,000 texts, of which more than 87,000 are now in a searchable database (Wilson 1976; Anttonen 2005; Tarkka et al. 2018; SKVR). Especially when this sort of corpus can be situated in relation to metadiscourse on performance and ethnographic data, it offers a valuable laboratory for testing diverse hypotheses linked to the evolution and variation of versification, as well as theories about how language works across poetries in traditions of this type (e.g., Timonen 2000; Tarkka 2013; see also Kallio 2015; Frog 2016b). Every corpus of archival materials has its own historical background, which has defined what it does or does not contain. It may also be possible to construct specific corpora, for example, of large samples of poetry from different periods, in order to analyse patterns in diachronic change (Bybee & Torres Cacoullos 2009). The content of the corpus determines the sort of questions with which it can be interrogated. Where a form of poetry is found in living practice, it can be investigated with specific aims, asking questions directly of performers and testing them with specific challenges to produce distinct empirical data. The potential of what can be done with such data is tremendous, but it brings different things into focus, while often being much more restricted in quantity. This data also tends to be far more limited in social or geographical scope than the large- scale collection campaigns that developed large corpora. Perspectives from different types of data are often complementary and can produce valuable insights through analogical comparison. For example, Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord did research with South Slavic epic singers in order to better understand Homeric epic through analogical comparison in what became the foundation of Oral-Formulaic Theory (OFT) (esp. Lord 1960). Their work has provided a fundamental framework for examining the dynamics of how oral traditions of verbal art “work” and vary in practice, although that framework and associated approaches have also developed considerably over time (Frog & Lamb 2022). By bringing together the knowledge gained from a variety of traditions, approached through different types of materials, our understanding of versification as a phenomenon in society can be significantly deepened. An important observation to be made about the variety of corpora is how sources change in relation to technologies for documenting poetry, as well as how changes in technologies reciprocally affect ways of thinking about corpora and the questions that can be asked of them. Technologies are 28 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice what enabled the documentation and preservation of ancient and medieval written texts, technologies not just for writing but also for producing practical and enduring mobile documents of considerable length. For instance, the earliest examples of Germanic verse are in runic inscriptions, which are often so short that it is not clear whether alliteration is merely a stylistic feature or an indicator of metre (e.g., Schulte 2007). Only with technologies of vellum manuscript production does Old Germanic poetry of any length begin to be written. These technologies were carried with the infrastructures of the Church during the spread of Christianity, a process of spread that impacted on what was written down and preserved, for example, in the lively interaction between oral and written culture that produced corpora of Old English poetry (Amodio 2004). Paper production made movable texts more economical and lighter, which not only facilitated manuscript copying but was also a precondition for, among many other things, the wide-ranging collection of oral poetry in the nineteenth century (Timonen 2000). Printing had a transformative impact on text reproduction, which had formerly been done by hand, giving rise to the sort of rich interaction between oral and written culture found in connection with ballads (Harris 1991; Ramsten et al. 2015). These technologies were combined with mobility and globalisation as preconditions for the rich research and documentation of poetries that were carried out by Romanticism. Technologies are sometimes given credit as significant for the breakthrough of the Lutheran Reformation, enabling the quick spread and popularity of Lutheran hymns (Brown 2005). At the same time, these technologies supported an ideology of poetry as verbal “text,” and the corpora produced were made of such “texts” (Foley 2000; Tarkka et al. 2018). There was an awareness of other aspects of performance, and melodies were documented during the nineteenth century, even by collectors for whom they were not necessarily of primary interest (Fig. 1; Kallio 2013: 52–54). Nevertheless, the cultural documentation at that time was strongly text-oriented, not only owing to the practicalities of documentation, but also because language was at the centre of heritage- construction projects. In addition, the circulation of both oral-derived and literary verse in print culture was organised for private consumption, mainly through silent reading, leaving how it should sound to the reader’s imagination. The possibility of making audio recordings with a phonograph changed not only practical but also theoretical views. The first important audio recorder of Finnic oral poetry, Armas Launis, explained that the purpose of the recordings was to document and preserve performance practices for posterity, as well as to increase the scientific precision of transcriptions. The records of the philological committee of the Finnish Literature Society add, probably following Launis, that the recordings would also enable “a fully reliable view on the ways that words and melody are related, which may also bear some philological significance” (Suomi 1906: 19; Kallio 2013: 69–70). Collectors’ and researchers’ ideology nevertheless remained inclined to reduce versification to verbal “text,” partly because that was what predominant documentation technologies did to it. During the second half of the twentieth century, technologies for audio recording became increasingly 29 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi Figure 1. I. K. Inha’s musical notation of the melody used by “Vasselei” in the perfor- mance of a kalevalaic epic recorded in 1895 in Alajärvi, Uhtua, Viena Karelia (i.e., the northern region of Russian Karelia, across the border from Finland). (SKS KRA, Inha 16–17.) portable, affordable and available, soon followed by video. These changes in technologies transformed the corpora that were created in documentation, and they were fundamental in reconceptualising traditions of versification through embodied performance (Katajamäki & Lukin 2013: 10). Literary poetry followed a corresponding trajectory of evolution but is so deeply rooted in conceptions of poetry as text rather than, for example, song, that its evolution in relation to changing media, such as so-called cinépoetry or video poetry of art installations and on YouTube, has gained comparatively little attention. Forms of art, such as rap, that combine oral and literary traditions are popular today and warrant more theoretical interest than they have generally received (see, e.g., Sykäri 2019). The sorts of materials that are brought into focus relate to the technologies that record and mediate versification, as well as reciprocally structure the thinking of researchers and of people in society about what versification is and what to focus on in its study. 30 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice Versification and Language Poetry today is widely viewed as usage of language that somehow transcends ordinary speech, moving beyond commonplace combinatory constructions of lexicon and grammar to create something aesthetic and distinct (see, e.g., Perloff & Dworkin 2009). Such ideas are especially connected with modern literary poetry, whereas oral traditions of verbal art can operate quite differently. The literary poetry of Western cultures today basically allows poets to draw on a full spectrum of language repertoires and combine these with any poetic forms and devices available, with potentially quite sophisticated inner structuring of the individual poem (e.g., Hasan 1989). Of course, oral poetry may also draw on different language repertoires and exhibit sophisticated inner structuring, but there are also significant differences. First, oral “poetry” is not a single broad category; instead, many poetic systems are often linked to different genres and practices, and the categories are much more specific. Second, the genres and the practices circulate socially as part of oral culture, often without the support of, or with minimal support of, writing. There may be a dynamic interaction between orality and literacy, but the crucial aspect is that the process of circulation depends on people reproducing “the same” poetry. This occurs by type as in the case of lyrics or laments, may be conceived of as reproducing the same information or telling the same story as in long epics, or may more regularly reproduce the same “texts,” however conceived, as in some shorter narrative poetries, verbal charms, ritual dialogues, and so forth (Frog 2019b). Rather than generating poetry through a more or less free selection of language and forms, oral poetry is transmitted and internalised as language practice or behaviour and as comprising language varieties, now commonly called registers (Halliday 1978; Foley 1995; Agha 2001, 2007). These registers are as natural for the particular type of situation or communication as conversational language would be for others (Foley 1996). Such verbal art is often analysed by isolating text from situations or performance and then separating language from poetic structuring features, such as metre. However, these are all unified in social transmission, where poetic form is mediated through instantiations in language in a way that is comparable to how people learn grammar (Frog 2015). As a consequence, a distinctive register of language normally evolves for a tradition of verbal art in relation to conventions of a poetic form and its patterns of use. From a historical perspective, the register or idiom of language can be considered to develop in a symbiotic relationship with the poetic form, on one hand (Foley 1996), and in relation to the expressive needs for how it is conventionally used, on the other (Parry 1928). OFT was founded on the idea that traditions of metred oral poetry developed formulaic phraseology that was pre-fitted to the metre as a prerequisite for composing verses at the rate of performance (Lord 1960). The recurrent structure formed regular metrical capsules into which expressions should fit (Foley 1996: 14–19), limiting the potential for variation and, instead, shaping phraseology into predictable structures. This situation creates a sort of feedback loop, both inclining phrases to take particular forms rather than others and inclining performers 31 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi to reuse and internalise predictable phraseology as a practical resource in performance. Similar metrical capsules can be found in traditional literary poetic forms, such as sonnets. Ultimately, they can lead to monotonous and anticipated expression (Lotman R. 2019a). The metres in OFT’s focus counted syllables and their quantities, and the identified formulae were phrases that had evolved to fit slots in a verse with a particular syllabic or moraic structure (see also Foley 1990: ch. 3–5). In poetries organised on different metrical principles, formulae also evolve differently, alongside syntax. For example, Old English alliterative verse has an accentual metre, which allows variation in the number of syllables, with the requirement of alliteration. The metrical capsules of this poetry were defined differently (Foley 1990: ch. 6), and the requirement of alliteration led the register to develop sets of equivalence vocabulary for the main things that poets talked about, so that poets could “say the same thing” with words that met different patterns of alliteration (Roper 2012). The requirement of alliteration that linked metrical capsules also led paired words and more complex systems of vocabulary to form that could fill this requirement of the metre even when alliterating words belonged to separate clauses. These pairs and systems could be used purely to fill formal needs rather than to express a particular unit of meaning as a formula. (See Frog, this volume.) Such variation in formulaic language was very different from that in the syllabically organised metres on which OFT was founded, although it was still shaped by metrical capsules. In contrast, Karelian lament is organised by alliteration without a periodic metre; thus, the alliterative equivalence vocabulary is not constrained to metrical units. Instead, formulae in this poetry are built from alliterating vocabulary and could expand and contract according to the needs of the performer (Stepanova E. 2015). Rather than patterns of sounds or syllables, some poetry is organised through patterning of words and meanings through parallelism. Verse parallelism can itself be viewed as a phenomenon of syntax that links units of language across phrases (Du Bois 2014). Verbal art organised by parallelism develops special types of formulaic language, such as word pairs that together “say the same thing” when distributed across parallel verses (see further Fox 2016). The types of formal conventions on which a form of poetry is built condition the evolution of the register. An oral-poetic register may develop and maintain a variety of resources for meeting constraints and conventions of form. Quite basic features are uses of syncope and apocope, contracting words to meet syllabic rhythms (Foley 1996: 30–33). Vocabulary that has dropped out of other forms of speech is also commonly maintained as a resource in a poetic register. Such vocabulary is often described in terms of “archaisms” but it may be considered “normal” from the perspective of the particular register (Foley 1996: 33–37). Alternative inflectional forms may be similarly maintained from different periods of language development (Coleman 1999: 37–38, 44), or the poetic register may even preserve inflections of words that have dropped out of other types of language use (Nikolaev 2011). Language change may also result in certain types of syllables being used in special ways, such as filling two positions rather than one where a word has historically become 32 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice shorter. However, current users will view such usage as practice, extending it by analogy to similarly structured words, irrespective of their etymology (Helgi Skúli Kjartansson 2009: 250–252; Sarv 2015: 10; Oras & Sarv, this volume). Parallel dialectal forms of words may also be found, and variations between parallel dialectal forms may equally generate similar word forms by analogy (Foley 1996: 27–30). Alternative words from different dialects and even different languages may become integrated as equivalence vocabulary (Frog with Tarkka 2017: 219). The semantics of words that are commonly used in other registers may be subordinated to poetic needs, “bending” or “flexing” their semantics (Roper 2012). New words may be generated in conventional ways to create alliteration or rhyme (Frog with Tarkka 2017: 219) or to produce equivalent terms for parallelism (Metcalf 1989: 40–44). New words may also be generated on an onomatopoetic basis (Tarkka 2013: 154–156; on similar strategies in literary poetry, see, e.g., Perloff N. 2009; Grünthal 2012). Developments at the level of the basic lexicon may extend into more complex systems for equivalence vocabulary, such as the Old Norse system for generating the circumlocutions called kennings (Meissner 1921; Clunies Ross et al. 2012) or those of Karelian laments (Stepanova A. 2012; see also Stepanova E. 2015). Whether only a few or many of these types of devices operate in a register, they may become distinctive of it as varying from types of language use in other contexts. OFT was initially developed with the idea that formulaic density could be a sort of litmus test for origins in orality of poems that have only been preserved as written text-transcripts, such as the Iliad and Odyssey (see further Foley 1988). However, formulaic language is not exclusive to oral poetry. Some types of poetry with a written tradition can be extremely formulaic as a function of the style that has evolved from oral-formulaic discourse (e.g., Blackburn 1988). Literary poetry traditions can also develop language that works in the same way, where the conventional phraseology is used in connection with the meanings that it can carry or even as a strategy to avoid unwitting metrical blunders (Hansson 2011; Nollet 2022). On the other hand, formulaic language may become bound up with the metre that is carried with it, both structuring the verses where it is used (Yelena Sesselja Helgadóttir, this volume) and constraining how phraseology varies in the lines (Frog, this volume). In any case, where a form of versification develops a distinct register shared by its users, the evolution of language and form becomes symbiotic, separable in analysis but unified in practice. From Language to Performance An interesting aspect of verse is that it is never simply “text.” The quality of verse resides in its articulation, which is perceivable, and perceivable as verse. Put simply, people articulate verse differently from other language use precisely so that it is perceived as “verse” or as a particular sort of verbal art. Its quality as verse may be marked in oral delivery; it may be linguistically encoded in written text, as when metre is recognised through the language rather than the layout, as with Old English verse in medieval 33 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi manuscripts; or it may be visually marked through its appearance on a page, from a commonplace editorial line-breaks to free-verse poems that have been characterised as objects of visual art (Steele 1990: 219). Of course, it is possible to articulate verse as natural speech, as actors in a Shakespearean play may do with his iambic pentameter. In such a case, the metre may operate as a mnemonic or as a subtle texture, but what is said does not come across saliently as verse. Oral poetry is by definition physically articulated in what Reuven Tsur (1992: ch. 2) describes as vocal performance, yet a poem’s verbal text may vary on each occasion. In contrast, literary poetry is customarily static as text, yet its articulations may vary considerably by reader or be inextricably bound with the visual representation on paper or on a screen. Examining literary poetry from a cognitive perspective, Tsur (1992: ch. 2) distinguishes vocal performance from mental performance as something that occurs in the mind of a reader of poetry. The key difference in mental performance is that it does not necessarily require resolving all possible alternatives, whereas the physicality of vocal performance reduces all possible alternatives to a single articulation. Literary poetry is widely conceived of as rooted in music and the musicality of language. For example, the modernist poet Amy Lowell (2004: 70) states that “[p]oetry is as much an art to be heard as is music, if we could only get people to understand the fact.” Poets sometimes refer to poetic elements such as rhythm, repetitive structures and sound elements (e.g., alliteration and rhyme) as “word music,” and they may allude to the musical dimensions of compositions by including words such as “song,” “ballad” or “lament” in the title (see, e.g., Steele 1990: 209–223; Perloff N. 2009). So-called sound poetry, born in the era of early twentieth-century modernism, can be regarded as carrying this emphasis to an extreme by building its meanings and aesthetics on imitating sounds, for instance, of a machine, or even advancing to detachment from all denotation (McCaffery 2009). The general discourse surrounding the musicality of poetry and poetry as an art of manipulating sound shapes modern readers’ thinking about poetry in a way that reflexively becomes an implicit guide for poems’ performance in reading, whether silently or aloud. Especially after the modernist movements, the visual representation of a poem has often been central in understanding the text (see, e.g., Lotman et al. 2008). The role of visual representation in interpretation is carried to an extreme in visual poetry, which can be defined as poetry that “presupposes a viewer as well as a reader” (Bohn 2001: 15) so that even mental performance cannot be divorced from the representation of the text as something that must be seen. Nonetheless, whether performance is mental, vocal or visual, verse is linked to articulation. As Karl Reichl (2012: 9) puts it, “[o]ral poetry is as a rule sung poetry,” although it may not always seem like “singing” to a Western ear. Researchers documenting forms of oral poetry have long observed and discussed differences between texts that were produced in a traditional mode of performance and their counterparts produced in dictation (for a survey, see Ready 2015). At the level of verse structure, this can have different effects. For example, it is common for what Foley (2000: 83) describes as “strictly performance-based features” to disappear. Foley (2000) looks at sounds 34 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice inserted between words where these begin and end with vowels, but it is also common for vocables and expletives to disappear in dictation (e.g., Klimenko 2022). Vocables are vocal sounds that participate in melody and rhythm or metre but are not perceived as words. Expletives are words or sometimes phrases that fill positions in rhythm or metre but do not carry any meaning in the context, instead filling functions related to metre or duration. Singers of kalevalaic epic did not normally use vocables, but they could drop the word on (“is”) into a verse to fill a position if needed, although they also frequently used it in the place of the vowel of the preceding word as a textural variation, that is, with apocope: košešša > Košešš’ on (“in a course of rapids (is)”) (e.g., SKVR I2 781; 767). Although performance-based features may be inconsequential for the propositional meanings communicated through the text, they can be fundamental to understanding its metrics, aesthetics and potentially even its rhetorical devices. The relation between metrical form and performance may also be manifested in different ways. In some traditions, the metrical structure of lines may only become observable in full performance because, in dictation, people present only the words with propositional meanings, eliminating expletives and vocables (Niemi, this volume). Metrical form might also appear more regular in dictation or might equally become more flexible or break down entirely, shifting into a summary of content (Ready 2015: 13–24). Alternatively, the metrical form of verses may seem to disappear in performance, becoming a substructure adapted and subordinated to musical structures (Kallio, this volume). These types of variations reveal the importance of understanding what source materials represent when only transcripts are available, and provides a point of departure for exploring how a particular tradition of verbal art works from the perspective of its users. Research on versification easily overlooks the potential for non-linguistic aspects of performance to structure language. The focus tends to fall on metre, sound patterning and parallelism. It is important to recognise that some traditional forms of sung verbal art place melody and language in a dynamic, emergent relation, as in the above-mentioned cases of Russian bylina epics and Finnic laments (Vesterholt 1973; Silvonen 2022). Today, it is not uncommon for verse to be composed for some particular music, which is fixed. The music may also be designed to produce sound-gestures, combining linguistic and musical expressions in order to enhance the desired semantic allusions (see, e.g., Middleton 1990: 230–231), not to mention the translation of popular songs across languages. In these cases, music presents a dominant structuring principle for organising language into verses, although the text lacks metre or the corresponding poetic structuring principles. However, many features of performance practice involve the body, movement and the space where the performance occurs. Rhythms of dance or movement, music and language are often all organically coordinated in performance (Frog 2017). Just as it is possible to observe differences in the hierarchy of relations between language and music, both may be involved in hierarchies linked to the physicality of performance or a virtual multimodal production, in which the different levels of composition may ultimately be subordinated 35 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi to the rhythms structuring the whole. In visual poetry, alongside the form and arrangement of words or letters on a page, choices of words or phrasing might be affected by the visual length of a line, the number of letters or how written letters of different words align. Video poetry is able to combine the features of both visual poetry and performance into even more complex arrangements. From the latter half of the twentieth century onwards, the production of all mediated popular culture has been strongly based on designs involving multimodality for creating meanings, affects and desires. This form of production expands the role and function of textual forms of versification, sound and movement. The voice of the artist-performer does not only “recite” poetic forms with musical accompaniment; the modern technical possibilities of sound production are designed to create feelings of presence and intimate and affective communication that may be united with a visual dimension of the performance (see Frith 1998: 183–202). Versification thus extends into what Eva Lilja (2009) describes as aesthetic rhythm, that is, a work of art’s play with proportions in time and space, whatever its medium (see also Hopsch & Lilja 2017). From an emic perspective, verse is verse because it is heard or seen as such, which is always linked to how it is articulated, whether mentally, vocally or visually. The relations between language on the one hand and melody, rhythm and/or visible arrangement with which it may be articulated on the other are many and diverse, but they are relevant for consideration even where only text- artefacts of verbal art in ancient languages are available, whether the aim is to read for enjoyment or for critical analysis. Approaching Semiosis The theme of versification is associated in various ways with articulations of language as culture, and it seems to be an especially thought-provoking example in considerations about representation, symbolic systems, meaning- production and cultural orders in general. The accounts and analyses of cultural orders presented in this collection represent a wide range of methodological and theoretical stances. Nevertheless, whether in cultural performance or in textual artefacts, the overall theme of versification touches on the methodological background of the semiotic explanation. If nothing else, its articulation involves the interrelationship of cultural performance and cultural text. Cultural performance – for example, a song performance in oral culture – results in an ephemeral entextualisation of an orally transmitted cultural discourse. This entextualisation can produce various other discourses (and also entextualisations or textualisations), depending on the ways that it is remembered, discussed, used, saved, documented or reworked by the members of the culture or by outsiders (see Silverstein & Urban 1996: 1–3). The history of the relations and tensions between the concepts of language and culture in scientific thought during the twentieth century illuminates the core of this discussion. The Saussurean heritage for understanding language as a system for producing semiosis, with its conceptual distinctions at the level 36 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice of the arbitrary and evolving interrelations of the symbol and its meaning, paved the way for the scientific belief in a stable and invariant constitution of the elements of culture. In a way, one result of this heritage was the structuralist postulate of understanding human culture as comprising a set of underlying, invariant interpretations and adaptations of its environment. This trajectory of research evolved especially in linguistics. Already in the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Ferdinand de Saussure (1983: 16) pointed out that the then-fresh concept of semiotics (“semiology”) must be understood as an intellectual enterprise for working with all sign systems, thus being something larger than merely an interest in linguistic semiosis. It is hardly surprising that semiotics evolved mainly in linguistics and in combination with it. Even some of the most influential musicological methods of structural or generative analysis (Rahn 1983 Ruwet 1987; Nattiez 1990; Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1996) were designed largely around such an identification and conceptualisation of elements and their orders in a system that was reminiscent of analytical procedures in structural linguistics. The semiotic-structuralist stances in linguistics in the 1960s – as well as language as a paramount example of a system and a cultural order – paved the way for the massive popularity of the structuralist explanation in most of the human sciences over the following decades. This can be observed in Noam Chomsky’s (1966) studies of linguistic structure, Roman Jakobson’s (1960) studies of versification, Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (1979) anthropology, Algirdas Greimas’ (1980) linguistic-narratological semiotics, Eero Tarasti’s (1979) musicological studies and Yuri Lotman’s (2005) over-arching concept of the semiosphere as a semiotic universe constituting the totality of individual texts and languages as they relate to one another. Despite the popularity of these semiotic and structuralist, linguistically based branches of science, the linguists were the ones who could claim to have the most rigorous methods for universal application – for working with any language in the world. This situation was never the same for the structural anthropologists or musicologists: even their most refined analytical methods did not seem to yield a definitive revelation of the cultural phenomenon under study (cf. Monelle 1992: 21–22). The so-called “grammars” or “syntaxes” of myth or music never seemed exhaustive or universally applicable. In the vast diversity of cultural variations, language seems to be a true universal and “easily” accessible with a chosen method of analysis in linguistics. This might be a slight exaggeration, but it can nevertheless be illuminating if language is considered from a biolinguistic and species-specific perspective (see, e.g., Deacon 1997). The study of versification, as it is obviously associated with both language and cultural conventions, can be seen as one of the most important crossroads for multidisciplinary discussion, also when arguing about the alleged “linguisticality” of culture. One of the most enticing contact surfaces is between language and cultural performance, especially in those empirical cases where we can examine linguistic text-artefacts together with recorded audio or video data of the performance situation and with ethnographic accounts of the cultural context of the performance. This may not be the easiest possible setting for research, but it enables researchers to analyse the 37 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi culture as it appears in the fleeting moment of performance, giving a transient living form to the language expressed. Cultural codes associated with the specific modes or registers of performance are ideally observed and analysed during the moment of performance in its conventional arena and with the customary performer–audience interaction, some elements of which can be readily observed in video recordings (see, e.g., Foley 1995; Honko 1998; Frog 2017). The study of versification on the basis of only verbal textual sources presents somewhat different choices for the relevant analytical methods, but it remains possible to gain perspectives on such traditions, even if these leave considerable gaps in knowledge about many dimensions of performance. In these cases, it is sometimes the critical mass of the analysed material that offers a possibility for a fruitful interpretation. For example, the analysis of thousands of lines of verse is usually needed to understand the occurrences, distribution and positions of linguistic phenomena in verse-form data (e.g., Kristján Árnason 1991; Fulk 1992; see also Foley 1990). However, one of the wonders of language is its apparent ability to leave diverse traces of the original performance’s tendencies of versification – even after multiphased processes of recording, transcription and intersemiotic translation, until the original performance is fixed in the typography of a literal source. How did the evolving semiotic-structuralist legacy elaborate on the concept of structure in twentieth-century European linguistics? Whereas de Saussure (1983 [1916]) was more concerned with language in a specific diachronic frame, Roman Jakobson (1956) further developed many of his concepts and aimed at broad, universal and synchronic generalisations about human language. One of these generalisations concerns those structures of language that could be understood to have analogies in other culturally organised structures (whether text-artefacts or human actions).1 The structuralist explanation involves discerning a system-like character in the examined object. It is not necessary here to discuss the implications of general system theories of communication, but the core of structuralist and semiotic thinking seems to contain at least the idea of a totality reminiscent of a system, with discernible elements in it, and, most of all, discernible interrelations among the elements. One of the central concepts originating from de Saussure’s teachings and further developed especially by Jakobson aims at understanding the interrelated nature of the constituent elements of a cultural performance under examination, whether a linguistic utterance emerges in prose or in verse or in other forms of acoustic (e.g., musical), visual or kinetic performance. According to Jakobson (1960: 358), the fundamental structural-semiotic tensions in any system can be better understood through the conceptual pair of syntagm and paradigm. Syntagm can be understood as an equivalent of grammar, style or any culturally organised form of order, while paradigm represents the selection of culturally relevant elements, which are regarded as suitable for the syntagmatic ordering. Conceptualised in this way, it seems obvious that such elements always appear as structural elements that are 1 On Lévi-Strauss’ (1979) definition of structure, see also Niemi, this volume. 38 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice fundamentally interrelated in an examined whole – especially if we are examining the functioning of poetry. For the present discussion on versification, it is relevant to keep in mind that this structuralist conceptualisation continues to have its effect in various fields of human and cultural studies. Jakobson himself has suggested that the interrelated nature of syntagmatic-paradigmatic elements of culture is also a tool of interpretation for semiotic endeavours, by presenting the conceptual interrelations of metaphor and metonymy in semiotic processes of various forms of cultural expression (Jakobson & Halle 1956: 76–82). In turn, metaphor and metonymy can be seen as conceptualisations, with which it is possible to relate the syntagmatic-paradigmatic mechanisms of selection (associated with the identity of what is selected) and order (see Fiske 1990). Against this background of methodological orientations in the analysis of a cultural performance, it must be acknowledged that deconstructionist – or any poststructuralist orientations – bring the structuralist postulates into question as points of departure in understanding the complexities, multivocalities or fluidities of cultural processes. For the present purposes, it is perhaps enough to encourage continuation of this discussion by asking whether an inclusive view of methodological strategies could work better than an exclusive one. When versification is quite easily associated with perspectives of semiotic and structural approaches for examining the textual properties of cultural performance, it warrants remembering that textual approaches to cultural and linguistic phenomena operate in terms of the structural properties of the examined text, whereas discursive approaches operate at the levels of reading, reception and meaning-making (cf. Fornäs 1998: 186–187). Then again, as Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (1996) reminded us, the divide between text and discourse is an intellectual construction, which does not directly correspond to any phenomenon in social reality. Silverstein and Urban aimed to clarify the complexities of expressive strategies in cultural performances by elaborating on the textual and discursive processes in culture, for example in terms of entextualisation as a (natural) emic strategy for establishing meanings and preferred ways of reading culture or cultural performance. Furthermore, they called the material a “product” – the concrete traces of these complex processes in the form of a text-artefact – to emphasise the immateriality of the mere notion of text in their conceptualisation. The question about the textual existence of a cultural expression remains problematic in many ways. It became all the more so as the linguistic turn in Western academic thinking began to wane towards the 1980s in the wake of the discursive turn. Especially in anthropology, the latter turn was viewed more as a time for establishing new kinds of reflexivities and sensitivities regarding the relations of the representatives of academic institutions with the people who would be the subjects of their studies. The ways that researchers would become representatives of the cultures that they study came into question. In addition, the roles of researchers and their works came under scrutiny as representative with regard to those cultural forms that had no textual existence before it was carved or inscribed into the forms by the researchers. (See Clifford & Marcus 1986.) When produced in this way, the 39 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi resulting cultural text may, after all, represent the researcher’s understanding and interpretation rather than those of the culture and the people to which they are attributed (see also Anttonen 2013). Perhaps the modern technological revolution, providing easily accessible means of producing multimedia materials, along with the possibilities for disseminating them instantly around the globe, has provided some answers to the inequalities of the old world, although many of them still strongly survive. Music and Meaning Musical expression is very often associated with the phenomenon of versification, especially in oral cultures, but also in the modern Euro-Atlantic global media culture. Musical expression adds yet another intriguing level to the problem of meaning-making in a cultural performance, even when only the musical level of versified language is in focus. If we discuss music from the global and relativistic perspective (or that of the ethnomusicological approach, for that matter), then we should perhaps keep in mind that many of our European presumptions about music may not be universally applicable. One of the most basic definitions of music was expressed by the ethnomusicologist John Blacking (1973), who stated that only from a global perspective should music be considered merely as a culturally organised form of behaviour that is associated with making sounds. In many cultures outside the Euro-Atlantic cultural hegemony, especially those in predominantly oral societies, musical expression exists without many of the constraints typical of a Western cultural heritage. For example, there may be no explicit or formal education in music, no strict borders between performer and audience or no concept of a musical “work” or “piece.” Some poststructuralist, psychoanalytically oriented researchers even regard rhythm as a sublime power that should be interpreted in relation to the reader’s body (Aviram 1994). These are factors in the question of how “musical meaning” should be understood. We should keep in mind that cultural expression containing both versified language and music is – at its most elementary level – a song. Even this elementary form of cultural performance can offer us more to think about concerning the production of cultural organisation, structures, interconnections and meanings than when verse is approached only as a linguistic text. At a minimum, it becomes necessary to consider the multilayered and interconnected construction of three culturally ordered fundamentals: language, which is embedded in a verse form and is further embedded in culturally organised sound (song, music), all in the flow of performance. In understanding performance situations, where linguistic and musical structures are simultaneously at work, the problem of meaning becomes quite challenging. Discussing the possibilities for a linguistic understanding of music, the musicologist Richard Middleton (1990: 173) reminds us that, in contrast to the performance of a linguistic code, a musical code can contain other co-occurring parameters that also participate in creating communicative and semiotic structures, such as movement, gesture, rhetoric 40 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice or affect. Thus, in a way, musical expression can contain the whole package of simultaneous codes for meaning-making, comparable to the paralinguistic properties of linguistic communication. Furthermore, musical expression as this kind of multiparametrical communication can include these codes in various ways: they can be mutually reinforcing, out of phase with one another or contrasting. Middleton (1990: 177) criticises the way that musical meaning is thought of as analogical to linguistic meaning simply by virtue of its temporality. Here, despite the surface-level similarity, language and music are not always comparable. Language tends to sequence itself into invariant segments and is inclined to do so in a more or less universal way. In music, we cannot always be certain about which segments should be regarded as similarly meaningful. Some musicological approaches have tried to solve the problem of musical semantics by identifying and examining some more straightforward semantic analogies in forms of musical expression, such as associating emotion with musical substance (e.g., Tagg 1979). However, the fundamental problem in the search for musical meaning remains; musical structure does not usually offer definitive clues for its segmentation. There are no clear boundaries between distinct or indistinct units in music as there are in language. Segmental hierarchies in language have no analogies in musical expression. Musical semantic segmentation can be more complex and associated with, for example, similarities, as well as distinctions. The semiotic systemic potential of language and music can thus be deceitfully similar and extremely different at the same time. Middleton (1990: 215) states that this tension between intuited and actual similarity is due to the fundamental differences between linguistic and musical communication. To fulfil its denotative and informative function, language aims at a maximal distinction between its units, which is a precondition for words to maintain separate denotational meanings. In contrast, music aims at maximal sameness, producing associations and connotations as they become recognisable by having been heard before in contexts or patterns of use. As opposed to linguistic distinction, music works by repetition and redundancy, through which its units become recognisable, and these units develop indexicality rather than denotative meanings. In the same way that smoke can be described as “indexing” fire, the meaningfulness of musical units emerges by “pointing to” earlier uses with which they are associated to give them connotative significance (e.g., Sebeok 1994: 62–79). The anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000: 22–23) addresses the fundamental difference between linguistic and musical communication as music being created through the performance itself, thereby constructing its own, emergent arena of meaning, within which the units of music and their arrangements become interpreted in relation to one another.2 Ingold seems to reflect on conceptions of music that are often associated with European institutions of art, with their vocal and orchestral traditions, cultural histories and canonised symbolics. However, if we give this 2 For a parallel view of text-internal referentiality in modern literature, see also Hasan 1989: ch. 4. 41 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi thought a more ethnomusicological and relative flavour, the perspective changes. For example, we could shift our view from modern music’s arts of composition to simpler and more straightforward relations of language and music, as in a tradition of oral epic performance like that of a South Slavic singer accompanying himself on his gusli (a stringed instrument) or the unaccompanied singing of a performer of Finno-Karelian kalevalaic poetry. Even in the latter case, the focus may narrow down to a targeted examination of language as voiced by the performer, embedded in the simultaneous flow of pitched and metrically patterned vocal musical sound – “music” as viewed from the researcher’s etic perspective, even if not viewed as music from the performer’s emic perspective. In traditions of verbal art, music develops its significance on the same basic principles of indexicality. However, rather than developing its referential patterns centrally within a particular work, meaningfulness is produced in relation to recognised practices and their conventions – including deviations from them – in what Foley (1995) discusses as traditional referentiality (cf. also, e.g., Agha 2007). Indexicality of Form The differences between the workings of meaning in language and music might appear fundamental and independent, if complementary, but this impression comes from the contrast between units of music with grammar and a lexicon. Indeed, purely linguistic approaches analyse metrical text without any reference to the possible interrelations between metrics and meaning because these are regarded as arbitrary, a view with roots in Russian formalism and structuralism. Similarly to music, however, metre or poetic form can “point” to things, for example, indexing conventional uses and contexts. For instance, in the plurality of Old Norse metres derived from Old Germanic alliterative verse, one known as ljóðaháttr (“song metre”) is particularly associated with direct speech to the degree that when the metre is used, it carries a load of associations built up by its emblematic usage (Quinn 1992). Of course, poetic form often operates as only one feature among many that reinforce or specify what is indexed. For example, performance of a narrative in a particular form of verse with its associated register and structure will activate a local “epic” as a category of text type. Even if the story is unknown, people familiar with the particular genre will interpret the story as an epic, asserted as an epic or of epic quality, or they will interpret it in relation to an epic as a type of text, as in the case of a parody (Frog 2016a: 63). Music, melody or other modes of articulation (e.g., rapid mumbling as with some incantations) can carry the same indexical properties. In addition to becoming emblematic of certain types of verbal art, music could also include other types of information. For example, in Sámi yoik, the melody might point to the person being sung about, but the melody could also be transferred to point to another person.3 Alternatively, a national anthem may 3 In some areal traditions, however, the melodies were not associated with people at all; see further Jouste 2006; cf. also Kallberg 2004: 39. 42 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice be composed to the music of another nation’s anthem, creating a connection between them. Literary scholars today emphasise that all metrical and sound units in poetry are important and should be understood as basic elements of representation and meaning-making (e.g., Viikari 1987; Carper & Attridge 2003). From the perspective of indexicality, verse form and music can be viewed as working in the same ways, with the potential for units of different scope, from a verse to a whole poem or song, to be simultaneously interpreted as meaningful. Indexicality is built up through patterns of use that are perceived as associated with particular things. The more regular those associations are, the stronger or more pronounced the indexicality is in the particular environment. Such connections can extend beyond genres to social roles and situations associated with them. This is normally the case with the music of a national anthem, which is immediately recognisable to people of the country as specific to a particular, symbolic song. In contrast, Karelian lament was a form of verbal art not performed by men and thus indexed gender, and it was also linked to ritual roles in which laments were used, allowing it to index the role identity “lamenter” (Stepanova E. 2015). In the regional traditions of Finnic poetry in Kalevala-metre, the melodies were most often associated with particular contexts and purposes of use, such as wedding songs or songs in the forest, which were in turn connected with local understandings of genres (Särg 2009), while there were also types of general melodies used across genres (Huttu-Hiltunen 2008). Whereas Sámi yoik connected melody with the subject of the song, poetic form may itself identify a performer with a particular role such as “lamenter,” which can be significant in constructing one’s personal identity in society. The people identified with it and what they do with it then reciprocally affect evaluations of the poetic form and its significance, as well as the models of identity associated with it, from “lamenter” in a pre-modern society to “poet” or “rapper” in different social contexts today. Just because these types of meanings are not propositional does not make them less significant. Instead, it allows the form and medium of expression to become a potential instrument in meaning-making that may be adapted to new contexts or used in innovative ways. The epic verse form by itself does not index something as epic, but verse forms become resources precisely because they are pregnant with indexical associations (see also Foley 1995; Agha 2001, 2007). For example, an epic singer improvising a few verses about having his or her photograph taken offers an indication of the significance or quality of experience that he or she confers on the event (Foley 2002: 213–215). Even without drawing on recognised forms of verse, using poetic principles to organise even a short utterance can set it apart from the preceding and following speech or writing. Of course, such devices can operate quite subtly (Du Bois 2014). However, when rhythm, parallelism or perhaps alliteration or rhyme becomes sufficiently salient to produce a breakthrough into verse, what is expressed becomes emphasised. In this case, indexicality may only be of verse in the broad sense. Alternatively, it may simply invoke a “presumption of semioticity” (Lotman Y. 1990: 128); the hearer will assume that the markedness is somehow meaningful and 43 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi consider, if only briefly, potential associations, that is, the indexicality of the brief breakthrough into verse. A presumption of semioticity then opens to possibilities of interpretation ranging from simple emphasis to weighted meanings, an impression of having missed a literary reference or perhaps humour. Where associations of form are less regular, their indexicality becomes less regular or ambiguous without additional co-occurring indicators to guide the way. People and Social Practices From simple text-scripts, considerations of versification can be rapidly expanded to encompass increasing numbers of features, such as melody, gesture, genre, performance and so forth, but people are the most crucial to all of these. People versify, perceive versification and assess and interpret it. They may appreciate it, or perhaps not, but there are always people. People engage with forms of versification, take them up, use them and manipulate them. Poets thus become the centre of particular interest in considerations of versification. Whatever their linguistic and cultural backgrounds, all poets represent certain poetic traditions, whether written or oral, and they are connected with historical, social and cultural contexts. Opinions vary regarding the extent to which an individual poet can be wholly independent from his or her cultural background and poetic tradition, but it is clear that at least the language used sets its own metrical, structural and semantic preconditions for each poet. In his or her own poetic work, a poet stands at the crossroads of personal creative input and the traditions in which sociocultural surroundings are engaged. Conventions are always born and evolve in cultural and societal groups. Consequently, symbols, poetic forms and their connotations are shared by a certain community. Although these may be practically discussed like things that have objective existence, floating in the air, they are rooted in experience- based and discourse-based understandings of the people in that community (Foley 1995). Rather than objectively existing, they can be described as intersubjective – that is, people’s subjective understandings include ideas and expectations of what other people will know and how they will understand things. Put in simplified terms, they may not know what other people think per se, but they can have at least a rough idea or have quite clear expectations, for instance, that something will be considered unmetrical or “bad” verse. It is important to recognise that cultures, as experience-based frameworks, have their own particular poetic traditions and that conventions of oral and written genres can have their local and cultural variants. The indexicality of verse can also vary by the historical situation, which may lead poets to avoid or mobilise a particular poetic form (e.g., Lotman R. 2019a, 2019b). For example, forms of verbal art may become linked to political aims or national identities, as certain genres such as ballads did during the era of National Romanticism (see also Tarkka et al. 2019; Karhu, this volume). Similarly, rap music began as a marginal genre that was widely regarded as rebellious 44 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice or anti-societal but has now moved into mainstream popular culture, from which it is even taken up by school institutions with pedagogical aims. The sort of process in which new genres evolve from being rebellious to becoming overly institutionalised is a widespread pattern, as already described by the Russian formalists. Such genres also tend to be described in terms of social movements, yet social movements themselves are constituted of individuals and groups of individuals. Poets drive the evolution of poetic forms and genres. Conventions in certain authors’ and poets’ poetic language can also be identified and analysed, often in relation to the poetic tradition to which they belong (Nollet, this volume). This type of approach is particularly common with regard to literary poets. In research on oral traditions, distinctive features of particular individuals’ understanding of a tradition have historically tended to remain invisible, with a more or less exclusive focus on what can be identified as collective and normative (e.g., Harvilahti 1992: 95–96; cf. also Faulkes 2007). When particular individuals’ understandings have been brought into focus in more recent decades, these are often described as “idiolects” (e.g., Foley 1990).4 With literary poets, it is often possible to delve into much more subtle detail, for instance, in terms of rhythmic and semantic allusions to other poets, the development of poetics over time and engagements with social trends (Laamanen, this volume). This is because oral texts are by their nature transient and variable, whereas written texts become static and invariant with an objective reality in print, and others also engage with that static form as a stable point of reference. Such research can enter into discourses on authorship and poets’ identities, both as constructed through their poetry and in social worlds. These discourses in which poets are embedded and in which they engage form a tradition, along with other conventions that are in continuous development, reciprocally having an impact on the individual poets. One important role of individual poets is adapting traditions that belong to other societies and making them their own. The history of poetries and poetics is filled with outcomes of such processes, such as the spread of the ballad through medieval Europe. However, the sorts of data revealing that such processes occurred do not allow us to explore how these occurred and what happened in the process. Thicker data on more recent individual poets and the ability to observe trends in poetry in the environment of literature (Karhu, this volume) and in ethnographic documentation (Wilce & Fenigsen 2015; Wilce 2017) allow insights into such processes. The process commonly involves a combination of motivation and the identification of features of the poetic form as emblematic. Together, these lead to the adaptation of that view of the poetic form into a poetic ecology of a different cultural environment, a process that occurs in connection with the ideas and ideologies of the person or people involved. In cases such as the medieval spread of the ballad or the more recent spread of freestyle rap, the form of versification evolving in this process is linked to creating connections 4 Cf. also studies that focus on particular performers but may lack a detailed analysis of collective tradition (e.g., Honko 1998). 45 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi where there is a cultural identification of sameness and an inclination to ideological alignments. The spread of these poetries is notably connected with the dissemination of practices in which the verbal art is embedded, so they have a social dimension that customarily links adaptation to immersion and reciprocal participation. In contrast, literary adaptations of the ballad during the era of Romanticism followed a different trajectory that made processes of selection and adaptation less predictable. In the Romantic era, ballads as constituting a type of text were broadly viewed as expressions of the “spirit” of a people and belonged to an idealised cultural milieu of the past, or they were regarded as an anachronism in the present, which belonged to an idealised past. Of course, there were places where the ballad remained a living practice, but, for many, the tradition was reconstructed as a heritage, emblematic of a time and a place in which things were different. The cultural gap between the milieu of a living or a historical ballad tradition and the parlours of erudite poets could be tremendous, but that difference is construed as bridged by a shared inheritance of culture. The construction of a heritage is characterised by lifting a “thing” of culture from its context, polishing away its complexities and making it an artefact of the past relevant to the present, transforming it from what it was (e.g., Hafstein 2018). In this process, the ideological gap is washed away as the things identified as heritage become pregnant with the projection of the viewer, a resource for reflecting on and creating modern identities, providing instruments for filling current needs and accomplishing current aims. Where poets were outsiders regarding ballad traditions, they took up the features that, to them, seemed emblematic of the text type, and used and manipulated those features for their own ends. This process occurred in the poets’ own poetic ecology, in which different aspects of the poetry were viewed and potentially contested. Their uses could thus easily diverge from how the features they took up had been used in the oral tradition, while other features might be completely erased. The process is the same in both oral and literary milieux, although it is often more salient in literary texts. Adaptation in an oral milieu is embedded in social practice and is normally observed only as an outcome of socially negotiated assimilation, whereas literary adaptation is often viewed through individuals’ creative acts. Modernity has also valorised pre-modern traditions as heritage. This has stimulated a new type of adaptation based on private reading divorced from social practice, in which the understanding of the poetic form might be superficial or the aim might only be to index a traditional genre or poetic form as a point of reference for the contemporary literary readership. This sort of process has been widespread, has taken different forms and continues in the present day. It is behind the production of epics around which national and ethnic identities could be built, starting from The Poems of Ossian (1773), which James Macpherson attributed to a great, ancient poet, although it was largely his own creation. Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1835, 1849) is a national epic constructed for Finland almost verse by verse from collected oral poetry, though creating new storylines and interpretations (Hämäläinen et al. 2019). Lönnrot’s active immersion in the poetry equipped him with a fluency that made his epic more metrically regular than the 46 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Metrics in Practice oral poetry (Kallio et al. 2017: 143), in contrast to Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s more superficial adaptation of the poetic form for his Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg (Sarv 2008: ch. 2; cf. also Moyne 1963: ch. 5). In any such case, the creation of an epic of Homeric proportions is not possible without a poet to take up the role of Homer. This type of process was already undertaken more than two thousand years ago when Virgil composed his literary epic Æneid and can be observed today in Bùi Việt Hoa’s creation of a Vietnamese national epic Con cháo mon mân (“The Descendant of Moon Man,” 2008). Whereas modern epics tend to be advanced as singular works for a particular culture, practices of verbal art may equally become adapted socially into a new environment, as in the spread of improvisational rap (cf. Sykäri 2019). Such processes remain largely opaque for traditions in the remote past, such as the ballad, but it is possible to gain nuanced perspectives where the processes are ongoing today, such as in adaptations of Karelian laments in Finland, where there are currently competing views on poetics and which features are most significant (Wilce & Fenigsen 2015; Wilce 2017). When poets build bridges across milieux, they create continuities, yet their construction of those continuities also involves transformations, making “ours” those that belonged to different social, cultural, historical and ideological environments. Transformations and continuities are easily observed in adaptations across cultural environments, but it is also necessary to recognise the role of individual poets, who may try to influence a broader tradition with strategic aims (Nollet 2022) or may have impacts on the traditions in which they participate through the interests and aims reflected in their works (Laamanen, this volume). These phenomena also occur in oral traditions, where they can simply be more challenging to pin down. Nevertheless, it is possible to observe individuals taking stances on oral traditions to which they belong, adapting them or trying to bring them into alignment with changes in ideologies and beliefs in their societies. Because of the transience of most oral forms of verbal art, such processes most often appear as stance-taking on one aspect or another of a tradition, questioning it, or an idiolectal deviation from a social convention (Stepanova E. 2012: 268, 270). In a predominantly oral environment, the impact of one person’s innovations depends on the person’s authority, networks of interaction and the innovations’ resonance with the people in those immediate networks. In the social tradition, such innovations and variations can be widely observed, but only a fraction of them resonates strongly enough with other people to implement change in the social tradition (Frog 2010: §17.3). More often, variations and innovations are integrated into the hazy field of social variation as the ongoing discourse of negotiating alternatives within slowly changing structures. In that context, people may do unique things, but these have to move beyond the field of the individual to affect social practice. The social establishment of such innovations can be observed in the local forms of a tradition (Stepanova E. 2012: 269), yet corpora generally do not comprise materials that allow nuanced perspectives. To triangulate this process in empirical data, variation needs to be situated in relation to three frames of reference: (a) the innovative features in an individual’s idiolect in relation to a local tradition, 47 https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.12 Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi (b) distinctive local developments in relation to broader regional traditions and (c) the relationship between an idiolectal innovation at one time and changes in local social practices at a later time. The processes can be seen as the same across both oral and literary forms of verbal art, with two central differences. First, written texts take on an enduring objectified existence with the potential to affect others across distances and over time in ways that transient oral performances cannot. Second, the objectification of written texts allows empirical analyses of possible influences at a much more fine- grained level than performances in an oral tradition, with its greater fluidity at precisely such a level of detail. Nonetheless, variation and innovation are inevitably traced back to individual poets and their engagements with collective tradition, which they participate in shaping. Reflections The historical origins of versification are beyond reconstruction, but they appear to lie deep alongside the roots of language. Indeed, versification may be an organic product of the emergence of human language, perhaps an unavoidable manifestation of the imagination and creativity that gave rise to the complexity of a language’s system of signification. Language mirrors the world and mediates both knowledge about it and interaction with it in ways that are only possible with the abstraction, imagination and creativity that enable the relations between arbitrary signs and the world (cf. Lakoff 1986; Johnson 1987; Lakoff & Turner 1989; Sebeok 1994). Versification orders these arbitrary signs and their relations, advancing language from mere signs to material in cultural products. The evaluation of versification as meaningful or aesthetic would appear to reflect the same type of creativity and imagination that has produced arbitrary linguistic signs that mirror things in the world and are so fundamental to thinking and communicating about them. Whatever its origins, versification is a thing of culture, learned and communicated through practice. 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