Anne Vabarna

There were eleven children in the family she was born into. Her singing came from her mother, Postimees and folklore.ee agree — and her mother died when Anne was seven, so she never got her mother’s full repertoire. What she learned instead she learned from an aunt: an unmarried woman with a bad leg, living on her brother’s farm, and from other singers in the village. No source names the aunt. There is not a single name in that sentence.

Her own name, too, is a Seto usage rather than a document. An unmarried daughter went by her father’s name, so in her home village she was probably Tihoni Anne — the “probably” is Paul Hagu’s, in his biography on folklore.ee, which names her parents as Tihon (baptised Tihhon) and Kreepa (baptised Agrepina) and makes her their fourth child. The surname came later: in the 1921 campaign of giving surnames to the Setos she was entered as Vabarn, and the genitive form Vabarna became the generally known and official one. The National Archives’ blog dates the campaign to that year.

Even where the birthplace is sits in dispute. folklore.ee’s performer page puts Võporsova on the shore of Lake Peipsi, and Paul Hagu’s biography, also on folklore.ee, “4 km north of Värska, on the shore of Lake Peipsi”; other pages name the same village with no lake attached to it. Wikidata gives the village a point, and this page uses it; whether that point is on the shore neither source says, and the page lets both stand.

The singing tradition she was born into is a choral one. Apart from a few solo genres — herding songs, lullabies, laments — the Setos always sing in a choir and always polyphonically. And the collecting enterprise that eventually found her was already long under way: Jakob Hurt’s “Setukeste laulud” I–III appeared in Helsinki in 1904–1907, while Anne was in her twenties. It had not reached her.

Setomaa vald: Anne Vabarna nimeline omakultuuriõhtu · Paul Hagu, “Setu rahvalaulik Anne Vabarna” (Estonian Literary Museum, folklore.ee) · folklore.ee rahvamuusika e-raamat: esitaja Anne Vabarna · Rahvusarhiivi ajaveeb: perekonnanimede panemisest Setomaal, 1921 · Eesti Entsüklopeedia: Jakob Hurt, „Setukeste laulud“ I–III · Wikidata: Võpolsova (Q984902), küla Setomaa vallas Võrumaal

Her age is the only thing known about the marriage. folklore.ee’s performer page says nineteen; Paul Hagu’s biography says eighteen, when she was courted into the neighbouring village of Tonja. Neither gives a year, a wedding place or a courtship. This page prints both ages, because there is nothing to overrule either with.

Her husband was Jako — Paul Hagu’s biography calls him hardworking and kind-hearted. By Seto custom a married woman was called after her husband, and so she became Jako naan’e, Jako’s wife. That is the most durable name she has: a by-name that carries somebody else’s. No source found here gives Jako’s surname before 1921, his dates, or his work beyond the farm.

Nine children: five daughters and four sons. Three or four of them reach this page by name. The son who wrote down “Peko”: Ivo (Jaan), nineteen in 1927. The archival note for the second part of the “Peko” song names a fifteen-year-old Mihkel as the scribe; whether he is a second son or the same son under another name, no source says. And two daughters, Matrjona (Mat’o) Suuvere and Natalia (Nati) Vabarna, who sang with their mother at Riigi Ringhääling in 1936 — folklore.ee’s performer page names them. The other five or six stay unnamed: the page leaves them open rather than rounding them off in a phrase.

And what actually made her known in her own parish was not the singing. Paul Hagu’s biography records that she was known as an articulate singer, gladly invited to sing at weddings — but that she was even more widely known as a midwife. It was that standing which, ten years later, brought the collector to her door.

folklore.ee rahvamuusika e-raamat: esitaja Anne Vabarna · Paul Hagu, “Setu rahvalaulik Anne Vabarna” (Estonian Literary Museum, folklore.ee) · Postimees / Elu24: üheteistkümnelapselisest perest üheksa lapse emaks · folklore.ee: “Peko laul”, part II (the archival note and the introduction)

Paul Hagu’s reason is precise and worth keeping: she went unnoticed because she was not yet the lead singer of her group. In a Seto choir the lead singer is the one whose words are new; the choir repeats. A machine pointed at a choir in 1914 recorded the part of her that was not yet doing the thing she would become famous for.

Väisänen (1890–1969) was a Finnish folk music scholar, ethnographer and ethnomusicologist. His phonograph work in Estonia began in 1912 at Oskar Kallas’s invitation; the Finnish Literature Society’s phonogram collection holds about 1 200 cylinders. That is the frame into which Anne Vabarna was eventually recorded: a Finnish scholar with Estonian institutional backing.

Nine years passed. Into them fell the Tartu Peace Treaty of 2 February 1920, after which the Setos’ historic settlement area lay inside the Republic of Estonia as Petseri county, and the 1921 name-giving, which gave the farm at Tonja a surname. When Väisänen came back, the woman in front of him had a different name — and was the lead singer of her group.

The machine’s Seto names stand in print in a title in Sirp: Marju Kõivupuu headed her 2004 essay (no. 42, p. 11) with a line about singing “toro sisse, kalli kramahvoona sisse” — into the horn, into the dear gramophone, in this page’s translation. The essay does not say the words are Anne Vabarna’s; in its text, singing into the dear gramophone is the author’s own figure of speech. So this page uses the title as its sample line, not as a quotation of her.

Paul Hagu, “Setu rahvalaulik Anne Vabarna” (Estonian Literary Museum, folklore.ee) · Herbert Tampere, introduction to the anthology of Estonian folk music (1967; the anthology 1970) · Marju Kõivupuu, “Lauli mi, tuvi? toro sisse, kalli kramahvoona sisse?”, Sirp, 12 November 2004 · Fenno-Ugria: setod, Tartu rahu ja 1944. aasta piir

Who found whom is not settled, and this page does not settle it. Paul Hagu’s biography on folklore.ee calls Väisänen her discoverer — and corrects itself in the next sentence: it would be truer to say that Anne made herself known to the Finn. The same biography says why the collector had come at all: to ask the midwife about birth customs. She put him to work writing down her song words instead. The usual picture — literate collector, illiterate tradition-bearer — is the wrong way round here.

Out of that summer came “Suurõq sajaq”, The Great Wedding, described as the first Seto wedding epic. Paul Hagu’s biography gives it 5 580 lines, and the Estonian Wikipedia article on the paired work gives the same count. Neither says what exactly was counted, and no archival figure for it reached this research.

That epic has a twin: a maiden’s death song, “Neio koolulaul”. Estonian Wikipedia describes the pair as two stories with a similar plot and different endings. Lauri Honko gives them a shared introduction of 700 lines, after which they run on at different lengths — in his round numbers, about 1 000 and 5 000 lines. The two run together for 700 lines and then part: a wedding down one road, the maiden’s death down the other. Which she sang first, and why, no source that could be read here says.

Eighty years later the twin epic appeared as FF Communications 281 — 529 pages, edited by Lauri Honko with Anneli Honko and Paul Hagu. Madis Arukask’s review in Mäetagused calls it Honko’s last work on the Kalevala-metre song tradition.

Paul Hagu, “Setu rahvalaulik Anne Vabarna” (Estonian Literary Museum, folklore.ee) · Estonian Wikipedia: “Neio koolulaul & Suurõq sajaq” · Lauri Honko, “Who are the epic-makers?” (Folklore Fellows) · Madis Arukask, review of “The Maiden’s Death Song & The Great Wedding” (FFC 281), Mäetagused 26

Voolaine was then twenty-seven: born in 1899 at Tooste village in Räpina parish, died 1985 in Tartu; archivist, librarian and local historian, who read Estonian, folklore and Finno-Ugric languages at Tartu from 1920 to 1925 and was the Academic Mother Tongue Society’s first stipendiary. The wording was to be hers; the storyline was his. The writing down was finished in May 1927 and the manuscript sent on to Voolaine through the Academic Mother Tongue Society.

What he commissioned and what he got are not the same text, and the scholarship says so outright. Voolaine proposed Peko, the ancient king of the Setos, as the theme, and wanted an epic — a people’s symbol in epic form. Kristin Kuutma reads the result this way: Vabarna took the king’s story as a frame and laid Seto life over it — the farm and the family, birth, courting, wedding and death, and her own Orthodox faith; the last third of the epic tells of Seto life through an orphan maiden and through Jesus, who sets the rules and rites the community lives by. Kuutma’s “Creating a Seto Epic” (Oral Tradition 19/1, 2004) is the standard account of who did what.

The figures do not agree and the page does not make them. The 1927 dictation is about 8 000 verses, with no uniform metre. By Hasso Krull’s essay in Ninniku the epic’s main text with its epilogue is 5 450 verses — about two thirds of the eight thousand; by Estonian Wikipedia the printed main text runs to 29 chapters, with 14 fragments and ballads besides. The printed edition has 7 929 verses, as Postimees reported in 2017. Three numbers counting three different things, and no source saying how.

Peko himself is at once strongman, farmer, warrior, hunter, cave dweller, king and prophet. Voolaine built him on the Finno-Ugric deity Peko, still known in places in Setumaa, and fitted him into a Christian worldview. The text was finished for Anne’s fiftieth birthday and then went onto a shelf in the Literary Museum, where it stood for nearly seventy years.

Estonian Wikipedia: Peko (eepos) (this chapter’s sentences on Voolaine’s idea, the figure of Peko and the finishing of the text are adapted from the article: translated, shortened and reworded; CC BY-SA 4.0) · Paul Hagu, “Setu rahvalaulik Anne Vabarna” (Estonian Literary Museum, folklore.ee) · Hasso Krull, „Lauluema Anne Vabarna“, Ninniku (EKI arhiiv) · Kristin Kuutma, „Creating a Seto Epic“, Oral Tradition 19/1 (2004) · Folklore Fellows: Making the Brilliants Shine · Vikipeedia: Paulopriit Voolaine · Postimees 2017: setu rahvuseepos ilmus piduliku raamatuna

Paul Hagu’s biography on the Literary Museum’s site says her nineteen-year-old son Ivo (Jaan) wrote down the first part in 1927, and that the text is held in a notebook as continuous text with no verse boundaries distinguished — 388 pages; Estonian Wikipedia says as much as it can — the nineteen-year-old son Ivo, about 8 000 verses, no uniform metre — and counts no pages. The Literary Museum’s archival note for the second part — ERA II 145, 141/380, Järvesuu parish, Tonja — has it written down in 1930 by Mihkel Vabarna, described as her fifteen-year-old son. The Estonian introduction to that same edition says Ivo (Jaan) again. Two sons, three statements, and no source that reconciles them.

The dating of the second part does not agree either: the folklore.ee edition says it was finished by Christmas 1929; Estonian Wikipedia says she dictated it in 1930. It runs to 4 318 verses. Voolaine had asked for a continuation — how the strongman rules over people, judges them and takes part in their lives — and suggested she weave in “Ilolaul”, “Ilmatütar” and folk tales. Her solution was her own: she built the work out of separate sub-stories, which let her fold in a range of Seto songs. Voolaine reviewed the result himself in Eesti Kirjandus 1930, no. 8, pp. 378–389.

And in October 1927, between the two Peko campaigns, a third commission: a verse novel called “Ale”. She finished it within six weeks and the manuscript was sent on 17 December 1927. It runs to 10 042 verses. That is the number this page is named after, and it is worth doing an arithmetic no source does: six weeks is forty-two days, so about 239 verses a day — every day, in her head, with no way of reading back what was already down.

What no source describes is the scene itself. Not how many hours a day. Not whether she sang the lines to a tune or spoke them. Not whether she paused for the pen to catch up, whether she corrected herself, whether the previous day was read back to her before she went on. Estonian sources use both “laulis ette” — sang out — and “dikteeris” for the same act. The machine on this page, a little further up, runs the rules that would make such work possible. It does not claim to know how she did it.

Paul Hagu, “Setu rahvalaulik Anne Vabarna” (Estonian Literary Museum, folklore.ee) · Vikipeedia: Peko (eepos) · Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum: Peko laulu II osa · Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum: Anne Vabarna „Ale“ · folklore.ee rahvamuusika e-raamat: esitaja Anne Vabarna

Her first public performance outside Setomaa was in Tartu on 3 February 1928, organised by the Estonian Folklore Archives together with the Academic Mother Tongue Society — the same institutions that had been collecting from her also put her on a stage. In June 1931 Väisänen took Anne and her three-member choir to Helsinki for a cultural congress; the Finnish Literature Society’s sound archive recorded 37 sample fragments of her repertoire onto phonograph cylinders there. Part of her recorded voice is therefore in Finland rather than in Estonia.

Between 1932 and 1935 she took part in tours organised by the music museum and the Tori local museum: 404 songs in 214 different places. In 1936, in the campaign run by Riigi Ringhääling with the Folklore Archives under August Pulst and Herbert Tampere, 20 examples of songs, singing games and laments were recorded from her onto gramophone discs, with her as lead singer. She was fifty-eight.

Finnish newspapers, Paul Hagu reports, called her “andekas laulik, julge esineja, võrratu improvisaator” — a gifted singer, a bold performer, a matchless improviser. The same biography lists what she gave on the tours: a greeting improvisation, a lullaby, a war song, a bridal lament, game songs and lyric songs. The greeting improvisation is the point: over 20 000 verses of her recorded repertoire are improvisations addressed to collectors, statesmen, doctors and guests. That is not memory. That is the form at work.

The Soviet decades Paul Hagu describes without smoothing: after the war she had to adapt to new economic circumstances and a changed ideology, and she too has a couple of improvisations in praise of Stalin, which Hagu calls downright obligatory, and later songs in praise of the new collective-farm order and Soviet peace policy. The same paragraph shows the other side as well: as a recognised folk singer she was treated with clear respect, and attempts were made — cunningly, in Hagu’s word — to use her reputation for the new ideology. In 1947 her choir’s songs were performed in Moscow for the city’s 800th anniversary — the longest journey of her life — and in the same year she was granted a state personal pension. In 1959, aged 82, she was taped at Tonja: “Urbõpäävä laul”, with Ode Vabarna. The age is the sources’: ERR’s archive dates its Tonja recordings to 4–5 June 1959, when by her birthday on 21 December she was still eighty-one; whether this tape is from those days, no source found says.

Paul Hagu, “Setu rahvalaulik Anne Vabarna” (Estonian Literary Museum, folklore.ee) · folklore.ee rahvamuusika e-raamat: esitaja Anne Vabarna · laul.setomaa.ee: „Urbõpäävä laul“, Anne Vabarna, 1959 · ERR arhiiv: Anne Vabarna, Tonja 1959 · Kalkun & Oras, Res Musica 10 (2018): nõukogudeaegne laululoome Setomaal