This was a question put to academics at a botanical field station in western Estonia, and they laughed. “Not at all” was one view, citing a much later arrival of Finnic peoples in the Baltic region than earlier thought. This places the Finnic ancestors of Estonians migrating westwards during the Bronze Age, which accords with an archaeology text published in 2020.
Estonian History I (2020) - Estonia's Finnic ancestors moved SW from western Siberia
Estonians are a mixed race, was the consensus, the result of more than 800 years of invasions from west and east. Besides, the Estonians themselves did not arrive into an empty land. Look to the Finns to find a more Finno-Ugric appearance, we were told.
This would be very short were there not more to the story. The DNA of the people may have changed over time, however, what about language and culture.
Here too, I was in for a surprise. A linguist who joined the gathering at Puhtu told me, smiling, that the Estonian language today has elements of German grammar and, naturally, many words borrowed from German.
It dawned on me that the Estonian habit of placing the past participle of a verb at the end of a sentence is a particularly German language trait – ma olin Wellingtonis sündnud, “I was in Wellington born”.
The verbs too in their modifications resemble that of Indo-European languages: compare the present tense of the verb “to come” in Estonian, and then in Latin, following the scheme of: I, you, third person singular, we, you (plural), they:
Tulen, tuled, tuleb, tuleme, tulete, tulevad
Venio, venis, venit, venimus, venitis, veniunt
An uncanny similarity for languages that in most other ways are very different. Even after several years of learning Estonian, on and off, I cannot read a single page of text in a book without consulting a dictionary, and am often perplexed over a sentence that makes no sense when translated into English. I can only guess at the meaning the writer is conveying.
Perhaps, I am failing to come to grips with the Estonian mindset, and so now to Estonian culture. A source of astonishing ideas is Valdur Mikita’s Forestonia, published in 2020, also in German and Estonian.
This series of essays on the connections between Estonians and their largely forested land is not easy to crystallise into a few words. Nevertheless, I will try.
Distilling Mikita’s metaphors and poetic imagery, Estonian culture has to do with forests, the sauna, and retreating from civilisation to the summer cottage, the suvila, to chop wood, tend the garden and orchard, invite family and friends to barbecues, drink home-made beer, fruit wine or schnapps, pick berries, hunt for mushrooms, and generally live in tune with nature.
In particular: “Our odd tradition of retreating to summer cabins is almost the only thing that ties us umbilically to something greater; that gives life a deeper meaning. Somewhat bipolar as we are [in adapting to modern urban life], the summer cabin has become our real home, and thus, in reality, we have gone and stored a great part of Estonian culture in its yard.”
And: “Estonia is an unusual place (at least in a European context) where landscape customs have survived to the present day. Our creation stories and traditions of maintaining sacred sites points to a very ancient cultural stratum that disappeared from the civilised world long ago ... Estonia remains a corner of the world where a large part of human culture has, even now, remained not fully cultivated. The forest has thus preserved something peculiar, supplying Estonian culture with an exquisite Palaeolithic substance.”
To conclude, this country at the eastern edge of Europe survives as a culture that has shed the Soviet legacy and raised its living standards without losing what is most important to being human, by inadvertently harking back to ancient times.
Comments