Among the more entertaining figures in Estonian myth is a real person in peasant culture, the rehepapp or the dryer and thresher of grain. His role at the estate was also to keep the fires going. In folklore, he was a trickster, a prickly personality who moved between the visible and invisible worlds, the natural and supernatural.
Making fun of the estate owner and the devil alike, the thresher earned among village folk honour and respect; the reference is Marju Kõivupuu’s book, Estonian Mythology for the Beginner (2023).
“Old Barny” is how the thresher is translated in an essay discussing Andrus Kivirähk’s 2000 novel Rehepapp ehk November, which as the title suggests is set in the dark and cold month of November. I bought a copy in Estonian from Rahva Raamat in Tallinn, in the belief I would learn more about the rehepapp.
In their essay, Ott Heinapuu and Katre Kikas explain that while Kivirähk has drawn on tropes from Estonian myth, his project is more about creating a surreal cultural landscape set in the late 19th or early 20th Centuries. Some of the narrative is Faustian, characters who sell their soul to the devil in exchange for something of value, only to later lose their life.
In general, it is difficult to tell from this essay what the book is about, other than to invoke a sense of the mysterious. If this is a portrayal of Estonian rural culture of a bygone age, it would be impenetrable, perhaps, to anyone other than an Estonian. Nevertheless, the following seems worth reproducing:
“One of the outcomes of this ethno-moralistic discourse was the birth of the concept rehepaplus – ‘old barnyism’ - which in the press acquired the meaning of ‘constantly thinking of the easiest way to appropriate something to his own use’. Some critics declared that this sort of conduct has helped the Estonians to survive our troublesome past. Others saw it as a national disaster: as a quality that must be rooted out, as something we must be ashamed of.”
New Zealanders have the same dilemma, in either admiring or criticising a national tendency to ingenuity or underhandedness when solving problems. An example occurred in the early 2000s when the government eased building regulations, the result being leaky structures around the country, costing the owners collectively many billions of dollars – a catastrophe for those affected.
And yet the New Zealand team performed extraordinarily well at the 2024 Paris Olympics, levering off very modest support, compared with that available overseas. When we put our minds to it, New Zealanders can achieve a lot with very little.
Travelling in Estonia and peering into restored old farmhouses – combined barns and living quarters – I found myself wondering about the rehepapp. A figure seated in the dark, the only illumination, a burning splint of wood set on an iron stand, and the light of the fire that must be kept going through long winter nights while the household sleeps. Time to think and reflect, to ponder the deep mysteries of existence, perhaps.
Kõivupuu writes that the trade of rehepapp was first mentioned in the 1400s in Estonia in church records, and persisted until the late 1800s, coming to an end with the advent of mechanised grain harvesting and threshing.
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