Visböcker i kulturella gränsland

Gemenskaper i estlandssvenskars handskrivna visböcker skapade 1861–1945

Abstract

Songbooks in Cultural Borderlands – Communities in Estonia-Swedes' Handwritten Songbooks Created 1861–1945

In this article, I raise the question what impact handwritten songbooks created by Estonia-Swedes have had on cultural identity formation. During the years 2019-2022, I have collected 28 handwritten songbooks created by 22 young Estonia-Swedes during the period 1861-1945. The songbooks consist of both secular and spiritual songs mostly in Swedish and Estonian, but also in German, English and Russian.

I have analysed the song-books through close-reading. Complementary, I have also made interviews with persons with experiences and knowledge about the situations in which the song-books once were created. Theoretically, I place the songbooks on two musical pathways (Finnegan 1989), the secular and spiritual song pathway. As no songs in any of the songbooks has been written and primarily spread within the Estonia-Swedish population group, I place the creation of songbooks in a cultural borderland, where individuals distance from their taken for granted culture and thereby have the opportunity to both get to know a foreign culture and see ones own culture from distance (Clifford 1992). As musical pathways are based on situations where individuals meet and interact, I understand them as lived communities where different imagined communities (Anderson 2016) get actualized through the songs.

My research shows how individuals might have reached cultural borderlands by following the two different musical pathways. The songbooks created on the spiritual song pathway consist throughout the period mainly of songs in Swedish. This indicates that the lived communities around chapels in spiritual revival environment created bridges to an imagined christian and cultivated pan-Swedish community through the songs.

Most of the secular songs in Swedish have not been changed during the transmission into the songbooks and thereby, I understand also these songs as expressions of an imagined pan-Swedish community. A few of the secular songs have been intentionally reshaped during the transmission, in order to bring out a locally imagined instead of a pan-Swedish community.

Before 1918 the Estonia-Swedish population was a cultural minority within the Russian empire and after 1918 a cultural minority in the republic of Estonia. After 1918, secular songs in Estonian were brought into the songbooks. As most songs are rather exact copies of popular songs spread through recordings and printed lyrics, I understand these songs as expressions of cultural convergance (Slobin & Ronström 1988).