294 NORDIC BALLADS

those of Finland also, though less perfectly exemplified. There is
but one ballad manner in Esthonia and Finland, the pattern of
which is to be found in the songs of Eastern Finland or Karelia,
collected by Elias Lonnrot. In these songs the line is of eight
syllables. The spoken accent is free, but the music imposes a
trochaic rhythm. There is no rhyme or assonance, save what may
occur by chance. Parallelism is a conspicuous feature of the style,
and it tends to break up lyrical passages into approximately equal
blocks; but the stanza is not achieved, and in narrative pieces there
is practically no such division of the material. Thus far there is no
essential difference between the Finnish-Esthonian style and that
of their immediate neighbours in the south. ,

The difference arises in the use of alliteration. Alliteration is
frequent in the folk-songs of all Nordic peoples, but in Finland
(and to a less extent in Esthonia) it is so prominent as to become a
prosodic norm. The accentuation of the first syllable of every word
encourages the use of this device, and the hint may have come
originally from the Swedes. In Eddie verse and in the modern
Icelandic 'rimur' the recurrence of certain initial letters follows a
fixed pattern. There is no fixed pattern in Finnish alliteration. It
may affect all the words of a line, and generally does affect two at
least; but these words are not required to occupy a fixed position.
On the other hand Finnish alliteration really affects more than an
initial letter. The language is relatively poor in consonants, and
the vowels also, divided into three classes by the laws of vowel-
harmony, are relatively few, but well defined. The alliteration is
satisfied, indeed, by its occurrence in the first letter of words, but
the following vowels usually correspond, either as being identical
or as being associated in the regular permutations, and there may
be several other consonants and vowels yielding echoes.* They are
due, as in the 'rimur', to the application of a high technical stan-
dard to the composition of popular verse. It would be hard to
decide whether this standard was original or elaborated in more
recent times. In Esthonian verse it is more arbitrary and fluctuat-
ing. Though the surviving forms in Finland are the older, they are
encountered in regions which were not the home and focus of
Finnish balladry, but have suffered displacement towards the
periphery of that culture.

The Finnish ballads have been pressed back from the coastal
1 See Note N, p. 390.