Testo / Lyrics / Paroles / Sanat: Kanteletar
Musica / Music / Musique / Sävel: trad.

This song, inspired by Riccardo Venturi's recent contribution, has little to do with antiwar themes and issues. Instead, its all about unconditional love, and if hatred is the fuel of war, love works exactly the opposite way. Therefore, I sincerely hope that this beautiful song will find its niche on this website.

This poem is known to exist in a total of 157 versions of which three are introduced here. The one best known in Finland is this VERSION 1 from Kanteletar, a collection of Finnish folk poetry gathered by Elias Lönnrot during several expeditions in the 1820s and 30s and first published in 1840.

Throughout centuries, the oral tradition of Finnish and Karelian folk poetry was kept alive and passed on from generation to generation by rune singers reciting, or actually singing, poems in simple and... (Continues)

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Suomalainen kansanlaulu
Ballata popolare finlandese
A Finnish folk ballad
Ballade populaire finlandaise

Velisurmaaja (The Fratricide) is a (very) old Finnish folksong. One of the many gruesome, cruel and highly dramatic murder ballads which are so common in all European balladries. The ballad comes probably from the same, widespread ballad stock of the well known Scottish Edward (Child #13, ”Quhy dois zour sword sae drap wi' bluid, Edward, Edward?”, in Percy's fake-antique spelling) and of Danish Sven i Rosengård: a striking, breathtaking dialogue between a mother and his son, in which he gradually reveals and confesses he has killed his (usually older) brother, pressed by his mother's precise questions, because the latter has "made his wife laugh" (i.e., he was making love with her). This is not the first old murder ballad included in this website: another specimen is French L'écolier... (Continues)