13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

KUPERJANOV, Andres

On Estonian Folk Astronomy - Birds’ Way or Milky Way?

In archival material ‘Linnutee’ (the Milky Way, literally ‘the Birds’ Way’) usually refers to the path along which the birds fly but sometimes denotes ‘the path that the Old Heathen trod upon with his huge birch bark shoes’. In runic songs ‘Linnutee’ is associated with motifs of the great oak and of its chopping down. Associating ‘Linnutee’ with the ‘Great World Tree’ is by no means a phenomenon only of primitive Ugric cosmology, but characteristic of almost all peoples.

The original ‘World Tree’ was a fig tree, in biblical areas a cedar in Lebanon, among the Germanic people an ash, in the Balto-Finnic area an oak, and further beyond a birch. Several authors, including Heino Eelsalu, argue that at the time when the North Pole was positioned in the Swan constellation (due to the precession) and ‘Linnutee’ stretched right across the sky throughout the night, it was believed to be the ‘World Tree’. With the shifting of the North Pole ‘Linnutee’ began to tilt, and it was at this time that it came to be associated with the chopping down of the ‘World Tree’.

To reconstruct popular astronomy it is important that, in addition to the collected material, other more indirect sources are used – namely, various legends, runic songs, other genres of oral tradition and information on the tradition of other peoples.