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Hasso Krull. The Great Bull and the Heritage of the Stone Age |
2007, nr. 3 |
In Rune XX of the Finnish epic "The Kalevala"
we find the description of a great bull to be butchered for a
wedding party. The incredible proportions of the bull seem to
suggest a mythical being, possibly an incarnation of a numinous
cosmic power. A similar song is also widely known in Estonia.
Although it has been argued that there have existed two different
songs of the great bull, their aesthetic principle seems to indicate
a structural identity. Following the Kantian aesthetics of the
"mathematical sublime" (Mathematisch-Erhabene),
one can say that the description of the bull aims to create an
impression of something that would be "great without any
comparison" (über alle Vergleichung groß).
In an Estonian version from Haljala (1894), the great bull will
be "made" by a tiny black cow, whose proportions are
no less incredible. That might support the idea that the song
of the great bull is in fact a cosmogonic myth ending with a scene
of a sacrifice. This idea finds more support in other important
details: the search for a butcher, who is nowhere to be found
except in some mythical foreign country; the connection of the
bull with both the sun and the moon; the fact that the song has
been sung in the ritual context of harvest, bee parties and beer
brewing; and the inclination to represent the body of the bull
as a source of cornucopian fertility. All that leads one to suspect
that the image of the great bull might be remarkably older than
the songs themselves. It might belong to some common European
heritage tracing back to the Neolithic or even the Paleolithic
era.
Keywords: Finnish, Estonian, mythology,
archaic symbolism, the sublime, runic song.
Hasso Krull (b. 1964), MA, Tallinn University,
Estonian Institute of Humanities, Department of Cultural Theory
hasso@ehi.ee
| 2007 |
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