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This article introduces an approach to ideologies of texts and of categories of text type for approaching the emic conceptions of things made of language or other kinds of signs. Finno-Karelian incantations of the ritual specialist known as a tietäjä provide a case study, considered in the broader context of cultures in the Circum-Baltic region. Text ideology is salient in this tradition owing to a conception that a performer will lose an incantation's power when it is communicated as a whole to someone else, but not if verses are omitted. Discussion is organized in four parts, providing different types of contextualization before discussing emic conceptions of incantations proper. It begins with a theoretical introduction to text ideologies and genre ideologies in relation to language ideologies. This section includes positioning the approach from the perspective of (Finnish) folklore studies for better multidisciplinary accessibility. The second section contextualizes the tietäjä as a social institution, the corpora and approach. The third section introduces the ritual technology of the tietäjä, the physics of the world in which these operate and what these are conceived as 'doing' in ritual performance. The fourth section turns to the understanding of incantations as a type of text object in relation to the technology and their variation in practice.

This article presents a new theory on the origins of the common Finnic tetrameter as a poetic form (also called the Kalevala-meter, regilaul meter, etc.). It argues that this verse form emerged as a creolization of the North Germanic alliterative verse form during a period of intensive language contacts, and that the Finnic ethnopoetic ecology made it isosyllabic. Previous theories have focused on the trochaic, tetrametric structure and viewed other features of poetic form as secondary or incidental. This is the first theory to offer a metrically driven explanation for the distinctive features of the poetic form: the systematic placement of lexically stressed short syllables in metrically unstressed positions and systematic yet unmetricalized use of verse-internal alliteration. The emergence of the poetic form may be viewed simply in terms of hybridization, but its formation as a central mode for epic and ritual poetry demands consideration of social factors. Creolization is considered a social process of hybridization at the level of sign systems that is characterized by a salient asymmetrical relation of power, authority or other value in the cultural sign systems being reconfigured from the perspective of the society or groups involved. An argument is presented that North Germanic contacts also produced systematic verse-internal alliteration in Finnic languages. Discussion then turns to the distinction between the origin and spread of the poetic form. The poetic form's uniformity across Finnic language areas in spite of its 'foreign' metrical features along with the range of genres with which it was used are considered indicators of the poetic form's spread with language, forming an argument that the tetrameter emerged within an environment that also produced Late Proto-Finnic, and then spread with Late Proto-Finnic language and culture through areas where other Finnic language forms were spoken. This paper introduces a new theory concerning the history of the common Finnic tetrameter (Kalevala-meter, regilaul meter). Unlike earlier discussions of the meter, my aim is to offer a metrically-driven account of the most

Parallelism 1 has been considered a fundamental feature of artistic expression. Robert Lowth (1753:180) coined the term parallelismus membrorum ("parallelism of members") to describe a variety of different types of equivalence or resemblance that he observed between verses in Biblical Hebrew. Lowth's study is in many respects the foundation of research on parallelism, 2 although his terminology only began to spread across the nineteenth century. The concept expanded considerably during the twentieth century, especially through the far-reaching influences of Roman Jakobson. From early in his career, Jakobson looked at parallelism as an abstract text-structuring principle of "le rapprochement de deux unités" (Jakobson 1977 [1919]: 25) ("the bringing together of two units;" translations following a citation are by the present authors), later referred to in English as "recurrent returns" (1981 [1966]:98). Jakobson saw parallelism not only at the level of words, syntax, or meanings of verses as discussed by Lowth, but also at the level of sounds and rhythms within and across verses as well as in larger, complex structures. The breadth of Jakobson's perspective allowed textual parallelism to connect fluidly with parallelism in music and other forms of expression. His views are the foundation for advancing the concept from language to a general semiotic phenomenon-a phenomenon observable within and across all sorts of media. Parallelism has become a central term and concept on discussions of literature, poetics, and beyond, and yet the phenomenon is so basic, so pervasive, that it is challenging to pin down. The discourse surrounding parallelism has constructed the ways we think about the concept. Recognizing what has happened in that discourse can make it easier to make sense of the different ways the concept is handled. Nigel Fabb recently observed that parallelism "has remained undertheorized." 3 Across the past century, research on parallelism has developed considerably, but James J. Fox describes this research as developing "in silos:" it builds up in towers of discussion on parallelism in a particular culture, language group, or field of research

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