Giant elk-shaped geoglyph discovered in the Urals, dating to the 6th-3rd millennium B.C.

Hat tip to Forging the Sampo, who also has some good thoughts and quatations on elk in Finnish folklore and the Kalevala.

Music for monsoon season, the latest entry in Forging the Sampo's Finnish Folk Music Fridays, which I highly recommend!

And if we here in New Mexico were Uralic pagans, we'd be all over this rain prayer to Ukko.

Here's more on the revisionist-history Lord of the Rings (which Smartdogs mentioned in the comments a few posts back). Sundry observations:

• Somehow, this brings strongly to my mind the more paranoid stories on modern-day Pravda. Something to do with that Slavic soul we hear so much about, I guess.
  
  
• I find the excerpts barely readable, in the stylistic sense. Substantial (though far from total) blame can go to the translator. But it makes me wonder how Tolkien comes across in translation. I can't imagine these stories without his philologist's pen evoking all those pre-1066 ancestral memories buried in our dictionaries. I suppose it likely does well in the Germanic languages.* Yet another big score for us native English speakers!
  
  
• On a similar note, ever a borderline Luddite and nature Romantic, I still find myself siding with Gandalf in excerpted dialog. Who cares if Mordor may eventually produce the iPad?
  
  
• Many things indicate that the author is not a very serious Tolkien fan. I leave their identification as an exercise to our nerdy readers.

Needless to say, I'm in no rush to read the whole thing.

*Also Finnish, maybe? I have the sense, almost totally derived from folk music, that there are certain vocabulary and idioms, mostly Ingrian- and Karelian-oriented, that hint at a more tribal, barbaric, pagan past. What other languages have such a tension? Maybe the Turkic tongues, when they prefer old steppe vocabulary over other terms. The Turks seem to do this when they use ak and kara in lieu of beyaz and siyah (white and black). The latter are the dictionary words, but the former show up in the family names, toponyms, songs, strong idioms and such, from Turkey to Mongolia. (Digression: karakurbağası="dark frog" i.e. "toad.") I suppose their equivalents of Latin and French are Arabic and Persian; no doubt the tension was much stronger before Atatürk's linguistic reforms (makes you wonder what we'd be speaking had Tolkien been to England as Mustafa Kemal was to Turkey). But nothing's even in the same league as English for this stuff. Hooray for us!

Ah, synchronicity! Today's Performance Today has an excellent segment dedicated to folk influences in Finnish classical music. Well worth a listen, it includes a composition based on Sami joiking.

This may well interest no one but me and Proclus, but here it is anyway: Digital Archive of Finnish Folk Tunes. The specific search feature works best if you just want to browse; you can filter by region and by type of tune. Obviously, it helps to be mildly conversant in Finnish geography and music. This polska was a nice find (click here to listen, and click the image for a clearer view):

Here, via Languagehat, is a wonderful series of four posts (1, 2, 3, 4) regarding the Ob-Ugrian languages, that is Mansi and Khanty. Some of the purely linguistic talk is dense even for me, who have studied a Finno-Ugrian language, but there remains much to be enjoyed: bear taboos, the Ob-Ugrian's lack of polite terms for body parts, river-related vocabulary ("Further, n?luw, meaning ‘in the direction of (down to) the river/downriver’ can also mean ‘towards the fire’, which is in the centre of the hut."), a chilling poem about the forced conversion of the Mansi, and a splendid folk story about a mouse, which concludes thus:

the mouse is offered food by children in the village, but refuses the perch because the bones will stick in his throat. At the third village he is offered roe broth, the favourite dish of his father and grandfather. The mouse eats and drinks so much his stomach bursts. The children sew it back up with a needle and some roots. The mouse gets in the boat and rows off. He meets a reindeer, and they play hide and seek in the forest. The reindeer accidentally swallows the mouse. The reindeer suggests that the mouse come out through his eyes, but his eyes are full of sleep. The mouse cannot come out through the reindeer’s mouth, because it is too sputum-y. And the reindeer’s ears are full of wax. So the mouse goes into the stomach, gets out his little knife, and cuts a hole in the reindeer’s belly. The reindeer dies, and the mouse strips the meat and fur, runs home and summons his wife and their daughters and sons. The mouse family collect the reindeer flesh and meat, and take it home, where they ate and lived well for a long time. And they all lived happily ever after.

Happily ever after is rendered in Ugrian idiom as They are still alive, if they did not die. The end.

Some previous Finno-Ugrian posts: Finnish Kanteletar, Khanty Bear Feast Song.