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The possibilities for using folklore in studying history are directly dependent on the raised problem. In memories about the distant past, reality and fiction are often mixed up, which is why historians may regard the reliability of such stories as low. Still, such folklore shows what was valued, which events were felt to be significant and important. For historians, problems have been posed by the reliability and difficulties in dating the lore. In connection with the emergence of microhistory, more and more attention is being paid to how and what people thought, and it is often very difficult to find answers to this question in written sources. This article observes the possibilities for using historical tradition in the studies of agrarian and settlement history and, more specifically, five narrow topics that concern border markers, the emergence of villages, land use in farms, inheritance matters, and beggars. Oral tradition about the founding of villages and farms and their first settlers is in most cases connected with the periods of war and the plague, immigration of people, or some other extraordinary event. Descriptions of everyday life, which are abundantly found in folk memory, usually speak about well known and familiar things. At the same time, they considerably help to broaden notions of the past and enable to find out the peasants’ attitudes towards and evaluations of one or another event or phenomenon. As a result of taking folklore into consideration, the picture of history becomes much more differentiated and colourful. The folklore that has been observed in this article is closely connected with the village society, and it primarily reveals notions connected with the farm people’s everyday life. Archive sources usually disclose them from quite a different point of view. As a result of the analysis, we have reached the conclusion that the best results are achieved when historical tradition is taken into account for relatively recent events, those that have happened since the second half of the 19th century, and under circumstances in which spatial relationships have not considerably changed. The use of earlier lore is more complicated, although it also enables us to see people’s attitudes, which gives a ‘soul’ to the discussed phenomena. The biggest difference is that archive materials, naturally, do not reflect the reasons hidden in the peasants’ mental world. Namely, this is why the use of folklore enables to provide important extra material for studying settlement and agrarian history, which supplements a rational picture about past events and processes, and enables to open up deeper backgrounds to what happened.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the collective expression of attitudes elicited by the doping scandal that concerned the esteemed Estonian cross-country skier and Olympic gold medal winner, Andrus Veer­palu. The paper provides an insight into the evolution of an athlete into a national hero on the Internet. The analysis is based on the material col­lected from Estonian online media during two years (from April 2011 to March 2013), when Andrus Veerpalu’s court case was actively followed by the Estonian sports circles and laymen alike. The data corpus includes the most relevant news texts published in the online news portal Delfi (www.delfi.ee), comments from the same online environment, posts from the Facebook fan sites, e.g., “We believe in Andrus Veerpalu”, etc. The doping accusation called forth a quasi-religious movement, which was built around the belief that the athlete was sacred and it was not allowed to attack or accuse him in any way. The main threads in the comments analysed within this study could be divided into two opposing, although intertwining categories: the serious and the ironic. Both categories included people who believed in Veerpalu’s innocence, and those who did not; in addition, there were those who displayed their superiority towards the entire discussion. The analysis addresses the transformation of an Olympic hero into a national hero, and points out narratives that treat the scandal within the present-day genres of urban legends, conspiracy theories, and Internet humour. The more or less genuine belief of people was reflected in sought-out explanations for the doping test result and counter-arguments (above all, via conspiracy stories, but also through social mobilisation in support of Veerpalu). In the post factum comments, the ma­jority expressed the feeling that their trust had been justified; they renewed their unremitting belief in the acquitted hero. But the rather complicated end to the long case was also a confusing one, and this allowed the ironic discourse to produce parodies, jokes and other critical comments. The questions central to the analysis are the following: (1) How does the audience interpret information provided by the media and which topics do the interpretations initiate in turn? (2) How does the notion of belief emerge in the discussion, which narratives and stereotypes are believed in, and how is the belief rationalised? (3) Which folkloric and other cultural (transmedial) texts have taken inspiration from this doping scandal?

The article observes the degree to which narrators of life stories interpret the course of their life as an individual choice and as a degree of inevitability resulting from the socio-historical context. Folkloristic approaches of the survival of the tradition as the intertwinement of predetermination (folklore awareness) and individual experience, and the approaches of the construction of "autobiographical self" based on the sciences of psychology in biographical research serve as the theoretical basis of the article. The material derives from three biographies sent to the Estonian Life Histories Association in the course of the collection competition of life histories conducted in 2000-2001 on the topic My life and the life of my family in Estonian SSR and the Republic of Estonia. The campaign resulted in over 300 life histories, currently held at the Archives of Cultural History of the Estonian Literary Museum (fund 350). The main source of the article is a life history which is compared with two other stories from the angle of problem presentation. The first basis of comparison is the temporal context. The historical background of the stories of the informants, born in the early 1950s in rural communities in Estonia, has been shaped by the periods of stability under the Soviet regime: during 1950-1960 and during 1970-1980. The first period is described partly through hardships endured during the post-war period, and partly through the economic difficulties at the time collective farms were established. The second period is characterised as more stable, but was still marked with problems with shortage of goods. On the axis of individual course of life, the first period is associated with childhood and the role of family in the informants' lives, whereas the second period is associated with school, acquiring an occupation and the course of personal life. The second period also entails the formation of attitudes towards the Soviet theme. The analysed life histories are presented in the context of events of the 1990s, the period of radical change in the political system of Estonia: how the narrators view the Soviet period now, at the time of independence, and how they perceive their opportunities in the new situation and which aspects do they see themselves as having been deprived of. The second basis for comparison is the self-images of narrators in the extreme situations during the stable period of the Soviet Estonia (prison/army violence). The concordance between individual abilities and behavioural preferences point to the role of cultural predetermination in specific decisions of the individual. The analysis of the narratives reflects the dynamics of predetermination and choices: historical-political framework as a predetermination, adaptation to it as a choice; origin as a predetermination, the interpretation of the life experience of one's family members as a choice; a violent situation as a predetermination, defiance with either physical force or analysis of experience is an individual choice, but also as a predetermination owing to personal qualities and abilities. The central analyses of personal histories diversify period analyses: the Soviet period in this case is not rendered meaningful only within the framework of the period (1940-1991) and political ideas. The issue of cultural continuity transgressing the limits of the period illustrate the life during and after the Soviet period. In the context of this article, the cultural continuity was expressed through the participation of family.

Peer reviewed

The paper gives an overview of six plants, naturalized in Estonia: butterbur (Petasites hybridus), chicory (Cichorium intubus), elecampane inula (Inula helenium), horseradish (Armoracia rusticana), soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) and sweet violet (Viola odorata).The approach to their naturalization is based on ethnobotanical rather than biological qualities. The first disseminators of foreign plants were merchants. The earliest cultivators may have also been monasteries, although it is not known what exactly was grown in these gardens. The most important plants cultivated in monasteries were herbs, which were planted in 4-12 beds, vegetables in 9-18 beds, whereas the rest of the garden was reserved for an orchard. The establishing of the first pharmacies in Estonian towns introduced the planting of new species in gardens for sale (the earliest pharmacy, the Tallinn Town Hall Pharmacy, dates back to 1422, with a herb garden founded in 1452). The oldest preserved list of plants growing in pharmacy garden originating from Narva pharmacy from the year 1677 contains already following herbs: chicory, elecampane inula, butterbur and sweet violet. Next to pharmacies, foreign species were also disseminated by grocers and drugstores. A century later, in 1777, the list of tracheophytes found in Estonia and Livonia was compiled; this list has been considered the first written source in the field of botany. In the list all the six plants were noted as natural species. The spread of the plants was speeded by their versatile usage - all these plants were used as medicines; chicory, horseradish and elecampane inula were also vegetable plants; elecampane inula, sweet violet, soapwort and butterbur were popular landscape plants; soapwort was used to clean silk and wool. Various legal acts, which have been applied to the plants, have also influenced their spread. Elecampane inula was listed in the first Estonian dictionary in 1660. Translated literature became an important factor in introducing herbs into broader use. Already the first journal (published in 1766-1767) and the earliest popular medical book (1771) in Estonian describe the use of horseradish, butterbur, elecampane inula and sweet violet. The plants, especially garden horseradish, are repeatedly mentioned in almanacs and books published since. The use of chicory is described only once in 1895, and soapwort once in 1870. The paper describes in more detail the formation of new ethnic names. The plant names were mostly derived from adaptations of German names (e.g. aland, pestilens-wurtsel, wiola, sigur, etc.), later from German translations (e.g. katkujuur for butterbur) and in some cases, the name of the local plant was used to mark a similar new plant (e.g. sinilill, or hepatica, for sweet violet and põierohi, or campion, for soapwort). In conclusion it has to be said that the important factors in distributing those plants were changes in landscape gardening and eating habits as well as the fact that the plants were eventually abandoned from use and thus, lost the most powerful natural enemy - the man.

Since the late 16th – early 17th century, tobacco smoking habit in Europe spread widely, which led to a new business branch – the production and sale of pipes. Due to the lack of historical data about when the habit of smoking tobacco emerged in eastern Baltic, it is imperative to pay attention to clay pipes that are considered to be a particularly suitable group of findings to specify the chronological limits. The article analyses in detail the chronologically earliest clay pipes found during archaeological research in Vilnius. Based on the typology of findings and known analogues, the author singles out the oldest pipes, names the possible places of their production, provides an interpretation of the appearance of pipes in the city. The article provides an overview of the development of smoking in Vilnius in the first half of the 17th century, as the text focuses not only on the analysis of findings, but also briefly introduces the historical, social and cultural contexts that led to the smoking of one or another type of tobacco pipe in Vilnius.

One of the characteristics of the 15th–16th-century pre-Reformation sacral art in southern central Europe, as well as in the Netherlands and Italy, is the multitude of natural plant depictions. Depending on the artists and subjects of paintings, plant depictions could, similarly to animal depictions, fulfil the roles of attributes, allegorical and metaphorical devices and/or to represent various landscapes. The appearance and properties of plants, their habitats and usage are the fundamental features of plant symbolism. Plant names in late medieval and early modern period herbals is another important clue for understanding the meaning of vegetation shown in the context of landscapes. Natural plants in pre-Reformation art, as interpreted here, represent the syncretism of Christian and folk belief in mundane and spiritual life. The richness of popular elements in Christian art and their interpretation, however, was a reason for the discontinuation of the same pictorial tradition and its replacement by another, suppressed into institutional frames and more controlled by the authorities.

Proceedings of the Workshop on NLP for Reading and Writing – Resources, Algorithms and Tools (SLTC 2008). Editors: Rickard Domeij, Sofie Johansson Kokkinakis, Ola Knutsson and Sylvana Sofkova Hashemi. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 3 (2009), 14-18. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/4116 .

The paper aims to define the structure of the population of a relatively small East Lithuanian Barrow Cemeteries culture territory and the causes that could have predetermined the emergence of the rich inter-regional warrior elite graves and their rather abrupt disappearance.

The tradition of the Udmurts beyond the River Kaama includes the following supernatural creatures that protect houses and outbuildings: korkakuzjo, or the cottage guardian, gulbech taka - the cottage guardian, who appears in the shape of a ram and lives in the cellar, gidkuzjo - the guardian spirit of cattle-sheds or stables, minchokuzjo - the guardian of the sauna, kuzjõrsi - the long-haired fairy inhabiting the sauna. While korkakuzjo and gidkuzjo could be either good or evil creatures, then gulbech taka, minchokuzjo and kuzjõrsi were utterly malevolent. Besides believing in spirits connected to various buildings the Udmurts beyond the Kaama also believed in the presence of zõrtkuzjo, the guardian spirit of the whole household, which embodied the characteristic features of both the cottage and stable fairy. By nature, zõrtkuzjo was both a benevolent and an evil spirit.