Eliidi pilk pimedasse onni. Maarahvas ja isand ning vastastikused representatsioonid
Authors: Kalkun Andreas 
Published: February 2025

In this article, I look at examples of motifs of darkness and dirtiness in representations fostered by the historical German-speaking elite in regard to Estonian peasants. The voluminous and diverse Baltic German corpus of texts reflects period-specific depictions of peasants and foreign peoples as well as more specific representations with local characteristics. As a counterweight to the elite’s view, I attempt, by studying runo song motifs, to discover how peasants saw and portrayed their rulers. Until the end of the 19th century, runo song was a universal popular style of song, an idiom that peasants would use in everyday interaction, ritual situations and entertainment contexts. It is not surprising that many types of songs in the runo genre also reflect serf life on manors; depending on the context, the representation can be serious or humorous, more poetic or concrete. Runo songs amount to a large body of work and indeed manor-themed songs are significant and numerous within this tradition, which led me to seek out peasant voices in this specific genre for this article.
The elite’s representations of peasants are multifaceted and not confined to a single genre. Yet this body of textual work also contains recurring motifs and images. Ones relating to darkness and squalor, and more broadly, night and dimly lit conditions are widespread and occur in a great variety. Smoke, darkness, mud and dirt recur in descriptions of living quarters and metaphors of night or hell/purgatory tie in with these. Texts linked to darkness and squalor of housing also go hand in hand with putative weakness of character among Estonians (sloth, promiscuity). A close reading that accounts for the hierarchical colonial system shows the German-speaking elite’s descriptions of peasants and their ethnography to be surprisingly cynical. The elite regarded the peasants’ body and their manners and dwellings from a distance without much empathy. Old Estonian or Livonian peasants were often depicted as the Other, differing from the “master race” in terms of living conditions, habits and innate nature.
It is much harder to study the voice and mindset of historical peasants but recorded oral do provide some opportunity for this. As expressed in collected runo songs, peasant voices give a different sort of perspective on the colonial viewpoint of the German elite and provides agency to the peasants described. The article examines motifs where animal metaphors are used to refer to the bodies of the ruling class, or the clothing is invoked to metonymically sing about the manor lords’ bodies. Neither of these groups of symbols is unambiguous and besides fear and alienation, they clearly also include desire longing and admiration. Animal and clothing motifs may be entertainingly humorous or ironic but may also be connected to religion and fears. Studying representations brings out the complexity of the elite-peasant relationship. The idea of the elite, perpetually fending off fright and repulsion as it peers into a dark peasant hovel may strike today’s readers as grotesque, while the way peasants conceive of their overlords also can appear equally piquant and bizarre.