Latvian folk song

Latvia’s cultural and linguistic heritage

Baltic moral philosophies perceive a participatory universe where dynamic flows of energy interweave material existence. Drawing from archaeological and linguistic sources, Endre Bojtár (2000) finds that ancient Baltic societies developed in accordance with an animist ontology and a matriarchal axiology. Like many other Indigenous societies around the world, precolonial Balts inhabited a cosmological realm where humans, trees, and animals transmuted into one another through cycles of reincarnation. Not only did people worship sacred forests and make daily offerings to Mother Earth, but they also maintained intimate bonds with all living beings, from flora and fauna to hills, rivers and stones. Cultural customs, such as seasonal festivals, encouraged people to view non-human forms of life as kin, and to nurture biodiversity as one would care for children.

When German crusaders colonized the Baltics, proto-Latvians responded by enfolding their pagan spirituality into Christianity. Although colonizing forces have fragmented Indigenous Baltic knowledge systems, obscuring their contributions to global science, their lessons are encoded in linguistic and oral traditions, as well as in folk symbols that transmit the wisdom of an archaic Baltic science.

Song is central to cultural identity across the three Baltic sister states, where Latvian Dainas, Lithuanian Dainos, and Estonian Runo song traditions house ancient moral philosophies. Latvian Dainas are quatrain-based poems, composed of four lines that alternately rhyme and typically are sung at gatherings. There are more than 1.2 million poems in existence – many of which are more than a thousand years old – making Dainas one of the largest recorded bodies of oral knowledge in the world (Bula, 2017). Dainas share linguistic ties to Lithuania’s non-rhyming songs, but they employ a similar rhythm as ancient Liv and Estonian songs; indeed, Latvian Dainas are culturally unique (Stepanova and Stepanova, 2011).