In sixteenth-century Finland, the Reformation marked not only the beginning of the Finnish written language, but also a slow, fundamental, and long-lasting change in poetics and music. Stanzaic and rhymed poetics first appeared in new Lutheran hymns and went on to take over the whole sphere of folk singing in Western Finland over a couple of centuries. The poetic features of vernacular Lutheran hymns varied by time, poet, and genre of singing, and these changes may be connected with the changes in historical and ideological contexts. The focus of this chapter is on the first three important translators and creators of Finnish liturgical songs, Michael Agricola (c. 1510-1554), Jacobus Finno (c. 1540-1588), and Hemmingius of Masku (c. 1550-1619). They were all clergymen in the diocese of Turku (Swe. Abo), consisting of the western and southern parts of modern Finland. At the time, the area was the most eastern diocese of the Kingdom of Sweden. The language of Church was Latin, while the languages of trade and secular administration were mostly German and Swedish. From the period prior to the Reformation there are no sources of literate Finnish language or rhymed poetics. The old oral idiom, the Kalevala metre, was built on alliterative trochaic verses with no rhymes or stanzas, and sung with narrow melodies of one or two lines.

The sources and contents of the early Finnish hymn melodies and texts, the role of the translators, and the relationships of the first hymnals to ecclesiastical history have been analysed, but the poetics have not been given much attention. From the nineteenth century on, these early hymns have been regarded as too formless to warrant more detailed poetic scrutiny. It has been asked, why did the early reformers even choose to use these new rhymed poetics, which were laborious to apply to Finnish, when they could have used the old Finnic oral poetic idiom, the so-called Kalevala metre? The question partly derives from the poetic and national ideals of the early twentieth century, projecting modern ideas of identity, Lutheranism, and good poetry on the past. The ethnomusicologist Heikki Laitinen has opposed this view by noting that, supposedly, for their authors and original audiences, these poems were not clumsy texts but enjoyable songs.