Editor’s note
In spring 2025, Lennart Meri’s Silverwhite was published in English by Hurst Publishers in Adam Cullen’s translation.
Meri’s essays and Rein Sepp’s translation of the Poetic Edda both shaped Estonian ideas about a culturally Nordic past during the Soviet occupation.
To accompany our conversation with Adam Cullen and Daniele Monticelli about translating Meri, we are publishing Mart Kuldkepp’s essay on Rein Sepp and the reception of Old Norse literature in Estonia.
Kristjan Haljak
Echoes of the North
A sense of historical and cultural – if not always political – kinship with the Nordic world has been central to Estonian national self-identification since the late nineteenth century. This affinity has shaped Estonian artistic and intellectual life as well as perceptions of myth and epic, often associated with the deep, primordial layers of national identity.
To some extent, this openness to Nordic cultural influence reflects a sense of absence. Unlike other European nations, Estonians have no ancient poems about gods and heroes written down and preserved from the Middle Ages. In the mid-nineteenth century, Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald composed Kalevipoeg, a folkloric epic poem that later became instrumental in the Estonian national awakening.
Yet many have felt that Kalevipoeg, for all its charm, is a kunsteepos – an artful pastiche rather than a primordial mythic saga capable of encapsulating the spirit of the nation. A void has therefore remained, waiting to be filled by other stories.
By the late 1960s, Estonia was under Soviet rule; its people were politically suppressed but culturally resilient and seeking alternative ways to express their national identity outside state-sanctioned culture. In 1970, the Poetic Edda – a thirteenth-century Norse anthology of mythological and epic poems – was published in Estonian translation as Vanem Edda.
For the first time, Norse myths and legends spoke to Estonians in their own language, with Odin, Thor and heroes of the Viking Age performing acts of creation and adventure in Estonian verse. The translation was the work of Rein Sepp, then a 49-year-old poet and philologist.
Before the 1960s, very few Old Norse texts had been translated into Estonian. Some works retelling the stories of Norse gods, apparently intended mainly for teenage boys, had appeared before the Second World War. Their impact had been limited and the retellings carried little of the original Norse flavour. In Rein Sepp’s rendering, Norse-Icelandic poetry became a cultural phenomenon – a breath of fresh air for the younger generation of Estonian intellectuals.
Rein Sepp (1921–1995) lived a life that mirrored the tumultuous currents of twentieth-century Estonian history. Born in Tartu in independent Estonia, he studied Germanic philology at the University of Tartu from 1940 to 1942, during the first Soviet occupation and then the German occupation, before being conscripted into the German army, first as a clerk and later as a military correspondent.
After the Soviet reoccupation of Estonia in 1944, Sepp initially became a ‘forest brother’, hiding in the woods from the authorities with two other Estonian poets, Artur Alliksaar and Ottniel Jürissaar. He later worked on a collective farm in Harjumaa but was arrested in 1949 and spent seven years as a political prisoner in Tallinn, Leningrad and Vorkuta.
After his release in 1956, Sepp re-established himself as a cultural figure and turned his attention to translation. He undertook the ambitious task of bringing major works of medieval European literature – especially Old Norse and other Germanic texts – into Estonian. He began with the work most important to him: the Poetic Edda. Several of its poems appeared in his translation in the 1962 anthology Keskaja ja vararenessansi kirjanduse antoloogia.
In 1970, Sepp’s complete translation of the Poetic Edda appeared as Vanem Edda. It remains the most influential and widely read Old Norse literary work in Estonian.
Using the fee from his Poetic Edda translation, Sepp purchased a farmhouse in 1971 in the remote Latvian village of Ipiķi, near the Latvian–Estonian border, and settled there. Withdrawn from urban life, he lived alone and simply in the farmhouse, which he decorated according to his understanding of the ancient Norse worldview. At the same time, he cultivated a near-mythic reputation among the younger generation of Estonian intellectuals, especially in Tartu.
His home became a place of pilgrimage for writers, scholars and younger intellectuals, who regarded Sepp not only as a translator but also as a guide to the world of ancient myth.
Two main factors contributed to the special significance of Rein Sepp’s Edda translation. The first was the atmosphere of hopelessness in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s, when the Soviet economy, reliant on oil exports, struggled under the strain of the arms race with the United States. The consequences of stagnation were felt everywhere and manifested themselves in renewed ideological oppression.
In Estonia, this pessimism was deepened by a generational shift in intellectual life, as younger intellectuals raised under Soviet rule began to replace those whose careers had started in the independent Republic of Estonia before the Second World War. This gave rise to a sense that personal continuity with the interwar Republic of Estonia was being broken.
At the same time, migration from the rest of the USSR led to growing concern that Estonians might soon become a minority in their own country.
In response, many people – especially younger intellectuals, writers and cultural figures – developed an intense interest in strengthening Estonian identity and Estonia experienced something of a new national awakening. The same process later led to the Singing Revolution of the late 1980s and culminated in the restoration of Estonian independence in 1991.
This new national movement remained grounded in cultural-nationalist ideals dating back to the first period of national awakening in the nineteenth century, which emphasized language, folklore, folk culture and history as defining elements of Estonian identity. A significant part of the movement was therefore devoted to exploring the culture and folklore of Estonia’s ancient past, despite its sparse documentation in written sources.
Speculation and mythmaking about Estonia’s distant history appeared prominently in those years, notably in the works of the future president of Estonia, Lennart Meri, which paralleled Rein Sepp’s interest in the forgotten past of the Baltic Sea region.
Lennart Meri’s Hõbevalge (1976) and its sequel Hõbevalgem (1984) presented an evocative reconstruction of Estonia’s ancient past, blending historical scholarship with literary imagination.
Meri argued that prehistoric Estonia occupied a central position on Baltic and Northern European trade routes, suggesting that Estonians had extensive maritime contacts with Scandinavia and Mediterranean civilizations long before written records formally acknowledged such connections.
Drawing on archaeological findings, folklore and linguistic evidence, Meri hypothesized about forms of cultural exchange and, in particular, the role of the mythical island of Thule, which he associated with the Estonian island of Saaremaa.
Sepp focused more closely on parallels and connections between Old Norse literature and ancient Estonian culture. Drawing on his poetic imagination, he found such parallels in abundance and presented them suggestively to his visitors. In this sense, the published translation Vanem Edda was only one aspect of Rein Sepp’s influence, albeit the most tangible.
Equally important was the oral tradition surrounding the book, which never appeared in print and could be experienced only by meeting Sepp in person. The lengthy visits made by young Estonian intellectuals – often lasting several days and resembling pilgrimages – and the near-mystical experiences they had in Ipiķi have themselves become part of Estonian cultural memory.
The second reason for the particular interest sparked by Vanem Edda was the Nordic affinity characteristic of Estonian nationalism: the conviction that Estonia is inherently Nordic and shares a deep identity with Finland, Sweden and the wider Nordic region, with roots reaching back to the Viking Age and beyond.
This idea resonated strongly with intellectuals’ fascination with Estonia’s ancient past, in which they sought evidence of early contacts and shared cultural traits with their northern neighbours.
In this context, the question of the national epic came into sharp focus. A clue to the anticipated reception of Vanem Edda lies in the physical design of the book. It appeared in the same series as several recognized national epics, including the Estonian Kalevipoeg, with hard covers, a large format, thick paper and illustrations in a mythological-primordialist style.
In his 1995 obituary for Rein Sepp, the folklorist Ülo Tedre pointed to the importance of this setting: ‘Perhaps epics seem especially important to us because we don’t really have our own folk epic. Say what you will, one must admit that F. R. Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg is [only] a so-called national epic.’
For Sepp and his followers, Vanem Edda became an alternative – a text to which one could attribute the very qualities that Kalevipoeg was felt to lack: genuine primordiality and authenticity. For those who believed in ancient cultural contacts between Estonia and Scandinavia, Vanem Edda could plausibly offer glimpses into a Nordic prehistory of Estonia itself.
For this reason, the first major work translated from Old Norse into Estonian left the most lasting impression. Thanks to Rein Sepp’s legacy, subsequent translators have been able to continue their work in a cultural environment where the high status of Old Norse literature had already been firmly established.
In the end, Rein Sepp’s role as a mediator of ancient knowledge is one example of how the stories Estonians tell about themselves – whether borrowed, adapted or newly imagined – reflect the need to anchor identity in the long flow of history. This search for connections with the real and mythical past has shaped Estonian national identity more strongly than any individual preserved remnant or translated echo.
Written by Mart Kuldkepp.
Edited by Robyn Laider.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mart Kuldkepp (b. 1983) is an Estonian historian and Professor of Estonian and Nordic History at University College London. His research focuses on twentieth-century cultural and political relations between Estonia and the Nordic countries, Nordic identity and the reception of Old Norse literature. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Tartu and Yale University and received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies in 2015.
His most recent book, The Shortest History of Scandinavia (Black Inc., 2025), surveys the region’s history from the Viking Age to the twenty-first century.