Folk Views on the Rural Upper Class and Questions of Historical Contextualization of Finnish Proverbs (1885–1950)

The article examines Finnish proverbs that include the word herra, or “master,” in relation to the social history of the common people. The sample in the analysis consists of 174 proverbs that were collected on the ideological basis of the historic-geographic method where the primary focus was on the evolution of folklore texts. This quantitative emphasis led to the large collections in the Folklore Archives, which now need new methodological choices, such as analyzing the texts as the history of ideas from below.