Verse Concordance

What this shows

A concordance (full-text index) of all verse lines in the Finnic runosong corpus: 4.29 million occurrences of 2.9 million unique verse texts across 289,702 Estonian and Finnish poems.

How search works

• Searches for your query as a substring within normalized verse text (lowercase, no punctuation).
• Unlike the Similarity Explorer search (which only checks one shard by first letter), this tool searches all 28 shards progressively.
• The primary shard (matching the query's first letter) loads first for quick results. Remaining shards load in the background (4 at a time).
• A progress bar shows scan progress. New searches cancel previous scans.

Reading the results

• Occurrence count (green badge): how many times this exact verse text appears across all poems.
• Language bar: blue = Estonian, orange = Finnish. Width proportional to count.
• Places: number of distinct collection places where this verse is attested.

Detail panel

• Geographic distribution: top 15 places by occurrence count, with language breakdown per place.
• Occurrence table: every individual occurrence with poem ID, language, and place. Click links to open in Poem Reader or Verse Network.
• Use the place and language filters to narrow the occurrence table.

Cross-links

• View in Similarity Explorer: compare with similar verses using 4 algorithms.
• View in Network: see the verse's similarity neighborhood as a force-directed graph.
• Find path: find similarity paths from this verse to another.