The runic songs are built from reusable formulaic phrases and fixed epithets recombined within a strict trochaic tetrameter and parallelism, so a singer composes by assembling inherited verbal units rather than inventing lines word by word. This makes each performance both traditional and newly generated, since the formulas are the shared raw material and the arrangement is the singer's act.
Successive lines restate the same idea through a parallel second line that varies the wording, so meaning accumulates by repetition-with-difference rather than by linear progression. The restatement intensifies, specifies, or emotionally deepens the first line instead of adding new information.
The Karelian lament is performed grief that follows fixed metaphoric conventions and formulaic diction while being improvised for a specific death or departure, so personal sorrow is expressed through a shared ritual vocabulary. The emotion is real but channelled into a communal form, making mourning a public and crafted act rather than a spontaneous private outburst.
A large body of these songs and laments is attributed to one rune singer, Larin Paraske, whose extensive repertoire was recorded from her memory. This shows that an oral tradition can be carried and transmitted at scale through an individual performer's memory, so the survival of a cultural corpus can depend on particular persons rather than written texts.