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Katre Kaju, a research fellow at the Tallinn University Academic Library Baltica and Rare Books Conservation Department discusses how printing the New Testament 300 years ago boosted the development of the Estonian written language.

In the autumn of 2014, 380 years passed since the first books were printed in Tallinn. To mark this anniversary, TU Academic Library and Tallinn City Archives opened the exhibition “Tallinn City and Gymnasium Print Shop (1634-1828)”, where the star item on display was the New Testament in northern Estonian, printed 300 years ago in 1715. The importance of this work to the written Estonian language and culture cannot be underestimated.

Today it seems self-evident that we can read and write fluently in Estonian. With a slight exaggeration, we can say we have to thank the 17^th century Swedish education and church policy, and the Baltic Germans, who decided to print the bible in Estonian for this. How did we come to that?

The Swedish education politics influenced the establishment of the first gymnasium in Tartu in 1630, which was later turned into a university. Another gymnasium was established in Tallinn. Both schools founded their own print shops – 1631 in Tartu and 1634 in Tallinn. At about the same time local pastors started compiling and printing church handbooks, sermon pamphlets and songbooks. First grammar books and dictionaries were published to improve the Estonian skills of pastors and also catechisms to educate children. The most important, though, is the printing of the Bible: in 1686 the Tartu-Estonian “Wastne Testament” or “Novel Testament” was printed in Riga, but it’s Tallinn-Estonian counterpart or “Uus Testament” (“New Testament”) took decades of work and was published as late as 1715. The full Bible in Estonian took another 24 years. These two works from the first half of the 18^th century, the New Testament and the Bible, with their standardized language and grammar, set the cornerstone for the development of a common Estonian written language.

The role of bookmakers cannot be underestimated in this scenario: in 1715, Johann Christoph Brendeken published the New Testament at his own expenditure. Due to lack of paper during the hard times following the Great Northern War, only 400 Testaments were printed. Nine of these are known to exist in libraries in Estonia and Europe. Bookmakers also took care of the distribution, which made the reprints of Bibles and other Estonian religious literature a very profitable business for them.

Thus, we can say that the history of Estonian written language and the art of typography are closely connected, mainly thanks to religious literature.