Everyone knows the lines of the song ‘the manors are burning, the gentry are dying, we get the woods and the land’, but a somewhat different and more polysemantic version has also been recorded from the sayings of the people – ‘the manors are burning, the gentry are dying, the peasants dance wearing glasses’.
On the one hand, of course, it expressly describes looting – when the gentleman has been despoiled or bumped off, the victorious peasant takes the gentleman’s glasses from his nose and makes off with them to his abode together with the rest of his booty. On the other hand, however, glasses symbolise culture and eruditeness – in other words, the lines of the song imply that the peasants become the heirs of the gentry and thereafter pass on the gentry’s values.
And that is indeed how things have gone. We have borrowed words and food recipes from the gentry, learned manners and polite behaviour from them, read their books, and copied them in the lives of our students and in how we maintain our households. We are admittedly Estonians, the descendants of peasants, but we wear glasses that we have pinched from the gentry and we look at the world through them without actually noticing that ourselves anymore.