Kristjan Jaak Peterson

Kristjan Jaak Peterson was born in Riga on March 14, 1801. He is best known as an Estonian poet, and is widely regarded as the founder of modern Estonian poetry and the herald of Estonian national literature. His literary career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 21. In Estonia, his birthday is known as Mother Tongue Day.

Kristian Jaak Peterson collected his Estonian poems into two small books, but they were not published until a century after his death. In 1823, three German poems were published posthumously. One of Peterson's projects, the German translation of Kristfrid Ganander's Mythologia Fennica, a dictionary of Finnish mythological words and names, was completed during his lifetime (the Swedish language original was published in 1789). Peterson's translation of Ganander's dictionary was well received both in Estonia and abroad, and it became an important source of national ideology and inspiration for early Estonian literature. Its dominance lasted into the first decades of the twentieth century.

He was a gifted philologist, a polyglot whose dream was to be a Christian missionary among indigenous peoples in America, Africa, or Asia. In the spirit of Herder, he was interested in both classical culture and the vernacular languages of the world, particularly his native Estonian. Even in secondary school, he began writing philosophical and philological poems and a diary. He published articles on Estonian syntax, morphology of noun declensions and verb conjugations, phonetics, and other topics in the Estophile Johann Heinrich Beiträge zur genauern Kenntniss der ehstnischen Sprache. After graduating from university, Peterson taught language classes in Riga and studied philology.