This excerpt from the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, written in the 1220s, is the oldest record of the collision of the two different worlds of Christian music and Baltic folk culture. According to Henry, it is not just the song, but the sounds of Christian music that brought to a halt the fight between the pagans and the Christians. However – and here I differ from the interpretation of this scene in the traditional national narrative – I would not focus on silence as a symbolic divide between the pagans and the Christians, but treat song and music as a means for pagans and Christians to meet. From this starting point, the following chapter explores the path by which the first Christian hymns entered the Latvian language as well as the reflections of folk culture in those texts.

This study is thus a deliberate attempt to explore and understand the genesis of the first Latvian Christian hymns of early modern times and thus the beginnings of written poetry in Latvian. Though there is no extant documentary evidence, I hypothesize that Latvians sang Christian hymns in their own language even before the Reformation. The historico-genetic and hermeneutical approaches, as well as a study of the first Latvian hymnals, exploring the contexts of the period and the earliest information about the Latvian singing tradition as it is found in historical sources, help to establish the methodology of the research and validate the hypothesis.

The first Latvian Catholic and Lutheran hymnals are also considered in the framework of cultural transfer. In this process, the representatives of one ethnic group, the Germans, laid the foundation for the written culture and literature of another ethnic group, the Latvians, by taking account not only of the characteristics of their language, but also of folk culture and thinking patterns.