This glossary is a reader aid, not a substitute for Estonian, South Estonian, Livonian, or community-led reference works.

A. H. Tammsaare (1878–1940) — Pen name of Anton Hansen, an Estonian prose writer, dramatist, essayist, journalist, and translator. His five-volume Tõde ja õigus appeared from 1926 to 1933. Good Works currently supplies volume I only.

Baltic — A word with different geographic, historical, and linguistic uses. Estonia is a Baltic country and Estonian history is part of Baltic regional history. In language classification, however, “Baltic languages” names an Indo-European branch containing Latvian and Lithuanian; Estonian is not in that branch.

Baltic German — German-speaking communities and institutions historically established in the eastern Baltic region, especially the landowning, urban, clerical, and educated strata that exercised substantial power under several states. “Baltic German” is a historical-cultural designation, not another name for Estonian.

collector / collection encounter — The person and event through which an oral performance entered notes, manuscript, recording, or print. A collector's spelling, questions, language knowledge, selections, genre labels, and later editing shape the surviving witness.

Common Estonian / standard Estonian — The modern shared written language, historically based mainly on North Estonian. It does not erase regional dialects or make South Estonian traditions merely defective standard speech. The University of Tartu's overview is at https://esttyp.ut.ee/about-the-project-languages/.

Estonia / Eesti — A multilingual country and historical region whose political borders and governing powers have changed. Literature produced in Estonia is not automatically written in Estonian, and Estonian-language literature also exists outside the state.

Estonian / eesti keel — A Finnic language within the Uralic family. It is related to Finnish, Võro, Seto, Livonian, Votic, and other Finnic languages or varieties but is not interchangeable with them.

Finnic — A branch of the Uralic language family including Estonian, Finnish, Karelian, Veps, Livonian, Votic, and other distinct languages and varieties. “Finnic” does not mean Finnish, and linguistic relationship does not create one ethnicity or literary canon.

Good Works Translation — A library type for a translation made within Good Works. It identifies an English-facing edition relation; it does not turn that translation into the source-language text or erase the translator's choices.

historical English witness — An older translation, retelling, anthology, or study that gave English-language readers access to some form of a work or tradition. It is evidence of reception and mediation, not automatically a reliable substitute for the original.

Kalevipoeg — Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald's nineteenth-century Estonian epic, constructed through oral materials, learned sources, editing, linking, and extensive composition. It is neither a transcript of one performance nor simply an Estonian copy of the Finnish Kalevala.

Livonian / līvõ kēļ — A distinct Finnic language historically centered in Latvia and maintained today through community and revitalization work. It is related to Estonian but is not an Estonian dialect. Estonian-language holdings do not create Livonian coverage.

North Estonian — The northern group of Estonian dialects on which common written Estonian is principally based. The history of standardization should not be mistaken for proof that other varieties had no literary legitimacy.

published-source-language-only — A canon-coverage label meaning a complete source-language work is publicly readable but no continuous English translation is supplied. For Tõde ja õigus I, “complete” means the complete first volume, not all five volumes of the cycle.

regilaul / runosong — Older Finnic alliterative song practice, shaped through performance, parallelism, meter, melody, locality, genre, and variation. The Estonian Literary Museum database at https://www.folklore.ee/regilaul/introduction documents the great scale and editorial complexity of the archive.

Seto — The easternmost South Estonian variety, spoken across the present Estonian–Russian border, with a vigorous written tradition and cultural institutions. Seto and Võro are closely related but distinguished in language and cultural history. A common-Estonian novel is not Seto coverage.

South Estonian — A group of varieties with a history not reducible to the modern North-Estonian-based standard. It includes Võro, Seto, Mulgi, Tartu, and historically related language-island varieties. Whether particular forms are described as languages, varieties, or dialects can depend on linguistic and community frameworks; the shelf should retain the specific name used by the source and community.

Tõde ja õigus — A. H. Tammsaare's five-volume novel cycle, published from 1926 to 1933. The title is often translated as Truth and Justice. The current Good Works text is Tõde ja õigus I only.

Tõde ja õigus I — The Vargamäe first volume, centered on Andres, Krõõt, their household, difficult land, and the rivalry with Pearu. Its complete Estonian text supplies authored-prose depth but no continuous English reader translation.

Uralic — A language family that includes Estonian, other Finnic languages, Sámi languages, Hungarian, Mari, Udmurt, Komi, Mordvinic languages, Khanty, Mansi, Samoyedic languages, and others. It is not one people, religion, mythology, or canon.

volume I / pentalogy boundary — A necessary bibliographic limit. Volume I is one complete book and one part of a larger five-volume work. Publishing it permits neither the label “fragment” nor the claim “complete Tõde ja õigus.” The accurate phrase is “complete first volume.”

Võro — The most widely spoken South Estonian variety, with its own written standard, publications, and cultural institutions. It is closely related to Seto and common Estonian but not covered by an Estonian-source work unless the work itself is in Võro or directly represents Võro literary culture.

Wikisource revision pinning — Preservation of exact page or subpage revisions rather than reliance on a mutable current web page. The Tammsaare packet also retains the scan and page-level source trail. Revision pinning establishes what was harvested; it does not by itself certify transcription accuracy.