Uku Masing is known as a polyglot, poet, orientalist, folklorist, ethnologist, and theologian. In the post-war period, Masing was mostly known as a partly underground intellectual, whose essays, monographs, and poems, were distributed, in manuscript form, from hand to hand in the university town of Tartu.

Uku Masing was born in Raikküla, in Rapla district, on 11 August 1909. By the time he finished secondary school, he could speak at least four European languages, and had made his début as both a poet and a translator. In 1926, he started his studies of theology at the University of Tartu. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published a number of poems, translations, essays, and reviews, as well as scientific studies. But he first came to the attention of Estonian readers in 1935 with the publication of Promontories Into the Gulf of Rains (Neemed vihmade lahte).

Before that, Masing had been known to Estonian intellectuals and academicians as a brilliant, though eccentric, young teacher of theology and semitic languages at the University of Tartu, and as an editor of the Theological Journal. During the Soviet occupation, when the Faculty of Theology was closed, he held various jobs and translated poetry. Masing was a superb linguist, knowing approximately 65 languages and translating from 20. He has been especially acclaimed for his translation of the Old Testament into Estonian straight from the original Hebrew. He has also translated European antique and Oriental literature into Estonian. Although he is well known and respected for his varied works, more than ten thousand pages of his manuscripts have not yet even been published.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Masing contributed material to various international folklore publications, specialising in Finno-Ugric, Samoyed, and Caucasian fairytales. He was, for instance, one of the authors of the 12-volume "Enzyklopädie des Märchens".

Uku Masing was an ethnofuturist, meaning that he wanted to revitalise literature through national traditions. In addition to everything else, he was also fond of painting. He specialised in landscapes, and made portraits of prominent fellow intellectuals and his wife.

He died in Tartu on 25 April 1985.

You are the mountain that our herds fear,
for the large stars hold council there every night,
also Your house guests and the shadows of Your longings
each one has a chain of Your thoughts on their belt.
Knowing that all winds pass once and dwindle,
men deny Your existence,
even when they see You being crucified again,
they still continue to catch their lost days.
And when they weep, You laugh.

Oh, let us leave today, to travel together.
You are the wind and I am Your tree,
the wave before You, and the rose from Jericho,
You are the sky, and I the waxing moon
and the windship has oars of light.