Kalevala
The Kalevala is a 19th-century compilation of epic poetry, compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish, Karelian and Ingrian folklore and mythology, telling a story about the Creation of the Earth, describing the controversies and retaliatory voyages between the peoples of the land of Kalevala called Väinölä and the land of Pohjola and their various protagonists and antagonists, as well as the construction and robbery of the mythical wealth-making machine Sampo.
The Kalevala is regarded as the national epic of Finland and Karelia, and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature along with J. L. Runeberg's The Tales of Ensign Stål and Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers. The Kalevala was instrumental in the development of the Finnish national identity and the intensification of Finland's language strife that ultimately led to Finland's independence from Russia in 1917. The work is known internationally and has partly influenced, for example, J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium.
The first version of the Kalevala, called the Old Kalevala, was published in 1835, consisting of 12,078 verses. The version most commonly known today was first published in 1849 and consists of 22,795 verses, divided into fifty folk stories. An abridged version, containing all fifty poems but just 9,732 verses, was published in 1862. In connection with the Kalevala, there is another much more lyrical collection of poems, also compiled by Lönnrot, called Kanteletar from 1840, which is mostly seen as a "sister collection" of the Kalevala.
Collection and compilation
Elias Lönnrot
Elias Lönnrot was a physician, botanist, linguist, and poet. At the time he was compiling the Kalevala he was the district health officer based in Kajaani responsible for the whole Kainuu region in the eastern part of what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland. He was the son of Fredrik Johan Lönnrot, a tailor, and Ulrika Lönnrot; he was born in the village of Sammatti, Uusimaa.At the age of 21, he entered the Imperial Academy of Turku and obtained a master's degree in 1826. His thesis was entitled De Vainamoine priscorum fennorum numine. The monograph's second volume was destroyed in the Great Fire of Turku the same year.
In the spring of 1828, he set out with the aim of collecting folk songs and poetry. Rather than continue this work, though, he decided to complete his studies and entered Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki to study medicine. He earned a master's degree in 1832. In January 1833, he started as the district health officer of Kainuu and began his work on collecting poetry and compiling the Kalevala. Throughout his career Lönnrot made a total of eleven field trips within a period of fifteen years.
Prior to the publication of the Kalevala, Elias Lönnrot compiled several related works, including the three-part Kantele, the Old Kalevala and the Kanteletar.
Lönnrot's field trips and endeavours helped him to compile the Kalevala, and brought considerable enjoyment to the people he visited; he would spend much time retelling what he had collected as well as learning new poems.
Poetry
History
Before the 18th century, Kalevala poetry, also known as runic song, was common throughout Finland and Karelia, but in the 18th century it began to disappear in Finland, first in western Finland, because European rhymed poetry became more common in Finland. Finnish folk poetry was first written down in the 17th century and collected by hobbyists and scholars through the following centuries. Despite this, the majority of Finnish poetry remained only in the oral tradition.Finnish-born nationalist and linguist Carl Axel Gottlund expressed his desire for a Finnish epic in a similar vein to the Iliad, Ossian and the Nibelungenlied compiled from the various poems and songs spread over most of Finland. He hoped that such an endeavour would incite a sense of nationality and independence in the native Finnish people. In 1820, founded the journal Turun Wiikko-Sanomat and published three articles entitled Väinämöisestä. These works were an inspiration for Elias Lönnrot in creating his masters thesis at Turku University.
In the 19th century, collecting became more extensive, systematic and organised. Altogether, almost half a million pages of verse have been collected and archived by the Finnish Literature Society and other collectors in what are now Estonia and Russia's Republic of Karelia. The publication Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot published 33 volumes containing 85,000 items of poetry over a period of 40 years. They have archived 65,000 items of poetry that remain unpublished. By the end of the 19th century this pastime of collecting material relating to Karelia and the developing orientation towards eastern lands had become a fashion called Karelianism, a form of national romanticism.
The chronology of this oral tradition is uncertain. The oldest themes, the origin of Earth, have been interpreted to have their roots in distant, unrecorded history and could be as old as 3,000 years.
The newest events, e.g. the arrival of Christianity, seem to be from the Iron Age, which in Finland lasted until c. 1300 CE. Finnish folklorist Kaarle Krohn proposes that 20 of the 45 poems of the Kalevala are of possible Ancient Estonian origin or at least deal with a motif of Estonian origin.
It is understood that during the Finnish reformation in the 16th century the clergy forbade all telling and singing of pagan rites and stories. In conjunction with the arrival of European poetry and music this caused a significant reduction in the number of traditional folk songs and their singers. Thus the tradition faded somewhat but was never totally eradicated.
Lönnrot's field trips
In total, Lönnrot made eleven field trips in search of poetry. His first trip was made in 1828 after his graduation from Turku University, but it was not until 1831 and his second field trip that the real work began. By that time he had already published three articles entitled Kantele and had significant notes to build upon. This second trip was not very successful and he was called back to Helsinki to attend to victims of the Second cholera pandemic.The third field trip was much more successful and led Elias Lönnrot to Viena in east Karelia where he visited the town of Akonlahti, which proved most successful. This trip yielded over 3,000 verses and copious notes. In 1833, Lönnrot moved to Kajaani where he was to spend the next 20 years as the district health officer for the region, living in the Hövelö croft located near the Lake Oulujärvi in the Paltaniemi village, spending his spare time searching for poems. His fourth field trip was undertaken in conjunction with his work as a doctor; a 10-day jaunt into Viena. This trip resulted in 49 poems and almost 3,000 new lines of verse. It was during this trip that Lönnrot formulated the idea that the poems might represent a wider continuity, when poem entities were performed to him along with comments in normal speech connecting them.
On the fifth field trip, Lönnrot met Arhippa Perttunen who, over two days of continuous recitation, provided him with some 4,000 verses for the Kalevala. He also met a singer called Matiska in the hamlet of Lonkka on the Russian side of the border. Although this singer had a somewhat poor memory, he did help to fill in many gaps in the work Lönnrot had already catalogued. This trip resulted in the discovery of almost 300 poems at just over 13,000 verses.
In the autumn of 1834, Lönnrot had written the vast majority of the work needed for what was to become the Old Kalevala; all that was required was to tie up some narrative loose ends and complete the work. His sixth field trip took him into Kuhmo, a municipality in Kainuu to the south of Viena. There he collected over 4,000 verses and completed the first draft of his work. He wrote the foreword and published in February of the following year.
With the Old Kalevala well into its first publication run, Lönnrot decided to continue collecting poems to supplement his existing work and to understand the culture more completely. The seventh field trip took him on a long winding path through the southern and eastern parts of the Viena poem singing region. He was delayed significantly in Kuhmo because of bad skiing conditions. By the end of that trip, Lönnrot had collected another 100 poems consisting of over 4,000 verses. Lönnrot made his eighth field trip to the Russian border town of Lapukka where the great singer Arhippa Perttunen had learned his trade. In correspondence he notes that he has written down many new poems but is unclear on the quantity.
Image:Elias Lönnrot field trips-notable karelia locations-1.png|thumb|right|250px|Notable towns visited by Elias Lönnrot during his 15 years of field trips – both sides then belonged to Russia
Elias Lönnrot departed on the first part of his ninth field trip on 16 September 1836. He was granted a 14-month leave of absence and a sum of travelling expenses from the Finnish Literary Society. His funds came with some stipulations: he must travel around the Kainuu border regions and then on to the north and finally from Kainuu to the south-east along the border. For the expedition into the north he was accompanied by Juhana Fredrik Cajan. The first part of the trip took Lönnrot all the way to Inari in northern Lapland. The second, southern part of the journey was more successful than the northern part, taking Lönnrot to the town of Sortavala on Lake Ladoga then back up through Savo and eventually back to Kajaani. Although these trips were long and arduous, they resulted in very little Kalevala material; only 1,000 verses were recovered from the southern half and an unknown quantity from the northern half.
The tenth field trip is a relative unknown. What is known however, is that Lönnrot intended to gather poems and songs to compile into the upcoming work Kanteletar. He was accompanied by his friend C. H. Ståhlberg for the majority of the trip. During that journey the pair met Mateli Magdalena Kuivalatar in the small border town of Ilomantsi. Kuivalatar was very important to the development of the Kanteletar. The eleventh documented field trip was another undertaken in conjunction with his medical work. During the first part of the trip, Lönnrot returned to Akonlahti in Russian Karelia, where he gathered 80 poems and a total of 800 verses. The rest of the trip suffers from poor documentation.