Kalevala

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kalevala is a 19th-century compilation of epic poetry that became the national epic of Finland and Karelia. A physician named Elias Lönnrot spent fifteen years making eleven field trips across remote Karelian borderlands, collecting the verses from village singers and stitching them into a single work. When the first version appeared in 1835, it contained 12,078 verses. The final version, published in 1849, had grown to 22,795 verses divided across fifty poems. What drove a country doctor to trek through mud and snow to write down the songs of strangers? And how did a collection of ancient oral poems come to shape a nation's sense of itself, fuel a movement for independence, and leave its mark on everything from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth to Finnish metal bands, jewellery companies, and the streets of a small town in Michigan?

• 2. The Man Who Walked Into the Songs

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  Elias Lönnrot was born on the 9th of April 1802 in the village of Sammatti in Uusimaa, the son of Fredrik Johan Lönnrot, a tailor. He entered the Imperial Academy of Turku at the age of 21, and his master's thesis was entitled De Vainamoine priscorum fennorum numine, which translates roughly as "Väinämöinen, a Divinity of the Ancient Finns." The monograph's second volume was destroyed in the Great Fire of Turku the same year it was submitted. By the time he set out on his first collecting trip in 1828, poetry was already an academic preoccupation. But in January 1833 he accepted a post as district health officer for the Kainuu region, living in the Hövelö croft near Lake Oulujärvi in the village of Paltaniemi, and it was from there that the real fieldwork began.

  His third field trip was a turning point. It brought him to Viena in east Karelia and the town of Akonlahti, which yielded over 3,000 verses and extensive notes. On his fifth trip he met Arhippa Perttunen, who recited continuously for two days and gave Lönnrot roughly 4,000 verses. Perttunen was born in 1769 and died in 1840, and the encounter became one of the most celebrated moments in Finnish literary history. That same journey also produced almost 300 poems totalling just over 13,000 verses. Lönnrot's fourteenth field trip into Kuhmo, a municipality in Kainuu to the south of Viena, collected over 4,000 additional verses and completed the first draft. He wrote the foreword and published in February of the following year.

  His ninth field trip began on the 16th of September 1836, after he was granted a fourteen-month leave of absence and travelling expenses from the Finnish Literary Society, with the stipulation that he travel around the Kainuu border regions, north, and then south-east. Despite the length of the journey, which took him all the way to Inari in northern Lapland and as far as Sortavala on Lake Ladoga, only about 1,000 verses came from the southern portion alone. Not every trip was productive. But collectively, eleven trips over fifteen years produced a body of material large enough to reshape a nation.

• 3. Poetry That Survived by Voice Alone

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  Before the 18th century, Kalevala poetry was widespread across Finland and Karelia, sung to music built on a pentachord, sometimes with a kantele player accompanying the singer. The kantele is a Finnish stringed instrument played similarly to a zither. These poems were often performed by pairs of singers in an antiphonic style, each singing alternating verses in what amounted to a kind of singing match. The metre they used was a trochaic tetrameter, now simply called the Kalevala metre, which scholars believe originated during the Proto-Finnic period.

  The metre is more intricate than it sounds. Syllables fall into three types: strong, weak, and neutral. A long syllable bearing main stress must appear only in the rising part of the second, third, and fourth feet of a line, while the first foot operates more freely. Traditional songs used two types of line, normal tetrameter and the broken tetrameter, called murrelmasäe in Finnish, in roughly equal proportion. Two main rhetorical devices run through the poems: alliteration, which appears in both weak and strong forms, and parallelism, in which the idea of one line is recast in the next using synonyms rather than advancing the story.

  In the 18th century, the tradition began to fade in western Finland as European rhymed poetry spread. Finnish clergy had already accelerated this process during the 16th-century Reformation by forbidding the singing of pagan rites. Finnish folklorist Kaarle Krohn later estimated that 20 of the 45 poems of the Kalevala are of possible Ancient Estonian origin, or at least involve Estonian motifs. Of the remainder, two are Ingrian and 23 are Western Finnish. The oldest themes, concerning the origin of the Earth, are thought to have roots reaching back as far as 3,000 years. By the end of the 19th century, the systematic effort to preserve what remained had produced nearly half a million pages of verse, archived by the Finnish Literature Society and other collectors. Among those archives, 65,000 items of poetry remain unpublished to this day.

• 4. The Epic That Was Built, Not Found

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  Scholars have never fully agreed on how much of the Kalevala is authentic folk poetry and how much belongs to Lönnrot himself. Finnish historian Väinö Kaukonen put specific numbers to the question: roughly 3% of the lines are Lönnrot's own composition, 14% are Lönnrot compositions drawn from poem variants, 50% are verses kept mostly unchanged except for minor alterations, and 33% are original, unedited oral poetry. During compilation, Lönnrot merged poem variants and characters, dropped verses that did not fit the narrative, and composed connecting lines of his own.

  The nationalist and linguist Carl Axel Gottlund, who lived from 1796 to 1875, had expressed the desire for a Finnish epic in the tradition of the Iliad, Ossian, and the Nibelungenlied. He published three articles on the figure of Väinämöinen in a journal he founded in 1820, and those writings served as an inspiration for Lönnrot's own thesis years later. Finnish folklorists Matti Kuusi and Pertti Anttonen have argued that Lönnrot effectively invented the opposition between the people of Kalevala and the people of Pohjola, since the phrase "tribe of Kalevala" barely appears in traditional poetry. By foregrounding that dualism, they contend, Lönnrot created the dramatic tension required for a national epic.

  The word "Kalevala" itself rarely appears in the original folk songs. The first recorded appearance in folk song comes from April 1836, yet Lönnrot chose it as his title sometime at the end of 1834. The name "Kalev" appears in both Finnic and Baltic folklore, and the Sons of Kalev are known across Finnish and Estonian tradition. Lönnrot also compiled a companion volume, the Kanteletar, in 1840, drawn from the same collecting trips but far more lyrical in character. An abridged version of the Kalevala, containing all fifty poems but only 9,732 verses, was published in 1862 specifically for use in schools.

• 5. A Nation Made of Verses

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  The Kalevala was instrumental in shaping Finnish national identity during the period of Russian rule, and it helped intensify the language strife that ultimately contributed to Finland's independence in 1917. Kalevala Day is observed on the 28th of February each year, marking the publication date of the Old Kalevala in 1835. By its other official name it is called Finnish Culture Day.

  The reach of the Kalevala into everyday Finnish life is unusually concrete. Several districts within Finland bear Kalevala-related names: Tapiola in Espoo, Pohjola in Turku, Metsola in Vantaa, and Kaleva and Sampo in Tampere. The Russian town of Ukhta was renamed Kalevala in 1963. In the United States, a small community founded in 1900 by Finnish immigrants in Michigan is named Kaleva, and many of its streets carry names from the epic.

  Finnish companies have drawn on the same reservoir. The Lemminkäinen construction group, founded in 1910 as a roofing and asphalt company, chose the name to signal that it was wholly Finnish in character. The private healthcare company Mehiläinen, formed in 1909, took its name from the Finnish word for bee, chosen to represent the "selfless and hardworking healer" in the Kalevala, a reference to the episode in which a bee retrieves honey to revive the drowned Lemminkäinen. The jewellery company Kalevala Koru was founded in 1935 on the centenary of the Old Kalevala's publication. In 2024, the European Commission granted the epic a European Heritage Label.

• 6. Characters Who Refused to Stay on the Page

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  Väinämöinen is the shamanistic hero at the centre of the narrative, a figure of immense age and magical song whose travels echo the journeys of a shaman into other realms. One of his most striking voyages takes him into the belly of the earth-giant Antero Vipunen, where he must torture the giant for the songs needed to complete his boat. Väinämöinen is closely associated with the kantele; in the story, the first kantele is fashioned from the jawbone of a monstrous pike killed on the journey to Pohjola.

  Louhi, the Mistress of the North, is the shamanistic matriarch of Pohjola and the Kalevala's most formidable antagonist. She commands an army, transforms herself into a massive eagle, and at one point hides the sun and the moon from the people of Kalevala. Scholars have noted that she also saves Väinämöinen's life early in the narrative. Her relationship with the heroes of Kalevala is one of repeated conflict and occasional negotiation, with the Sampo, a mythical wealth-making device of disputed nature, at the centre of nearly every dispute.

  Kullervo is the epic's most tragic figure. Sold into slavery by his uncle Untamo, tormented by Ilmarinen's wife, he eventually seduces a young woman while returning from paying taxes, only to discover she is his sister. She kills herself on the spot, and Kullervo later takes his own life in the place where the act occurred. British fantasy author Michael Moorcock cited the character Kullervo as a direct influence on his sword-and-sorcery anti-hero Elric of Melniboné. J. R. R. Tolkien built the tale of Túrin Turambar in Narn i Chîn Húrin on the Kullervo story, including the detail of a sword that speaks when the hero uses it to commit suicide. Tolkien also claimed the Kalevala as a source for The Silmarillion, and echoes of Väinämöinen can be found in the character of Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings.

• 7. Music Across Two Centuries

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  Filip von Schantz is the first recorded musician known to have drawn on the Kalevala. In 1860 he composed the Kullervo Overture, which premiered at the opening of a new theatre in Helsinki that November. Robert Kajanus followed with his Kullervo's Funeral March and the symphonic poem Aino in 1880 and 1885 respectively. The Aino composition is credited with prompting Jean Sibelius to investigate the Kalevala more deeply.

  Sibelius went on to have twelve of his best-known works shaped by the epic, among them his Kullervo, a tone poem for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra composed in 1892. The first opera freely based on the Kalevala, Die Kalewainen in Pochjola, was composed by Karl Müller-Berghaus in 1890. In 1893, the Finnish bands Amorphis and Sentenced released two Kalevala-inspired concept albums, Tales from the Thousand Lakes and North from Here, which launched a wave of folk metal albums in subsequent decades. Turisas adapted verses from the ninth song of the Kalevala, called "The Origin of Iron," for their song "Cursed Be Iron" on the album The Varangian Way. On the 3rd of August 2012, Korpiklaani released Manala, an album whose singer Jonne Järvelä described as drawing heavily on the Finnish national epic.

  In 2003, the progressive rock quarterly Colossus and the French label Musea Records commissioned thirty progressive rock groups from around the world to compose songs based on individual sections of the Kalevala. The resulting three-disc release runs to four hours. In 2017, a New York-based production called Kalevala the Musical premiered in celebration of the centenary of Finnish independence, featuring an original score by Johanna Telander performed across the United States and Finland.