— Ch. 1 · Elias Lönnrot's Field Expeditions —
Kalevala.
~6 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
In the spring of 1828, a young physician named Elias Lönnrot stepped out from his home in Sammatti with a satchel full of notebooks and a singular goal. He traveled to rural Karelia and Ingria to collect oral poetry that was vanishing from memory. Over the next fifteen years, he made eleven distinct field trips into the forests and villages of eastern Finland and western Russia. His first journey yielded little compared to what followed. The second trip ended abruptly when cholera struck Helsinki, forcing him back to medical duties. By 1833, he had settled as district health officer in Kajaani, living in the Hövelö croft near Lake Oulujärvi while continuing his search for verses.
The third expedition proved transformative. Lönnrot reached Viena in east Karelia and visited Akonlahti, where singers offered over three thousand new lines of verse. In 1834, during his fifth trip, he met Arhippa Perttunen, who recited four thousand verses across two days without stopping. Another singer named Matiska helped fill gaps in the cataloged material despite having a poor memory. These encounters provided the raw material for what would become the Old Kalevala published in 1835. Later journeys took him to Kuhmo, Lapukka, Sortavala, and even northern Lapland. Some trips recovered only one thousand verses while others remained poorly documented. Despite the physical hardship and long distances covered on foot or by boat, these expeditions formed the backbone of Finnish national literature.
Compilation Methodology And Versions
Lönnrot did not simply transcribe songs; he wove them into a coherent narrative structure that never existed in oral tradition. The first version, called the Old Kalevala, appeared in February 1836 with twelve thousand seventy-eight verses divided into thirty-two poems. He merged disparate folk song variants from different regions and singers into a single continuous story. Scholars estimate that about fifty percent of the final text consists of verses kept mostly unchanged except for minor alterations. Another thirty-three percent represents original unedited oral poetry collected directly from singers.
The remaining portions reflect Lönnrot's own compositional work. Three percent are lines he composed entirely himself, while fourteen percent are his adaptations drawn from existing variants. He left out verses that did not fit his plot and composed new lines to connect certain passages logically. This editorial process created tension between Kalevala and Pohjola, two lands that rarely appeared as opposing forces in traditional poetry. The word Kalevala itself was very rare in the original folk songs until Lönnrot chose it as the title at the end of 1834. His second version, known as the New Kalevala, arrived in 1849 with twenty-two thousand seven hundred ninety-five verses spread across fifty poems. An abridged school edition followed in 1862 containing nine thousand seven hundred thirty-two verses.