Kalevala - National Epic of Finland

We all had to read Kalevala, our national epic at school, and did not, of course, always like it. I can imagine that not all English schoolchildren love Shakespeare, or the Spanish youngsters Don Quijote. All the wisdom included in these Finnish folk poems or songs, did not attract so much at school, but even then, the rhythm and metre somehow fascinated. Understanding the value of national epics in general, grows by age, luckily enough. The metre is trochaic tetrametre, also called the Kalevala metre. It is an efficient metre when reading Kalevala as bedtime stories for children: it won´t take long before they fall asleep.

Until the 16th century, an archaic song tradition was a living tradition in Finland, but the Reformation with its Lutheran church forbade the pagan songs. This meant that the tradition of singing the songs gradually disappeared, but in the 19th century, collection of old folk poems was started and several trips were made to Karelia where the knowledge of them was strongest. The main collector was Elias Lönnrot, who also compiled and edited the first version, published in 1835.

Elias Lönnrot was a physician who worked as a general practitioner in a small city in NE Finland. Besides his professional work he did an invaluable job in creating and compiling a coherent story of the folk poems he had collected. The Finnish Literature Society was founded in 1833 to further his work. In addition, he was the first populariser of medical knowledge, by writing a medical guide book for ordinary people. His production also includes an illustrated book on Finnish plants called Flora Fennica. He was very interested in educating ordinary people and contributed to this in many ways.

The songs of Kalevala consist of a series of poems on the creation of the world, where two clans fight with each other for the ownership of Sampo, the mythical source of riches, whose looks are not described in the poems (limitless inspiration to artists). A great number of different stories are interwoven in the main theme. Please see http://www.virtualfinland.fi/finfo/english/kalevala.html

Life in Finland has been very much influenced by Kalevala, especially all genres of arts. We also have a lot of personal names deriving from Kalevala and it still affects our thinking and in everyday language there are references to Kalevala, although we do not always immediately recognise them.