A Study Guide for Elias Lonnrot's "Kalevala"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Elias Lonnrot's "Kalevala," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Epics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Epics for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535826792

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10

Kalevala

Elias Lönnrot

1849

Introduction

The Kalevala is Finland's national epic, drawn from a rich oral tradition with roots stretching back more than two millennia. Its compiler was Elias Lönnrot, a nineteenth-century physician and folklorist who traveled throughout the Finnish-Russian borderlands recording the lyrics, ballads, charms, and epics sung by the rural people. From these poems (called runes) he assembled a coherent whole, a literary epic that fired the imaginations and the national consciousness of the Finnish people.

Steeped in magic, by turns dreamlike and dramatic, the Kalevala recounts the mythic history of the ancient Finns in a series of fifty poems. Its heroes are the sons of Kaleva: the wise shaman Väinämöinen, the skillful smith Ilmarinen, and the feisty warrior Lemminkäinen. Stories of their interactions with one another, the spirit world, the natural world, and with their northern neighbors, the tribe of Pohjola, unfold in the resonant, musical cadences of Finnish oral poetry.

The Kalevala became the foundation of Finnish cultural identity. Published in its final form in 1849, Lönnrot's epic immediately took its place alongside the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, the German Nibelungenlied, and the Norse Poetic Edda. It established Finnish as a literary language and inspired a flowering of Finnish art and music, and it also played a crucial role in the Finns' struggle for independence, giving a heroic history and a focus for their national pride.

The interest in Finland's national epic reached a worldwide audience in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. A major inspiration for the writings of English fantasist, J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), the Kalevala spread its influence to other fantasy writers in Scandinavia, Great Britain, and the United States. Progressive rock bands in Finland, Italy, Germany, France, and the United States have used the lyrics and ideas for song material. Films such as Jade Warrior (2007), aco-operative effort of Finnish and Chinese filmmakers, base their plots on the epic. Clearly, the Kalevala is no longer merely a national treasure; it belongs to the world.

Author Biography

Elias Lönnrot was born in the southern parish of Sammatti, Finland, in 1802, the fourth of seven children in a poor tailor's family. In spite of his humble background, Lönnrot managed to attend the University of Turku, where he studied folklore and linguistics while supporting himself with various jobs. At Turku, Lönnrot became involved with the Finnish national ist movement. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of Professor Henrik Gabriel Porthan, an historian who encouraged the study of folklore and believed that a nation's cultural identity must be rooted in the language and oral traditions of its ordinary folk.

Following the Turku fire of 1827 that destroyed most of the city, the university relocated to Helsinki, where Lönnrot continued his studies and earned his medical degree in 1832. From 1833 to 1853, Lönnrot worked as a district physician and traveling health inspector in the remote northern town of Kajaani. Though he was the only doctor in that part of northeastern Finland, the job did not occupy him full time except during periods of epidemic, leaving Lönnrot free to pursue his study of Finnish language and folklore.

Between 1830 and 1850, he took several leaves of absence to travel through rural Finland, Ingria, Estonia, and eastern Karelia, meeting traditional singers and gathering folk poetry. During one of these trips, he was struck by the idea of arranging these poems and fragments into a single, coherent epic narrative. In 1834, he wrote:

As I compared [the results of my collections on my fourth journey] to what I had seen before, I was seized by a desire to organize them into a single whole in order to make of the Finnish legends of the gods something similar to that of the Edda, the saga of the Icelanders. So I threw myself into the labors