Lönnrot The Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot (Illustrated)

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-80170-315-4
Verlag: Delphi Publishing Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 1136 Seiten

Reihe: Delphi Poets Series

Compiled by the philologist Elias Lönnrot in the nineteenth century, 'The Kalevala' is a compilation of epic poetry from Finnish, Karelian and Ingrian folklore and mythology. It narrates the story of the Creation of the Earth, describing the adventures and voyages between the peoples of the land of Kalevala called Väinölä and the land of Pohjola. Regarded as the national epic of Finland, 'The Kalevala' was instrumental in the development of the Finnish national identity and the intensification of Finland's language strife, ultimately leading to its independence from Russia in 1917. Steeped in mythology and folklore, comprising ballads, lyrical songs, and mystic incantations, the enigmatic epic helped influence the Middle-earth mythology of J. R. R. Tolkien.

* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Lönnrot and 'The Kalevala'
* Concise introduction to 'The Kalevala'
* Excellent formatting of the texts
* Multiple translations of 'The Kalevala' - John Martin Crawford, 1888 and W. F. Kirby, 1907
* Includes the original Finnish text of 'The Kalevala'
* Easily locate the runes you want to read, with individual contents tables
* Features a bonus resource on the history of Finland

CONTENTS:

The Kalevala
Brief Introduction: The Kalevala
Kalevala: the Epic Poem of Finland (Crawford translation)
Kalevala: The Land of Heroes (Kirby translation)

The Original Text
The Finnish Text

The Resource
Finland (1911)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lönnrot, Elias

Leseproben

Brief Introduction: The Kalevala

The Kalevala is a nineteenth-century compilation of Finnish epic poetry, compiled by the polymath and philologist Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884) from Karelian and Ingrian folklore and mythology. It narrates the story of 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 collection is regarded as the national epic of Finland and Karelia, forming 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 the country’s independence from Russia in 1917.

The first version of the text, called the Old Kalevala, was published in 1835, consisting of 12,078 verses. The version that is most commonly known today appeared fourteen years later and consists of 22,795 verses, divided into fifty folk stories (runot). An abridged version, containing all fifty poems but just 9,732 verses, followed in 1862.

At the time Lönnrot was compiling The Kalevala he was serving as 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. In the spring of 1828, he had 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, he compiled several related works, including the three-part Kantele (1829-1831), the Old Kalevala (1835) and the Kanteletar (1840). His field trips and endeavours helped him to compile The Kalevala, while bringing considerable enjoyment to the people he visited; he would spend much time retelling what he had collected as well as learning new poems.

Prior to the eighteenth century, Kalevala poetry, or runic song, was common throughout Finland and Karelia, but it was starting to disappear in Finland, first in western Finland, as European rhymed poetry became more popular. Finnish folk poetry was first written down in the seventeenth century and collected by hobbyists and scholars throughout the following centuries. Despite this, the majority of Finnish poetry remained only in the oral tradition.

Finnish-born nationalist and linguist Carl Axel Gottlund (1796-1875) 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 rouse a sense of nationality and independence in the native Finnish people. In 1820, Reinhold von Becker founded the journal Turun Wiikko-Sanomat (Turku Weekly News) and published three articles entitled Väinämöisestä (Concerning Väinämöinen). These works were an inspiration for Lönnrot while writing his masters thesis at Turku University.

The collecting and preserving of old poetry had become more extensive and systematic in the nineteenth century. 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 (Ancient Poems of the Finns) 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 nineteenth 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.

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. The third field trip was much more successful than the second. Lönnrot journeyed to Viena in east Karelia where he visited the town of Akonlahti, which proved particularly 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, devoting his spare time searching for poems. His fourth field trip was undertaken in conjunction with his work as a doctor, on 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, he 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 named Matiska in the hamlet of Lonkka on the Russian side of the border. Although this singer had a somewhat poor memory, he helped 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.

After the publication of Old Kalevala, 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 due to bad skiing conditions. By the end of the trip, he 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.

Lönnrot departed on the ninth 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. The tenth field trip is a relative unknown, though the eleventh trip was undertaken in conjunction with his medical work. During the first part of this final trip, he returned to Akonlahti in Russian Karelia, where he gathered 80 poems and a total of 800 verses.

The poetry was often sung to music built on a pentachord, now and then assisted by a kantele player. The rhythm could vary but the music was arranged in either two or four lines in 5/4 metre. These verses were often performed by a duo, each person singing alternative verses or groups of verses. This method of performance is often likened to a “singing match”. The metre of the poems is usually a form of trochaic tetrameter, widely known as The Kalevala metre. It is thought to have originated during the Proto-Finnic period (1000 BC to 500 AD). Its syllables fall into three types: strong, weak, and neutral. Its main rules are as follows:

• A long syllable (one that contains a long vowel or a diphthong, or ends in a consonant) with a main stress is metrically strong.
• In the second, third, and fourth foot of a line, a strong syllable can occur in only the rising par.

Traditional poetry in The Kalevala metre employs both types with approximately the same frequency. The alternating normal and broken tetrameters is a characteristic difference between The Kalevala metre and other forms of trochaic tetrameter.

There are four additional rules:

• In the first foot, the length of syllables is free. It is also possible for the first foot to contain three or even four syllables.
• A one-syllable word can not occur at the end of a line.
• A word with four syllables should not stand in the middle of a line. This also applies to non-compound words.

Little is actually known about Lönnrot’s personal contributions to The Kalevala. Scholars still argue about how much of the work is genuine folk poetry and how much is Lönnrot’s own composition — and the degree to which the text is ‘authentic’ to the oral tradition. During the compilation process, it is known that he merged poem variants and characters together, left out verses that did not fit and composed lines of his own to connect certain passages into a logical plot. Similarly, as was normal in the preliterate conventions of oral...