Discover the great Finnish epic on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the country of Finland.
Elias L nnrot was a Finnish country doctor born in 1802. During
twenty years spent working in a remote part of eastern Finland, L
nnrot collected fragments of folk tales and poetry which he
believed formed a continuous epic. He undertook eleven field trips
on a quest to gather as much material as he could, partly funded by
the Finnish Literary Society, of which he was a founding member.
The result was the Kalevala, first published in 1835. L nnrot
continued to collect material, eventually bringing out the version
we know today in 1849. It consists of 22,795 verses, divided into
fifty songs. L nnrot most likely merged similar variants and
stitched fragments together with his own words.
L nnrot became a professor of Finnish language and literature at
the University of Helsinki in 1853. His work paved the way for the
development of modern Finnish literature and promoted Finnish as
the national language over Swedish. From 1866 he worked on the
fourteen-year-long task of compiling the first Finnish-Swedish
dictionary which contained over 200,000 entries. Many of the
translations were coined by L nnrot himself. He died in 1884.
One of the great mythic poems of Europe
*New York Times*
I was immensely attracted by something in the air of the
Kalevala
*Tolkien to W.H. Auden in 1955*
Did so much to bolster early Finnish nationalism on the road to
independence
*Guardian*
The Kalevala , the 19th-century folk epic that crystallised
national resistance to Russian rule, was compiled by Elias Lonnrot
from ancient runes sung from memory in the eastern forests of
Karelia. The Kalevala inspired not only Sibelius but JRR Tolkien,
whose Middle Earth and elfin tongue tapped Finnish myths and
language
*Guardian*
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