Kalevala Society

The ''Kalevala'' ( fi, Kalevala, ) is a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology, telling an epic story about 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 epic mythical wealth-making machine Sampo.

The ''Kalevala'' is regarded as the national epic of Karelia and Finland and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature 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 Finland's independence from Russia in 1917. The work is also well known internationally and has partly influenced, for example, J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium (i.e. Middle-earth mythology).

The first version of the ''Kalevala'', called the ''Old Kalevala'', was published in 1835, consisting of 12,078 verses. The version most commonly known today was first published in 1849 and consists of 22,795 verses, divided into fifty folk stories (Finnish: ''runot''). An abridged version, containing all fifty poems but just 9732 verses, was published in 1862. In connection with the ''Kalevala'', there is another much more lyrical collection of poems, also compiled by Lönnrot, called '' Kanteletar'' from 1840, which is mostly seen as a "sister collection" of the ''Kalevala''.

Collection and compilation

Elias Lönnrot

Elias Lönnrot (9 April 1802 – 19 March 1884) was a physician, botanist, linguist, and poet. During the time he was compiling the ''Kalevala'' he was 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. He was the son of Fredrik Johan Lönnrot, a tailor and Ulrika Lönnrot; he was born in the village of Sammatti, Uusimaa.

At the age of 21, he entered the Imperial Academy of Turku and obtained a master's degree in 1826. His thesis was entitled ''De Vainamoine priscorum fennorum numine'' (''Väinämöinen, a Divinity of the Ancient Finns''). The monograph's second volume was destroyed in the Great Fire of Turku the same year.Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. "The Kalevala or Poems of the Kaleva district" ''Appendix I. (1963)''.

In the spring of 1828, he 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'', Elias Lönnrot compiled several related works, including the three-part ''Kantele'' (1829–1831), the ''Old Kalevala'' (1835) and the '' Kanteletar'' (1840).

Lönnrot's field trips and endeavours helped him to compile the ''Kalevala'', and brought considerable enjoyment to the people he visited; he would spend much time retelling what he had collected as well as learning new poems.

Poetry

History

Before the 18th century the ''Kalevala'' poetry was common throughout Finland and Karelia, but in the 18th century it began to disappear in Finland, first in western Finland, because European rhymed poetry became more common in Finland. Finnish folk poetry was first written down in the 17th century and collected by hobbyists and scholars through 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 incite a sense of nationality and independence in the native Finnish people. In 1820, founded the journal ''Turun Wiikko-Sanomat'' (Turku Weekly News) and published three articles entitled ''Väinämöisestä'' (''Concerning Väinämöinen''). These works were an inspiration for Elias Lönnrot in creating his masters thesis at Turku University.

In the 19th century, collecting became more extensive, systematic and organised. 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 the 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 19th 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.

The chronology of this oral tradition is uncertain. The oldest themes, the origin of Earth, have been interpreted to have their roots in distant, unrecorded history and could be as old as 3,000 years.John Martin Crawford. ''Kalevala – The national epic of Finland'', "Preface to the First edition, (1888)".
The newest events, e.g. the arrival of Christianity, seem to be from the Iron Age, which in Finland lasted until c. 1300 CE. Finnish folklorist Kaarle Krohn proposes that 20 of the 45 poems of the ''Kalevala'' are of possible Ancient Estonian origin or at least deal with a motif of Estonian origin (of the remainder, two are Ingrian and 23 are Western Finnish).

It is understood that during the Finnish reformation in the 16th century the clergy forbade all telling and singing of pagan rites and stories. In conjunction with the arrival of European poetry and music this caused a significant reduction in the number of traditional folk songs and their singers. Thus the tradition faded somewhat but was never totally eradicated.

Lönnrot's field trips

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. By that time he had already published three articles entitled ''Kantele'' and had significant notes to build upon. This second trip was not very successful and he was called back to Helsinki to attend to victims of the Second cholera pandemic.

The third field trip was much more successful and led Elias Lönnrot to Viena in east Karelia where he visited the town of Akonlahti, which proved most 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, living in the Hövelö croft located near the Lake Oulujärvi in the Paltaniemi village, spending his spare time for poems. His fourth field trip was undertaken in conjunction with his work as a doctor; 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, Lönnrot 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 called Matiska in the hamlet of Lonkka on the Russian side of the border. Although this singer had a somewhat poor memory, he did help 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 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.

With the ''Old Kalevala'' well into its first publication run, 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 because of bad skiing conditions. By the end of that trip, Lönnrot 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. In correspondence he notes that he has written down many new poems but is unclear on the quantity.

Elias Lönnrot departed on the first part of his ninth field 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. For the expedition into the north he was accompanied by . The first part of the trip took Lönnrot all the way to Inari in northern Lapland. The second, southern part of the journey was more successful than the northern part, taking Lönnrot to the Russian town of Sortavala on Lake Ladoga then back up through Savo and eventually back to Kajaani. Although these trips were long and arduous, they resulted in very little Kalevala material; only 1,000 verses were recovered from the southern half and an unknown quantity from the northern half.

The tenth field trip is a relative unknown. What is known however, is that Lönnrot intended to gather poems and songs to compile into the upcoming work ''Kanteletar''. He was accompanied by his friend C. H. Ståhlberg for the majority of the trip. During that journey the pair met Mateli Magdalena Kuivalatar in the small border town of Ilomantsi. Kuivalatar was very important to the development of the ''Kanteletar''. The eleventh documented field trip was another undertaken in conjunction with his medical work. During the first part of the trip, Lönnrot returned to Akonlahti in Russian Karelia, where he gathered 80 poems and a total of 800 verses. The rest of the trip suffers from poor documentation.

Methodology

Lönnrot and his contemporaries, e.g. Matthias Castrén, Anders Johan Sjögren,
and David Emmanuel Daniel EuropaeusElias Lönnrot. "Kalevala" ''Preface to the First edition, (1849)''. collected most of the poem variants; one poem could easily have countless variants, scattered across rural areas of Karelia and Ingria. Lönnrot was not really interested in, and rarely wrote down the name of the singer except for some of the more prolific cases. His primary purpose in the region was that of a physician and of an editor, not of a biographer or counsellor. He rarely knew anything in-depth about the singer himself and primarily only catalogued verse that could be relevant or of some use in his work.

The student David Emmanuel Daniel Europaeus is credited with discovering and cataloguing the majority of the Kullervo story.

Of the dozens of poem singers who contributed to the ''Kalevala'', significant ones are:
* Arhippa Perttunen (1769–1840)
* Juhana Kainulainen
* Matiska
* Ontrei Malinen (1780–1855)
* Vaassila Kieleväinen
* Soava Trohkimainen

Form and structure

The poetry was often sung to music built on a pentachord, sometimes assisted by a kantele player. The rhythm could vary but the music was arranged in either two or four lines in metre. The poems were often performed by a duo, each person singing alternative verses or groups of verses. This method of performance is called an antiphonic performance, it is a kind of "singing match".

Metre

Despite the vast geographical distance and customary spheres separating individual singers, the folk poetry the ''Kalevala'' is based on was always sung in the same metre.

The ''Kalevala''s metre is a form of trochaic tetrameter that is now known as the ''Kalevala metre''. The metre is thought to have originated during the Proto-Finnic period. 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 part:
:: Veli / kulta, / veikko/seni (1:11)
:: ("Dearest friend, and much-loved brother"
Kalevala: The Land of Heroes
', trans. by W. F. Kirby, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1907).)
:The first foot has a freer structure, allowing strong syllables in a falling position as well as a rising one:
:: Niit' en/nen i/soni / lauloi (1:37)
:: ("These my father sang aforetime")
* A short syllable with a main stress is metrically weak.
:In the second, third, and fourth feet, a weak syllable can occur only in the falling part:
:: Miele/ni mi/nun te/kevi (1:1)
:: ("I am driven by my longing")
:Again, the first foot's structure is more free, allowing weak syllables in a rising position as well as a falling one:
:: vesois/ta ve/tele/miä (1:56)
:: ("Others taken from the saplings")
* All syllables without a main stress are metrically neutral. Neutral syllables can occur at any position.

There are two main types of line:
* A normal tetrameter, word-stresses and foot-stresses match, and there is a caesura between the second and third feet:
: Veli / kulta, // veikko/seni
* A broken tetrameter (Finnish: ''murrelmasäe'') has at least one stressed syllable in a falling position. There is usually no caesura:
: Miele/ni mi/nun te/kevi
Traditional poetry in the Kalevala metre uses 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.
* The last syllable of a line may not include a long vowel.

Schemes

There are two main schemes featured in the ''Kalevala'':
* Alliteration
:Alliteration can be broken into two forms. Weak: where only the opening consonant is the same, and strong: where both the first vowel or vowel and consonant are the same in the different words. (e.g. ''vaka vanha Väinämöinen'' "Steadfast old Väinämöinen").
* Parallelism
:Parallelism in ''The Kalevala'' refers to the stylistic feature of repeating the idea presented in the previous line, often by using synonyms, rather than moving the plot forward. (e.g. ''Näillä raukoilla rajoilla / Poloisilla pohjan mailla'' "In these dismal Northern regions / In the dreary land of Pohja"). Lönnrot has been criticised for overusing parallelism in ''The Kalevala'': in the original poems, a line was usually followed by only one such parallel line.

The verses are sometimes inverted into chiasmus.

Poetry example

Verses 221 to 232 of song forty.

Lönnrot's contribution to the ''Kalevala''

Very little is actually known about Elias Lönnrot's personal contributions to the ''Kalevala''. Scholars to this day still argue about how much of the ''Kalevala'' is genuine folk poetry and how much is Lönnrot's own work – 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 poetry—according to the testimony of Arhippa Perttunen—traditional bards in his father's days would always vary the language of songs from performance to performance when reciting from their repertoire.Thomas DuBois. "From Maria to Marjatta: The Transformation of an Oral Poem in Elias Lönnrot's Kalevala" ''Oral Tradition, 8/2 (1993) pp.247–288''

The Finnish historian Väinö Kaukonen suggests that 3% of the ''Kalevala''s lines are Lönnrot's own composition, 14% are Lönnrot compositions from variants, 50% are verses which Lönnrot kept mostly unchanged except for some minor alterations, and 33% are original unedited oral poetry.Väinö Kaukonen. "Lönnrot ja Kalevala" ''Finnish Literature Society, (1979)''.

Publishing

Finnish language

The first version of Lönnrot's compilation was entitled ''Kalewala, taikka Wanhoja Karjalan Runoja Suomen Kansan muinoisista ajoista'' ("The Kalevala, or old Karelian poems about ancient times of the Finnish people"), also known as the ''Old Kalevala''. It was published in two volumes in 1835–1836. The ''Old Kalevala'' consisted of 12,078 verses making up a total of thirty-two poems.

Even after the publication of the ''Old Kalevala'' Lönnrot continued to collect new material for several years. He later integrated this additional material, with significantly edited existing material, into a second version, the ''Kalevala''. This ''New Kalevala'', published in 1849, contains fifty poems, with a number of plot differences compared with the first version, and is the standard text of the ''Kalevala'' read and translated to this day. (Published as: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran Toimituksia. 14 Osa. KALEVALA.)

The word ''Kalevala'' rarely appears in the original folk songs. The first appearance of the word in folk songs was recorded in April 1836. Lönnrot chose it as the title for his project sometime at the end of 1834,Matti Kuusi and Pertti Anttonen. "Kalevala Lipas" ''Finnish Literary Society, 1985''. but his choice was not random. The name "Kalev" appears in Finnic and Baltic folklore in many locations, and the '' Sons of Kalev'' are known throughout Finnish and Estonian folklore.

Lönnrot produced ''Lyhennetty laitos'', an abridged version of the Kalevala, in 1862. It was intended for use in schools. It retains all 50 runos from the 1849 version, but omits more than half of the verses.

Translations

Of the few complete translations into English, it is only the older translations by John Martin Crawford (1888) and William Forsell Kirby (1907) which attempt to strictly follow the original (Kalevala metre) of the poems.

A notable partial translation of Franz Anton Schiefner's German translation was made by Prof. John Addison Porter in 1868 and published by Leypoldt & Holt.

Edward Taylor Fletcher, a British-born Canadian literature enthusiast, translated selections of the ''Kalevala'' in 1869. He read them before the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec on 17 March 1869.

Francis Peabody Magoun published a scholarly translation of the ''Kalevala'' in 1963 written entirely in prose. The appendices of this version contain notes on the history of the poem, comparisons between the original ''Old Kalevala'' and the current version, and a detailed glossary of terms and names used in the poem. Magoun translated the ''Old Kalevala'', which was published six years later entitled ''The Old Kalevala and Certain Antecedents''.

Eino Friberg's 1988 translation uses the original metre selectively but in general is more attuned to pleasing the ear than being an exact metrical translation; it also often reduces the length of songs for aesthetic reasons.Eino Friberg. ''Kalevala – Epic of the Finnish people'', Introduction to the first edition, 1989. In the introduction to his 1989 translation, Keith Bosley stated: "The only way I could devise of reflecting the vitality of Kalevala metre was to invent my own, based on syllables rather than feet. While translating over 17,000 lines of Finnish folk poetry before I started on the epic, I found that a line settled usually into seven syllables of English, often less, occasionally more. I eventually arrived at seven, five and nine syllables respectively, using the ''impair'' (odd number) as a formal device and letting the stresses fall where they would."

Most recently, translator Kaarina Brooks translated into English the complete runic versions of ''Old Kalevala'' 1835 (Wisteria Publications 2020) and ''Kalevala'' (Wisteria Publications 2021). These works, unlike previous versions, faithfully follow the Kalevala metre throughout and can be sung or chanted.

Modern translations were published in the Karelian and Urdu