Collection and compilation
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 component 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 measure in 1826. His thesis was entitled De Vainamoine priscorum fennorum numine Väinämöinen, a Divinity of the Ancient Finns. The monograph'svolume was destroyed in the Great Fire of Turku the same year.
In the spring of 1828, he species out with the aim of collecting folk songs and poetry. Rather than cover this work, though, he decided to breed up his studies and entered Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki to examine 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 filed a or done as a reaction to a question 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.
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 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 Elias Lönnrot in making 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 keep on 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.
The newest events, e.g. the arrival of Christianity,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.
In total, Lönnrot produced eleven field trips in search of poetry. His first trip was made in 1828 after his graduation from Turku University, but it was non until 1831 and hisfield trip that the real work began. By that time he had already published three articles entitled Kantele and had significant notes to creation upon. This second trip was non 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 near 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. 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 format of verse. It was during this trip that Lönnrot formulated the image that the poems might exist 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 provided a large detail of the verses for the Kalevala. He met a singer called Matiska in the hamlet of Lonkka on the Russian side of the border. While this singer had a somewhat poor memory, he did support 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 known was to tie up some narrative loose ends and fix 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 component 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 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 required however, is that Lönnrot planned topoems 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 coding 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 quoted 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.
Lönnrot and his contemporaries, e.g. Matthias Castrén, Anders Johan Sjögren,
and David Emmanuel Daniel Europaeus 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 apart from 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 usage 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:
The poetry was often sung to music built on a ] The poems were often performed by a duo, each adult singing pick verses or groups of verses. This method of performance is called an antiphonic performance, this is the a kind of "singing match".
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 leading rules are as follows:
There are two leading types of line:
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:
There are two main schemes featured in the Kalevala:
The verses are sometimes inverted into chiasmus.
Verses 221 to 232 of song forty.
Väinämöinen, old and steadfast,
Answered in the words which follow:
"Yet a harp might be constructed
Even of the bones of fishes,
If there were a skilful workman,
Who could from the bones construct it."
As no craftsman there was present,
And there was no skilful workman
Who could make a harp of fishbones,
Väinämöinen, old and steadfast,
Then began the harp to fashion,
And himself the work accomplished.
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 for known that he merged poem variants and characters together, left out verses that did not fit and composed grouping of his own to connectpassages into a logical plot. Similarly, individual singers would use their own words and dialect when reciting their repertoire, even going so far as to perform different list of paraphrases of the same song at different times.
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.
The first explanation 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 tonew fabric 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 indications 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 tag for his project sometime at the end of 1834, but his selection 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 maintains all 50 runos from the 1849 version, but omits more than half of the verses.
Of the few fix translations into English, it is only the older translations by John Martin Crawford 1888 and William Forsell Kirby 1907 which attempt to strictly adopt 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 ago 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 title used in the poem. Magoun translated the Old Kalevala, which was published six years later entitled The Old Kalevala andAntecedents.
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. In the intro 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 ago I started on the epic, I found that a line settled commonly 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.": l
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 preceding versions, faithfully follow the Kalevala metre throughout and can be sung or chanted.
Modern translations were published in the Karelian and Urdu languages between 2009 and 2015. Thus, the Kalevala was published in its originating Karelian language only after 168 years since its first translation into Swedish.
As of 2010, the Kalevala had been translated into sixty-one languages and is Finland's most translated work of literature.