Professor Pertti Anttonen receives the ninth Kalevala Society Award on Kalevala Day in 2026. Currently the most internationally renowned and well-connected Finnish folklorist, professor Anttonen has also made significant contributions to research into the textualisation of the Kalevala and oral tradition.
Pertti Anttonen, an internationally renowned Finnish folklorist
Professor Pertti Anttonen (born 1953) is a folklorist and professor emeritus of folklore studies at the University of Eastern Finland. He completed his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993 with a dissertation entitled Tradition and Its Study as Discursive Practice. Anttonen’s research focuses on theoretical concepts, research history and argumentation. Early in his career, he specialised in ethnopoetics and has since moved on to issues of textualisation of oral tradition and nationalism. Anttonen’s research is characterised by analytical criticality, theoretical examination of prevailing paradigms and concepts, and self-reflection within the field.
Anttonen’s internationally recognised magnum opus is Tradition Through Modernity: Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship, published in 2005, which deals with the history of research on nationalism and folklore studies. The work has become a classic in folklore studies both in Finland and abroad. Anttonen’s latest work is a collection of articles examining violence and tradition, edited by Anttonen, entitled Explorations in the Tradition of Violence and Violence of Tradition (FFC 328, 2025). The book was preceded by the international Folklore Fellows’ Summer School (FFSS 2021) led by Anttonen, which focused on violence and tradition. A Finnish-language work on tradition and argumentation is currently in progress. His international articles emphasise methodological and perspectives and themes, and analysis of ideologies.
Pertti Anttonen has also made a significant contribution to research on the textualisation of the Kalevala and oral tradition. Early in his career, he co-authored Kalevalalipas (1985, second edition 1999) with Matti Kuusi, which remains a fundamental work in the popularisation of science. He is an indispensable researcher of the ideological background and history of the reception of the Kalevala. The Academy of Finland project he led, ‘The Textualisation of Oral Tradition and Modern Contextualisation in Finland’ (2006–2009), was the first in-depth research project on the subject. It has resulted in doctoral dissertations on the textualisation and ideological world of the Kalevala (Hämäläinen 2012, Saarelainen 2019). The critical edition of the Kalevala, Avoin Kalevala (2019–2026), has also grown in part from Pertti Anttonen’s research.
Pertti Anttonen is currently the most internationally renowned and well-connected Finnish folklorist. From 2013 to 2019, he served on the board of SIEF, the European umbrella organisation for the field, and was the only Finn involved in the massive book project Grimm Ripples: The Legacy of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen in Northern Europe (Brill, 2022). Anttonen’s article dealt with the little-researched field within storytelling traditions in Finland. Pertti Anttonen is a docent of folklore at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku and a docent of ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä.
