The Kalevala – what is it?
What was Elias Lönnrot’s role in the birth of the Kalevala?
Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) has been called a collector of fragmented epics, a collector of folk poetry, a scribe, a creative poet, and a singer. In reality, the Kalevala is Lönnrot’s epic poem and a 19th-century work of art, although its sources are deep in the folk traditions. Lönnrot created the epic by combining a variety of folk poems from different times. The Finnish-Karelian-Ingrian poetic culture did not contain a single epic whole, although for their length, some of the poems can be seen as miniature epics.
Image: Elias Lönnrot with his daughters. Detail from a family portrait, 1864. Finna.fi
The Kalevala is Lönnrot's epic poem and a 19th-century work of art, although its sources are deep in the folk traditions.
Lönnrot’s aim was to present folk poems and their meanings to the educated elite, who often had little knowledge of the Finnish language and the culture of the people across the eastern border. The literary challenge was to find ways to present the Karelian and Ingrian poetry and poetic tradition in a form that the urban readers could understand, while remaining as faithful as possible to the traditions.
Elias Lönnrot was well equipped to manage this unification work. He was the fourth of the nine children of a poor tailor and his wife in the rural Finnish speaking village of Sammatti, but through his formal education he rose to the Swedish speaking, pro-Finnish intelligentsia emerging at the time. On the other hand, practicing the medical profession–he was the district doctor of Kajaani for 30 years–and numerous trips to the remote villages of Finland and Karelia, collecting folk poetry, brought Lönnrot closer to the Finnish-speaking population, a people that he sought to enlighten in many ways.