"Songs preserved from distant ages."
The national epic of Finland, the Kalevala, or Place of Heroes, stands
midway between the purely epical structure, as exemplified in Homer, and
the epic songs of certain nations.
It is a purely pagan epic, and from its complete silence as to Finland's
neighbors, the Russians, Germans, and Swedes, it is supposed to date back
at least three thousand years.
The first attempt to collect Finnish folk-song was made in the seventeenth
century by Palmsköld and Peter Bäng. In 1733, Maxenius published a volume
on Finnish national poetry, and in 1745 Juslenius began a collection of
national poems. Although scholars saw that these collected poems were
evidently fragments of a Finnish epic, it remained for two physicians,
Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lönnrot, to collect the entire poem.
Topelius, though confined to his bed by illness for eleven years, took
down the songs from travelling merchants brought to his bedside. His
collections were published in 1822 and 1831. Lönnrot travelled over
Finland, collecting the songs, which he published, arranged in epical
form, in 1835. A revised edition was published in 1849.
The Kalevala consists of fifty parts, or runes, containing twenty-two
thousand seven hundred and ninety-three lines. Its historical foundation
is the contests between the Finns and the Lapps.
Its metre is the "eight syllabled trochaic with the part-line echo,"
alliteration also being used, a metre familiar to us through Longfellow's
"Hiawatha."
The labors of a Wolf are not necessary to show that the Kalevala is
composed of various runes or lays, arranged by a compiler. Topelius and
Lönnrot were conscientious collectors and compilers, but they were no
Homers, who could fuse these disconnected runes into one great poem. The
Kalevala recites many events in the lives of different heroes who are not
types of men, like Rama, or Achilles, or Ulysses, but the rude gods of an
almost savage people, or rather, men in the process of apotheosis, all
alike, save in the varying degrees of magic power possessed by each.
The Finnish lays are interesting to us because they are the popular songs
of a people handed down with few changes from one generation to another;
because they would have formed the material for a national epic if a great
poet had arisen; because of their pictures of ancient customs, and
particularly the description of the condition of women, and because of
their frequently beautiful descriptions of nature. But because they are
simply runes "loosely stitched together" we can regard them only with
interest and curiosity, not with admiration.