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The page of Kalevala, English biography

Image of Kalevala
Kalevala

Biography

The Kalevala is an epic poem which Elias Lönnrot compiled from Finnish folk lore in the 19th century. It is commonly called the Finnish national epic and is traditionally thought of as one of the most significant works of Finnish-language literature. The Kalevala is credited with some of the inspiration for the national awakening that ultimately led to Finland's independence from Russia in 1917.

The name can be interpreted as the "lands of Kaleva" (by the Finnish suffix -la/lä for place). The epic consists of 22,795 verses, divided into fifty cantos or "chapters".

Finnish folk poetry was first written down in the 1670s, followed by a few collectors during the next centuries. In the 19th century, collecting became more extensive and systematic. Altogether, almost two million verses were collected during this time. Of these, about 1,250,000 have been published and some 500,000 remain unpublished in the archives of the Finnish Literature Society and the collections in Estonia and the Republic of Karelia and other parts of Russia. By the end of the 19th century this pastime and the cumulating cultural orientation towards eastern lands had become a fashion called Karelianism.

Lönnrot and his contemporaries (e.g. A.J. Sjögren and D.E.D. Europaeus) collected most of the poem variants (one poem might have up to two hundred variants) scattered across the regions of Karelia and Ingria amongst the rural people. They carefully noted the name of the poem singer, his or her age, the place of performance and the date in their records. During his fourth field trip in September 1833 Lönnrot got 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.

The poetry was usually sung to tunes built on a pentachord, sometimes assisted by the kantele (a kind of five-string zither). The rhythm could vary but the tunes were arranged in either two or four lines consisting of five beats each. Sometimes the poems were performed antiphonally, sometimes they were a part of a "singing-match" between knowers of the tradition. Despite the vast geographical distances and cultural spheres separating the individual singers, the poetry was always sung in the same metre, the so-called archaic trochaic tetrametre. Its other formal features are alliteration and parallelism and inversion into chiasmus.

The chronology of this oral tradition is uncertain. The seemingly oldest themes (the beginning of the world) have been interpreted to have their roots in distant pre-history while the seemingly latest events (e.g. the arrival of Christianity) seem to be from the Iron Age.

Of the tens of poem singers who contributed to the Kalevala, significant ones include:

* Arhippa Perttunen (1769-1840)
* Matro
* Ontrei Malinen (1780-1855)
* Vaassila Kieleväinen
* Soava Trohkimainen


source :: wikipedia
Literature ::
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