Kalevala: Elias Lonnrot (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

"One of the great mythic poems of Europe" (New York Times)

"I was immensely attracted by something in the air of the Kalevala" (Tolkien to W.H. Auden in 1955)

"Did so much to bolster early Finnish nationalism on the road to independence" (Guardian)

"The Kalevala , the 19th-century folk epic that crystallised national resistance to Russian rule, was compiled by Elias Lonnrot from ancient runes sung from memory in the eastern forests of Karelia. The Kalevala inspired not only Sibelius but JRR Tolkien, whose Middle Earth and elfin tongue tapped Finnish myths and language" (Guardian)

Elias Lönnrot was a Finnish country doctor born in 1802. During twenty years spent working in a remote part of eastern Finland, Lönnrot collected fragments of folk tales and poetry which he believed formed a continuous epic. He undertook eleven field trips on a quest to gather as much material as he could, partly funded by the Finnish Literary Society, of which he was a founding member. The result was the Kalevala, first published in 1835. Lönnrot continued to collect material, eventually bringing out the version we know today in 1849. It consists of 22,795 verses, divided into fifty songs. Lönnrot most likely merged similar variants and stitched fragments together with his own words.

Lönnrot became a professor of Finnish language and literature at the University of Helsinki in 1853. His work paved the way for the development of modern Finnish literature and promoted Finnish as the national language over Swedish. From 1866 he worked on the fourteen-year-long task of compiling the first Finnish–Swedish dictionary which contained over 200,000 entries. Many of the translations were coined by Lönnrot himself. He died in 1884.