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  • Published: 2 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9781784873042
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 704
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Kalevala




Discover the great Finnish epic on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the country of Finland.

Kalevala is the poetic name for Finland: ‘the land of heroes’. Here you’ll find the cultural essence of a young country but an old land, the stories, songs and poems that recount the mythical adventures of humankind. Ambition, lust, romance, birth and death can all be found within its pages, as well as the sampo, a mysterious talisman that brings great happiness to its possessor and over which great battles will be fought.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HORATIO CLARE

  • Published: 2 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9781784873042
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 704
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

About the author

Elias Lonnrot

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.

Praise for Kalevala

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

I was immensely attracted by something in the air of the Kalevala

Tolkien to W.H. Auden in 1955

One of the great mythic poems of Europe

New York Times