Kalevala 1835-1985 [antikvár]

Michael Branch Kalevala: from myth to symbol On 28 February 1835, Elias Lönnrot signed the preface to the first edition of Kalevala. This collection of thirty-two cantos had been compiled from oral poetry which for the most part Lönnrot himself had recorded among the unlettered folk in the backwoods districts of north-eastern Finland and those parts of the Russian Province of Archangel where Karelian (a language closely related to Finnish) was spoken. Fourteen years later, in 1849, Lönnrot published an enlarged version of Kalevala, the edition which has become known to the world as the Finnish national epic. The publication of both editions was widely acclaimed in Finland, for they fuelled the aspirations of the emerging national movement. Yet the first edition was read by only a very small number of Finns: those with sufficient command of Finnish to understand Kalevala were but few in number in 1835. Their realisation of the work's significance, however, won the support of others in positions of authority and means were found for Lönnrot to prepare the second edition. The readership of the 1849 edition was alsó small and remained so for more than twenty years after its publication, and for the same reason: few educated Finns were competent enough in language to savour the poetic quality of Kalevala in the originál Finnish. Paradoxically, until the later decades of the nineteenth century Kalevala was probably more widely read in translation than in the originál. But for most Finns this did not matter. It was the 'rnyth' of Kalevala that was of paramount importance during those early years after first publication: the myth that Lönnrot had recovered from oblivion an ancient literary tradition of beauty and majesty. It was this myth that did so much to bring about the changes in hearts and minds necessary to open the way for the elevation of Finnish to a national language and the achievement of a Finnish national consciousness. The compilation of Kalevala was a unique embodiment of a set of late-eighteenth-century ideas most closely associated with the Germán thinker, J.G. Herder (1744-1803). Herder argued that a 'nation' could exist only if it possessed a distinctive cultural identity founded on the language and oral literature of the ordinary people. In Finland, where Swedish was the principal language of government and education at the end of the