The Kalevala [antikvár]

FOREWORDThe Finnish epic in English translation has been part of my consciousness of heroic poetry since my undergraduate and graduate days, and it has informed my teaching as well as my scholarly activities for some years. It draws one to revisit it frequently, because it has elements of subject and a general atmosphere that are not found in epic and romance as I know them in the European tradition from Homer through the eighteenth century. For the key to an understanding of the Kalevala is the power of the word, the power of incantation and of the story that brings power. Its heroes are word-masters and wonder-workers.In the early 1950s I introduced the Kalevala into a course of Comparative Epic, The English translation of the Kalevala that I used for teaching at that time was W. F. Kirby's (1907). In the fifties there was little in English beyond Domenico Comparetti's The Traditional Poetry of the Finns (1892) to aid one in understanding how this strangely haunting epic from the North came into being. But that book, written by a classicist, was especially helpful for students of Homer, because it explained how Elias Lonnrot had not only collected but also assembled and shaped the great epic from its constituent shorter traditional songs.In time in my course, Kirby's translation was superseded by that of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. (1963), who had been my teacher in Anglo-Saxon; it was during those years that he was working on his translation of the Kalevala. After Comparetti's book, Martti Haa-vio's Vainamőinen, Eternal Sage (1952), with its study in depth of several of the songs used for the composition of the Kalevala, was of very great help, for it also adduced comparative thematic material from all over the world and throughout time. With the appearance of Finnish