Kalevala

by Elias Lonnrot, Horatio Clare (Introduction)

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781473549111
Publisher:	Random House
Publication date:	11/30/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	704
Sales rank:	772,587
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Preface xix

Book 1 Proem 5

Rune I Birth of Wainamoinen 7

Rune II Wainamoinen's Sowing 15

Rune III Wainamoinen and Youkahainen 27

Rune IV The Fate of Aino 45

Rune V Wainamoinen's Lamentation 61

Rune VI Wainamoinen's Hapless Journey 69

Rune VII Wainamoinen's Rescue 76

Rune VIII Maiden of the Rainbow 87

Rune IX Origin of Iron 95

Rune X Ilmarinen forges the Sampo 111

Rune XI Lemminkainen's Lament 126

Rune XII Kyllikki's Broken Vow 138

Rune XIII Lemminkainen's Second Wooing 153

Rune XIV Death of Lemminkainen 162

Rune XV Lemminkainehs Restoration 176

Rune XVI Wainamoinen's Boat-building 195

Rune XVII Wainamoinen finds the Lost-Words 208

Rune XVIII The Rival Suitors 224

Rune XIX Ilmarinen's Wooing 244

Rune XX The Brewing of Beer 259

Rune XXI Ilmarinen's Wedding-feast 277

Rune XXII The Bride's Farewell 289

Rune XXIII Osmotar the Bride-adviser 303

Rune XXIV The Bride's Farewell 326

Editorial Reviews

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

EBOOK COMMENTARY

"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

From the Publisher