Review of Kalevala (1849)

Elias Lönnrot (editor).

Read in 2024.

I read John Martin Crawford’s 1988 translation of the 1849 “new Kalevala”. I have not read the 1835 original or any of Lönnrot’s raw materials.

Some of the adventures involve the Sampo, a kind of mill churning out flour, salt, and money. This makes me think of it as a cross between a Medieval cornucopia and the industrial capital of Lönnrot’s time, perhaps via a quern. This confusion of symbols is typical of the work. The Kalevala does not really have a central narrative, even though Lönnrot tried to synthesize one from the songs of his sources. Instead, it’s a blurry snapshot of ancient Finnish life. There are 72 references to the Sampo and over 400 references to maidens, both as objects of universal desire in folktales, and as characters. The most powerful section is in chapters (“runes” or cantos) 22 and 23, where one particular maiden, about to get married, hears warnings about patrilocal married life. These passages are more touching than the epic adventures. They’re clearly based on experience.

The supernatural adventures are kind of cool though. Just-so stories about the creation of the world are woven through them, and sometimes, the strands of the natural and the supernatural come together in metaphor. In chapter 3, a wannabe collides head on with the object of his jealousy, the “wisdom-singer” Väinämöinen. The wannabe gets sung into the ground. To save his life, he promises his sister Aino to Väinämöinen. Aino, believably, would rather die than shack up with this eerie old “hero” who was present at the world’s creation in chapter 2. Instead of living as a “prop to stay him when he totters”, she drowns herself in chapter 4. In chapter 5, living as a mermaid after death, she meets Väinämöinen again and rejects him again. In these four chapters out of 50, you already get drama, a kind of magic tied to both song and wisdom (i.e. the real poet’s narcissistic fantasy), and a surprising feminism and humility colouring the imagination of the poets, which they applied to nature. This is more fun than The Iliad (ca. 700 BCE), albeit less influential.

The many “maidens” like Aino are bigger fans of the wild and handsome Lemminkäinen. In chapter 28, this bad-boy “hero” is on the run, but the spotlight passes to his mother. She’s not happy about the trouble he’s caused. Nominally, she counsels him on where to hide from his enemies, but the poets make another delightful shift in perspective. The words of the disappointed mother are really about human ecology.

This the answer of the mother:
“I do not know where I can send thee;
Be a pine-tree on the mountain,
Or a juniper in lowlands?
Then misfortune may befall thee;
Often is the mountain pine-tree
Cut in splints for candle-lighters;
And the juniper is often
Peeled for fence-posts for the pastures.[---]”

Her answer expands to a strangely long list of humankind’s encroachments on the wilderness, and this is not an isolated incident. If you’re generous, you can misread it as character development. Earlier, in chapter 15, Lemminkäinen’s mother is out looking for him. She “tramples down opposing brush-wood”, and then:

Now she asks the trees the question,
And the forest gives this answer:
“We have care enough already,
Cannot think about thy matters;
Cruel fates have we to battle,
Pitiful our own misfortunes!
We are felled and chopped in pieces,
Cut in blocks for hero-fancy,
We are burned to death as fuel,
No one cares how much we suffer.”

Like the Sampo, these songs about environmental awareness seem coloured by Lönnrot’s own time. From his version alone, it’s hard to tell how old the many stories might be. They certainly contain crossbows, Christian crosses and hashed allusions to Christian legends. Ukko is the name of a supreme “god of mercy”, a creator, omnipresent yet also living in heaven. This is all like the Christian Yahweh, but Ukko is not Yahweh. Like the Greek epics, the Kalevala is charming in its paganism, and even more so in its un-Christian concern for a world larger than drama.

References here: The Lord of the Rings (1954).

text fiction