Description

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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. 

About the Author

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Elias Lönnrot was a Finnish country doctor born in 1802. During 20 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 11 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 50 songs. 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 14-year-long task of compiling the first Finnish–Swedish dictionary which contained over 200,000 entries. Horatio Clare is the author of Running for the Hills.

Praise For…

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"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