It is a purely pagan epic, and from its complete silence as to Finland's
neighbors, the Russians, Germans, and Swedes, it is supposed to date back
at least three thousand years.
The first attempt to collect Finnish folk-song was made in the seventeenth
century by Palmskoeld and Peter Baeng. In 1733, Maxenius published a volume
on Finnish national poetry, and in 1745 Juslenius began a collection of
national poems. Although scholars saw that these collected poems were
evidently fragments of a Finnish epic, it remained for two physicians,
Zacharias Topelius and Elias Loennrot, to collect the entire poem.
Topelius, though confined to his bed by illness for eleven years, took
down the songs from travelling merchants brought to his bedside. His
collections were published in 1822 and 1831. Loennrot travelled over
Finland, collecting the songs, which he published, arranged in epical
form, in 1835. A revised edition was published in 1849.
The Kalevala consists of fifty parts, or runes, containing twenty-two
thousand seven hundred and ninety-three lines. Its historical foundation
is the contests between the Finns and the Lapps.
Its metre is the "eight syllabled trochaic with the part-line echo,"
alliteration also being used, a metre familiar to us through Longfellow's
"Hiawatha."
The labors of a Wolf are not necessary to show that the Kalevala is
composed of various runes or lays, arranged by a compiler.
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