The launch took place on 28 February, which is Kalevala Day. When Elias Lönnrot first assembled the book from Karelian oral poetry in 1835 he did so with the intention of creating a Finnish national epic. That there is a national day dedicated to the book indicates his success. The audiobook was recorded by its translator, Keith Bosley, and I found myself giving a potted introduction to the poem's significance in a room full of people much better equipped to do so than me. Naxos posted a nice summary of the event here, while the Finnish Embassy reviewed the speeches by Irma-Riita Järvinen and myself in this nice article.
Below is the text of my speech on 'The Kalevala and Folklore'. It's somewhat rudimentary, but I hope it conveys a little of the excitement and enjoyment I got reading this great work for the first time.
* * *
Mr Ambassador, esteemed colleagues,
ladies and gentlemen.
I am delighted and deeply
honoured to be able to participate tonight in celebrating the (long-overdue) release
of an English-language audiobook of the Kalevala.
I should preface my brief remarks here by extending greetings and
congratulations from the Folklore Society here in Britain. The Folklore Society
is pleased to welcome this audiobook, which sets the seal on the splendid
translation of the Kalevala by Keith
Bosley, who is one of our members. The Folklore Society was founded in 1878: it
was among the first such societies internationally to identify itself as a
‘folklore’ society, but we have some eminent forebears and predecessors. I’d
especially like to pay tribute here to our colleagues in the Finnish Literature
Society (which was founded in 1831 and has a magnificent folklore archive) with
whom we still have good and close relations.
So, I am delighted and honoured,
but also rather daunted to be speaking about the Kalevala in front of an audience which has grown up with this as
their cultural patrimony and in front of someone who has spent so long living
inside the poem, first translating it and then recording it. However, one of
the things we’re celebrating tonight is the enormous global cultural
significance of the Kalevala. This
significance of Elias Lönnrot’s publication was quickly recognised far beyond
what would become Finland’s borders, and these poems had an international
impact in a number of fields.
Not least of these was in
poetry itself, where Longfellow’s adoption of Kalevalic trochaic tetrameters
set an uncomfortable model for English ears of how this verse might sound. So
it’s an additional delight that the audiobook we’re celebrating tonight is the
work of Keith Bosley, whose fine translation avoids that misleadingly plodding
character and come closer to the flexibility and vitality of Lönnrot’s texts.
More importantly, as a folklorist,
I have to point to the impact Lönnrot’s book had on the emerging discipline of
folklore. There have been ebbs and flows in this. Taken initially as a body of
folkloric material, the Kalevala
played an important role in shaping the discipline of folklore as scholars
argued over how folkloric it actually was. The discipline of folklore received
all sorts of theoretical boosts from investigations that actually ruled out
studying the Kalevala as folklore at
all, treating it rather as literature. Lönnrot probably wrote about 600 lines,
around 2% of the total, and we’ve now come to a much more satisfyingly
complicated appraisal of the text, which acknowledges Lönnrot’s literary
achievements as editor and writer, the oral poetic achievements of the Karelian
rune singers whose traditional material Lönnrot shaped, and the folkloric
material contained within the texts: the point, though, is that this book
continues to stand at the centre of a whole nexus of argument, thinking and
appreciation.
It’s appropriate, at an
occasion where we’re celebrating the broader availability of the cultural
masterpiece, to note that the Kalevala
has from the start been part of an international discussion of folklore. Lönnrot
was influenced by the Grimms and the German Romantics in his attempts to merge these
oral texts into a Finnish mythology. That was reciprocated: one of the early
champions of the Old Kalevala was
Jacob Grimm, who gave enthusiastic lectures on it in 1845. One of the most
important early critics of the Kalevala,
who really fought to identify the traditional religious material within it even
when Finnish scholars were treating it predominantly as literature rather than
folklore, was the Italian folklorist Domenic Comparetti.
Here in Britain the pioneers
of the Folklore Society were quick to champion the work and its significance.
In 1888, just 10 years after the founding of the Folklore Society, W.F. Kirby
announced his intention of producing an English version from a German
translation of the Kalevala. There
was an outcry among scholars in the new discipline of folklore: among the
eminent scholars who insisted that Kirby really must work from the Finnish were
Andrew Lang and Max Müller – I believe it is one of the few occasions on which
those eminent folklorists ever agreed with each other. (Although the result was
in a Longfellow metre, we should at least give Kirby credit for taking their
arguments seriously enough to learn both Finnish and Estonian before
undertaking the translation).
Studies of the Kalevala were to shape whole schools of
folklore research. This began, appropriately enough, in Finland itself. All of
the literary and oral materials on which the Kalevala is based are still in existence, and are held in the
folklore archives of the Finnish Literature Society. Lönnrot preserved all his
field diaries and journals, and there is clear evidence of every stage of the
development of the text as we now have it. This body of material provided a
stimulus to the early development of scholarly research into folklore there.
It’s not a coincidence that one of the earliest chairs in folklore was established
in Helsinki in 1898, and the department in Helsinki remains internationally
important.
Julius Krohn, who was born 3
months after first publication of the Old
Kalevala, began his studies of the genetic transmission of oral poetry and
folklore with an examination of the Kalevala.
He concluded that Lönnrot’s texts were not in origin homogeneous, or even
specifically Finnish/Karelian, but brought together folkloric themes known from
a wide area. (He pointed out that even though this was the case it didn’t
preclude the material in its present form being taken to the Finnish heart).
Through the work of Julius
Krohn and his son Kaarle, a whole school of folklore research developed, which
became known as the Finnish or (later, when non-Finns were more involved) the
Historic-Geographic method. This attempted to identify the origins and movement
of individual folklore items and motifs by putting together all the known
records and charting them historically and geographically. This has fallen
somewhat out of favour now but it shaped a whole way of approaching folklore
material that’s ultimately proved very useful with the Kalevala.
Looking at the source
material we can identify four broad groups of poetry historically. Lönnrot was
most interested in constructing a mythology, a spiritual or supernatural
account of origins and situations. Much of the mythic material here seems to be
the oldest poetry included. There is a later phase of magic and shamanistic
poetry, perhaps dating up to about AD600. After this shared motifs with
Scandinavian sagas start to appear in Baltic-Finnish material, and we see the
development of more adventure poetry. A whole body of material also directly
reflects the Christianisation of the region. Kalevala poetry began to decline
from the Middle Ages, but there were periodic resurgences of the form for
propaganda (16th/17th centuries) and 18th
century plaints. This material existed disparately, and Lönnrot was able to
blend the periods and themes together, so the shaman of one poem can also be
identified with the adventure hero of another, or the god of one myth has his
status changed to that of shaman throughout.
Comparetti noted the huge
number of charms that appear throughout the Kalevala,
describing it as ‘an epic of charms’. Lönnrot assembled a text which pointed to
an ancient monotheism, what’s been called ‘a “good” paganism’: he adduced the
charms as evidence of this practice, but seems not to have noticed always the
christianisation evident within individual items.
Now I, as a folklorist, of
course find this stuff fascinating, and worthy of closer attention. I can talk
about the history of folklore till the cows come home, but the point of this
audiobook is that it actually makes available in a direct, oral, form, the content.
The stories themselves – the origin myth, the tragedy of Kullervo – are
accessible enough, but the poem brims with other folkloric material. Folklore
is the minutiae of people’s lives, the informal and unstated fabric of how
people live and think, and this poem teems with it. Some of it is
straightforwardly about folklife, about how people conduct/conducted
themselves: the runes concerning the preparation of the bride for her new home
tell you all sorts of things not just about relations between the sexes but
also about how young couples are treated by their older relatives during
betrothal ceremonies.
Given the blending of
different source material from different historical periods you get a
shimmering sense of different folklore passing before you. Some of them will
find echoes in folklore familiar across the British Isles, too, for example the
notion in rune 43 that singing on board a ship is unlucky.
Does it really matter, when
you read or hear this captivating poem for the first time, whether Väinamöinen is
a god or a hero, whether Lemminkäinen is a hero or a shaman? What’s more
important here is the sense of something magical and possible, that’ll be
immediately familiar to anyone who knows any of the English-Scottish ballad
tradition. In rune 27, when Lemminkäinen duels with the Lord of Pohjola they
sing each other into different forms – a pond, a bullock, a wolf, a hare – in
much the same way as the protagonists of the ballad ‘The Two Magicians’ or the
fairies in ‘Tam Lin’. The dreadful results of Kullervo’s seduction of his
sister are echoed throughout ballads like ‘Edward’, while making a magical
musical instrument from bones is also an important theme in the ballad ‘The
Three Sisters’.
For those of you more
familiar with the earthier end of English folksong, the Great Ox of rune 20 has
a lot in common with the widespread (and often quite scatological) ‘Derby Ram’,
while the creation of beer – and the warnings about its power – in the same
rune have parallels in ‘John Barleycorn’.
