As a wanderer, musician and archaeologist wannabe I love the story and idea of the the Finnish Kalevala. This is believed to be the oldest epic song of creation on earth, older than the Song lines of Australia, older than Beowulf, older than any of us can imagine.
The Kalevala is the Finnish story of Creation, and includes myths that influenced and inspired countless artists and composers over almost infinite eons. It is believed that the Kalevala and it’s stories and myths originated after the last ice age, 18,000 years ago, and that the songs were passed on over the millennium generation to generation family to family, as an oral history.
The Kalevala has its birthplace in the Viena Karelian villages, an area still surrounded by primeval forest. Much of this area is in what is now Russia, but some of the villages are also in Finland. They are very remote, which is likely why the tradition of singing the Kalevala was preserved for so long: Literacy came late to these remote places, and because of that the oral tradition was the only way of transmitting cultural heritage and wisdom from one generation to the next. It was part of the daily routine, living on in the old men and women telling bedtime stories, in the lullabies, in the fishing and hunting incantations, in ceremonies and celebrations.
The Kalevala is a very long poem, and prior to it’s written publication, it was passed down generation to generation by word of mouth. It was sung as a song, generation after generation, winding back to the time before the Bronze age, when our ancestors were nomads hunting and gathering food, and not yet farmers. Like many ancient human tales, it begins with a version of the Creation of the World. There are feats of heroism, battles, magicians and magic, great warriors and kings, tales of success and tales of tragedy, monsters, weapons, myths and even a virgin birth. Though it may sound like fantasy and fable, much that is in the Kalevala is believed to be based on real human events, and is the history of the Finnish people. Modern research has shown that the texts are based on genuine material and events. It has also been suggested that much of the lore in the Kalevala relates to the peoples that we in the west call “Vikings”, a group that wrote little, but had a long history of epic storytelling and song.
These songs and poems were collected by Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), compiled into a collection and published in 1835. The material, old ballads and lyrical songs depicting "the sons of Kalevala" were published in two editions, first in 1835 with 35 cantos, and the enlarged edition with 50 cantos in 1849. Lönnrot's aim was to arrange the myths and poems into a single volume and tell about the past heroes as Homer did in Iliad and Odyssey. The Kalevala itself is based principally on poems collected from the Finnish-speaking regions beyond the eastern frontier of Finland. Between 1831 and 1835 Lönnrot undertook three collection journeys to Archangel Karelia and arranged his materials into an epic whole. The revised Kalevala was elaborated with the new material that he and other collectors had amassed since 1835.
The publication of the Kalevala helped protect the ancient poems and even the Finnish language itself, as the language was once in danger of dying out, but now is protected as a national language. The “Karalian” language, the language of the Kalevala, is very ancient, but closely related to modern Finnish. There are only about 5,000 speakers of this language left, at this point, as it is dying out.
There, near the Arctic Circle, the Viena Karalian village of Hietajärvi,lives Finnish Rune singer Jussi Juovinen, an extremely old man, the only living human who knows the entire epic song of the Kalevala. He has committed most of it to memory, and is considered the last living rune-singer. He is a living treasure, a man that can sing songs whose roots are so deep and ancient that they are obscured by time. (There is a National Geographic Special about him—very fascinating!)
How does this all tie in with our modern world and with music today? Though we may not have heard of the Kalevala ourselves, it has influenced many, many works of art in Western Culture. Twelve of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s best known works are based upon and influenced by The Kalevala, including his Kullervo, a symphony for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra. Modern artists and writers have also used the texts of the Kalevala for inspiration. One of the greatest examples of this is J. R. R Tolkien, who was fascinated with the Kalevala. One of it’s central themes is that of the Sampo, a magical artifact that brings good fortune to it’s owner, and is fought over by both good and evil till it is ultimately destroyed. Sounds like the One Ring to me.
The language of the Elves and the ancient history told in the Silmarillion is certainly inspired by the Kalevala, the Norse Volsunga Saga, and the German Niebelungenlied. And of course, there is Wagner’s Ring, closely related to all these sagas.
It is human nature to build on and embellish what we are familiar with, what we have always known. I like to catch someone in a cliché or old saying we all take for granted, and wonder, “Where did that come from?” “Who let the cat out of the bag? (Huh?) He’s a little tyke! (What is a tyke?) She kicked the Bucket! I got hitched! They really pulled the wool over my eyes! He really knows the ropes! I have butterflies in my stomach!” I generally go and look these things up when they occur to me (because apparently I need to have a vast reservoir of arcane and obscure knowledge), and I almost always discover that their origins go back to the middle ages, or hundreds of years ago, or to sometime in a past century when a sailor on a tall ship coined them and then everybody started to say them.
Whether or not you had heard of the Kalevala before you read about it here, part of you has always known some portion of it, because it is really your story, it is our story. Maybe you have recently seen a movie whose author or composer was influenced by a tale like the Kalevala, or by some aspect of it. In the end, no matter how modern we are, or how far into the future we go, we are always tied in some way to our ancient past by a thick or slender filament, whether we know it or not.