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The Kalevala and the Authenticity Debate

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The Kalevala and the Authenticity Debate chapter 3 The Kalevala and the Authenticity Debate Pertti Anttonen The Kalevala, officially named and recognized as the national epic of Finland, is a book of verse in Finnish that was compiled by medical doctor and folk- lore collector Elias Lönnrot on the basis of traditional songs of folk poetry that he documented from among illiterate singers in eastern Finland and Russian Karelia between the late 1820s and early 1840s. The book was first published in 1835, but after making new collecting trips and receiving additional materials from his fellow collectors, Lönnrot compiled an extended version that came out in 1849. This is the authorized version of the national epic that contains 22,795 lines divided into 50 cantos. The text runs in trochaic tetrameter with four poetic feet in each line. The meter has been subsequently named the Kalevala meter, which is anachronistically also applied to the type of oral folk poetry that the epic draws on. The terms ‘Kalevala poetry’ and ‘Kalevalaic poetry’ may thus refer to the printed epic as well as traditional Finnish-language folk poetry in general. Ever since its publication, the Kalevala has been debated in terms of how accurate it is as a representation and reflection of oral tradition. The debate has mainly concerned Lönnrot’s editorial role in the compilation of the epic and the extent to which his editorial choices and textual practices have compromised the epic’s authenticity. Upon its publication, the Kalevala was received with great acclaim and celebrated as a discovery and restoration of an ancient folk epic which had over time shattered into pieces and survived as fragments in oral tradition. In accordance with contemporary Romantic views, it was believed that the unified literary form that Lönnrot gave to his collected materials represented the epic in its original shape.1 Later, however, the idea of the Kalevala as a genuine folk epic in both form and content gave way to view- ing it as a literary rendition of oral folk poetry, as “Lönnrot’s epic.”2 As such, it 1 Jouko Hautala, Finnish Folklore Research 1828–1918 (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1969), 26; Väinö Kaukonen, Lönnrot ja Kalevala [Lönnrot and the Kalevala] (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1979), 88–91, 187. 2 See Lauri Honko, “The Kalevala: The Processual View,” in Religion, Myth, and Folklore in the World’s Epics: The Kalevala and its Predecessors, Lauri Honko (ed.) (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 181–229. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�768�9_004 the kalevala and the authenticity debate 57 came to be seen as fundamentally distinct from its source materials and the oral poetry tradition that it purportedly depicts. Curiously enough, despite being mainly regarded inauthentic as an epic compilation, it still retains an aura of genuineness especially due to its national significance. During the almost 200 years since the first versions of the epic, the question of the Kalevala’s authenticity has basically concerned its justification as an epic entity. Is it what it claims to be? Does it have popular origins? Is it faithful to its sources? Is the plot structure cohesive enough for an epic? Is the plot structure justified with regard to the plot structures in the original folk poems? Does its justification as an epic emerge from some theory concerning the tradition of oral poetry and its literary representation? Does it receive its justification as an epic from being a successful artistic creation that draws relatively faithfully on oral tradition? Or does its justification emerge from being symbolically sig- nificant for Finnish nation-making and relevant images of Finnish prehistory, regardless of the question of its textual fidelity to its sources? Lönnrot himself justified his compilation with contemporary theories of epic textualization. As a student at the Royal Academy of Turku in the 1820s he had familiarized himself with F.A. Wolf’s theory on Homeric epics, accord- ing to which these had originally been songs and rhapsodies in oral circula- tion that Homer the singer had compiled into an entity, which in turn had continued to be reproduced in oral circulation by wandering performers and eventually come to be written down. This theory prompted him to try the same with the folk poems that he was collecting in Finland and Russian Karelia. His teacher at the Academy, Reinhold von Becker, gave major encouragement to this enterprise. Lönnrot’s friend J.L. Runeberg, who was to become Finland’s national poet, publicly praised him for both succeeding in the reconstruction of an ancient but fragmented epic and for proving how the Homeric poems had been collected.3 It was the highly influential Runeberg who raised the Kalevala to the status of a national epic even before it was published. Another narrative justification of the epic deals with Lönnrot’s discov- ery of epic potential in Finnish folk poetry. In the preface to the first edi- tion of the Kalevala, Lönnrot writes that while reading Kristfrid Ganander’s Mythologia Fennica, a dictionary of Finnish mythology in Swedish, published in 1789, he started to think “whether there might not be enough of them about Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkäinen and others of our ancestors worth remembering, to make longer tales about them, as we see that the Greeks, Icelanders and others have done with poems of their ancestors.”4 It is 3 Kaukonen, Lönnrot ja Kalevala, 88–9. 4 Elias Lönnrot, “Esipuhe” [Preface], in Kalevala taikka vanhoja Karjalan runoja Suomen kan- san muinosista ajoista. 1835 julkaistun Kalevalan laitoksen uusi painos [The Kalevala, or old .
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