Exploring the Epics I - The Kalevala: Dead Form, Living Song
By Hanna Simojoki
The National Epic of Finland, illustrated by Akseli Gallen-Kallela
Bridging the gap between modernity and antiquity, folk epics provide us with origin stories for the world as we know it, vividly giving life to the histories of people long dead. In Exploring the Epics, Hanna Simojoki examines the notions of belonging, collectivity, and storytelling, as well as the forms and means by which these are expressed. Exploring the place of ancient stories in a modern world, this first instalment probes the power of the narrative which helped shape a nation, uncovering the rich and unique folk history of Finland as seen through its national epic, the Kalevala.
“I am wanting, I am thinking, / To rise up and go forth singing”. So begins the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. It is both ancient and recent, living and dead, and it has had an unquestionably far-reaching impact on Finnish culture. Not in a sentimental way, which claims an unbreakable emotional tie between modern man and his mythical ancestors, but in a subtle and complex way, its many, often invisible, tendrils woven into the fabric of the nation. However, despite the idiosyncrasies of this particular poem, mythology is an ubiquitously significant part of modernity, culturally and politically. Every nation has an origin story, and every homogenous people is united by this sense of a shared origin. Within this framework (admittedly a generalisation), exists the very specific phenomenon of folk epics: long narrative poems born out of an oral tradition and only written down later on, thus unattributable to a single author. These are an incredibly significant part of understanding the culture which produced them, precisely because of the lack of attributable authorship – they can genuinely be said to have come from a living tradition, shared by countless, nameless individuals, and passed down through the ages before finally reaching us in the present day. They also therefore fulfil this need for an origin story: they are a product of a shared oral tradition, often refer to a semi- or fully mythical golden age, and thus provide people with a starting point from which their sense of common culture is born. To rise up, and go forth singing – that then is what it means to be a nation, telling its own story on its own terms. But abandoning these grand, Romantic ideals, what really is the significance of an ancient poem in a decidedly modern world? Can we even say that there is one?
The Kalevala is an epic full of metrical and linguistic idiosyncrasies. It is written in Kalevala metre, a loosely trochaic tetrameter which relies heavily on alliteration, rather than rhyme. As such, it lends itself to sung rather than spoken performance, which draws attention to the sounds of the words and weaves them into the melodies. Although the Kalevala is most well known today as a long, written work, it is actually a collection of thousands of individual songs and fragments, compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the early 19th century. To do this, he travelled extensively in the east of Finland, visiting rune singers in Karelia and Archangel Karelia, most of which now belongs to Russia. Although singing had previously been a ubiquitous part of Finnish folk culture, by the time he was collecting songs, the skill and memory was limited to only a few singers. Not only was it a means of storytelling and recall, but it was also considered to have spiritual and magical properties, with songs being used for domestic purposes such as healing, as well as for larger ceremonies, such as the sealing of marriage or the safe passage of the dead in funeral rites. Due to a lack of written cultural documentation however, there is much speculation about when, and to what extent, this kind of culture truly existed. Certainly, if it did, it was at its strongest during the Iron Age, which ended around 800AD in Finland. After the Christianisation of Scandinavia and Finland, the use of song as a supernatural tool greatly decreased.
Song as a method of storytelling and preservation is far from unique to Finnish culture, however. Most folk epics began as sung, rather than spoken, oral traditions, and the medium of song as accessible to all makes it a powerful vehicle for collective tradition. The rune singers who remained during the 19th century were therefore seen as the last links to a shared history which was once accessible to and created by all Finnish people as a collective body. This idea was therefore incredibly powerful during a time when a sense of national identity was growing rapidly in a Finland under Russian rule. The existence of the Kalevala as a written, and therefore literary artefact was in itself a strong claim for the concept of Finnish literary tradition and cultural heritage, something which hadn’t really existed beforehand. With an observably unified and historical culture, the idea of an independent Finnish nation became more credible, and the Kalevala was consistently used as a key proof of this. As a focus of Romantic nationalist ideals, its literary existence consolidated and unified thousands of strains of stories and beliefs from many different centuries. Further to this, it gave them a form which enabled access to a modern, and thus conventionally accepted and respected, conception of literature as an embodiment and representation of culture. The Kalevala was Finland: it was its history, its people, its story, its national identity, its origins and the source of its cultural credibility.
However, the form that solidified and consolidated the tradition also calcified it. Rune singing was already well on the decline, alive only in the most rural and disconnected parts of Finland, but with the creation of the written text, Lönnrot essentially put an end to the most crucial part of the Kalevala as a tradition, which was invention: telling old stories in new ways. As a text, the stories were given a final, authoritative form, thus hierarchising individual storytelling by prioritising the one written text. Where it helped Finland gain a credible place in the modern world, and eventually gain independence from Russia, it also inadvertently helped put an end to the traditional way of life still preserved in Eastern Finland and Karelia, as large swathes of these were lost to Russia when independence was gained. By creating an epic out of raw living material, Lönnrot undertook the incredibly important work of bringing the significance and value of Finnish folk culture to a global stage, but in doing so, he also monumentalised it, turning it into a relic of the past. While the Kalevala still has a significant place in modern culture, similar to that of the Arthurian legends in Britain, the skills, tradition and lifestyle it stands for are long extinct.