Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Oxford University Press, USA (1989), Paperback, 736 pages
Description
The Kalevala is the great Finnish epic, which like the Iliad and the Odyssey, grew out of a rich oral tradition with prehistoric roots.During the first millenium of our era, speakers of Uralic languages (those outside the Indo-European group) who had settled in the Baltic region of Karelia, that straddles the border of eastern Finland and north-west Russia, developed an oral poetry that was to last into the nineteenth century.This poetry provided the basis of the Kalevala. It was assembled in the 1840s by the Finnish scholar Elias Lonnrot, who took `dictation' from the performance of a folk singer, in much the same way as our great collections from the past, from Homeric poems to medieval songs and epics, have probablybeen set down.Published in 1849, it played a central role in the march towards Finnish independence and inspired some of Sibelius's greatest works. This new and exciting translation by poet Keith Bosley, prize-winning translator of the anthology Finnish Folk Poetry: Epic, is the first truly to combine livelinesswith accuracy in a way which reflects the richness of the original.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member octoberdad
Although I clearly lack the language and culture to fully appreciate this collection of legend (or what have you), I found much of The Kalevala very intriguing. I liked best the exploits of Väinaöinen, as he set about doing...whatever it was he set about doing...but the craftsmanship and
I would like to read other translations. I really would like to read it in the original, but Finnish is somewhat far down on the list of languages I likely will never learn.
Show More
courtship of Ilmarinen also held some interest for me. I liked least the beginning (though, that may simply have been because I was coming upon something completely unknown and didn't yet know how to approach it) and the ending (a very bizarre tale that reeked of Christian allegory and which I think suffers from the melding of allusions). I would like to read other translations. I really would like to read it in the original, but Finnish is somewhat far down on the list of languages I likely will never learn.
Show Less
LibraryThing member GregsBookCell
One of the most recent rendering of oral folkore and myth into an epic cycle is Elias Lönnrot’s The Kalevala, shaped as a literary creation in the nineteenth century out of the author’s research collecting oral lore in stories and songs in Finland and rendering them into a continuous narrative
What is striking is the way that the chief characters simultaneously inhabit the personas of gods, shamans, bards and ordinary human beings. This too is reminiscent of, for instance, Rhiannon in the medieval Welsh tales riding magically across the landscape from the Otherworld and then continuing to live here as if she were a human character while also appearing in another tale in the cycle with magical birds that can sing people into an enchanted state. The main character in The Kalevala is Väinämöinen who is first met as an agent of the Creation, helping to put the sky in place and shape the world as we know it. But he continues to inhabit that creation as a human being, sometimes with enhanced powers but at other times as a vulnerable person with all-too-human weaknesses. He is a bard who can use his songs as powerful spells, turning aside the songs of a young rival and consigning him into a swamp with his own songs. He is a shaman who journeys to Tuonela, the Land of the Dead, to gather spells from another powerful shaman who has died. He also travels there to get the words he needs to create a boat to go to woo the daughter of The Mistress of Northland, though when he goes to her his friend, the younger Smith God Ilmarinen, is the preferred suitor and he must stand meekly aside.
When the focus then turns to Ilmarinen, the Smith is given apparently impossible tasks to fulfil, reminiscent of those given in other such wooing stories in the international folklore canon identified as the motif of ‘The Giant’s or Magician’s Daughter’. But it is not a giant or magician who sets the tasks but The Mistress of Northland, and it is now Ilmarinen who must travel to Tuonela to fulfil one of them. Having done so the narrative continues to treat the wedding and subsequent events as if they are the domestic arrangements of ordinary humans, incorporating elements of the folklore wisdom of rural life in Finland. This shifting of the signifier backwards and forwards from mundane through heroic to divine activities occurs quite naturally as the narrative progresses and Bosley’s verse translation (using a short seven-syllable line as a base, but varying from five to nine syllables where required) is always fully engaged with these shifts of significance and evocative in its expression of them at all levels.
In Väinämöinen’s bardic prowess and his claims to having been present at the Creation, there are echoes of the bardic boasts contained in the medieval Welsh Book of Taliesin. Similarly, in his journeys to the Netherwold to get what he wants, in particular to regain words and songs that “should not be hidden” we might also think of the claims of Taliesin or other bards for the source of poetic inspiration or ‘Awen’. Just as The Book of Taliesin has a raid on the Otherworld to capture a magical cauldron, The Kalevala has a raid on what appears to be Lapland in the North to capture a mysterious object called the Sampo which The Mistress of Northland has hidden in a mountain. The North, or Lapland, seems to function here both as a rival territory and as an Otherworld location, but separate from Tuonela, the Netherworld. This parallels the way that ‘Lochlann’ in Irish stories can variously function as a name for Orkney, Scandinavia or as an Otherworld place, or as the ‘Old North’ in Welsh tales is often a location for Otherworld encounters. But The Kalevala raid is not entirely an attempt to loot someone else’s treasure as one of the raiders is Ilmarinen who, earlier in the cycle, had created the Sampo in exchange for being able to woo the daughter of The Mistress of Northland, though she at that time rejected his advances. Here, again, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen seek to free what has been hidden, regaining an object removed from the world that should have a use in the world.
Looking for parallels across different mythologies we should not ignore the differences that make each set of stories culturally specific. The fact that we can identify international folklore motifs in stories from different cultures is certainly significant, and when we encounter them they often resonate both because they are essentially the same story and because of their distinct differences. We recognise the characters in The Kalevala as gods not so much because of who they are but by what they do. Falling into mythological patterns of behaviour which are recognisable across cultures is one of the clues. But characters in folk tales often also do this without obvious signs of divinity. What makes the characters in Bosley’s translation so obviously divine and yet so characteristically human is a mode of presentation that unselfconsciously allows them to be themselves in a particular landscape and yet transcend that particularity by their enactment of divine themes.
These gods are not remote. They can be lived with, admired, disapproved of, sympathised with, just as people we know in our own lives. Yet they remain larger than life and so can speak to us from another culture and also illuminate our own. At the end of The Kalevala there is an account of the coming of a new god, announcing the arrival of christianity (though churches are mentioned in the preceding chapters) as if to say ‘the time of these gods it at an end’. Väinämöinen bows out after the son of a virgin who had become pregnant by eating a cowberry banishes him, declaring as he goes:
Just let the time pass
one day go, another come
and again I’ll be needed
looked for and longed for
to fix a new Sampo, to
make new music
He leaves behind him the Kantele, the source of music which he had created. But he leaves the world he had helped to create. The folklore sources suggest that acknowledgment of the old gods had run concurrently with christianity for some time before this. There are several references to “The Great Bear”, the constellation that dominates the northern skies, as if it were of cultic significance. ‘God, keeper of heaven’ is often invoked as the source of storm clouds as when the trickster figure Lemminkäinen asks him to whip up a storm so he can escape his pursuers after killing The Master of Northland. One of the set formulas of this epic is that things can be tried three times and the attempt to effect things by spells - spoken words of power - generally proceed by first addressing a local spirit, then a demon and finally ‘The Thunderer, the Old Man, the One in the Sky’. The implication is that there is a final resort to an ultimate God figure, but one who can told what to do if the right words are used. He seems to function as one of the multiple identitities and levels of existence that are encompassed in these stories. But when he baptizes the son of the virgin who had eaten the cowberry everything changes, things become set and the old world passes. Yet still lives in this epic.
☼
Show More
in verse. As such it compares with earlier renderings of traditional lore such as Snorri Sturlsson’s Edda and also provides some insights into how oral sources can be shaped into literature as they are, for instance, in some of the medieval Welsh tales collected as ‘The Mabinogion’. I have dipped into The Kalevala before in a prose translation but have only recently fully engaged with it in Keith Bosley’s vivid and highly readable verse translation. It is the work of a poet, it is also a work where things happen by the right words being found and spoken to make them happen: “Steady old Väinämöinen. put this into words, spoke thus” and because his words are better than his opponent’s words, the battle is won.What is striking is the way that the chief characters simultaneously inhabit the personas of gods, shamans, bards and ordinary human beings. This too is reminiscent of, for instance, Rhiannon in the medieval Welsh tales riding magically across the landscape from the Otherworld and then continuing to live here as if she were a human character while also appearing in another tale in the cycle with magical birds that can sing people into an enchanted state. The main character in The Kalevala is Väinämöinen who is first met as an agent of the Creation, helping to put the sky in place and shape the world as we know it. But he continues to inhabit that creation as a human being, sometimes with enhanced powers but at other times as a vulnerable person with all-too-human weaknesses. He is a bard who can use his songs as powerful spells, turning aside the songs of a young rival and consigning him into a swamp with his own songs. He is a shaman who journeys to Tuonela, the Land of the Dead, to gather spells from another powerful shaman who has died. He also travels there to get the words he needs to create a boat to go to woo the daughter of The Mistress of Northland, though when he goes to her his friend, the younger Smith God Ilmarinen, is the preferred suitor and he must stand meekly aside.
When the focus then turns to Ilmarinen, the Smith is given apparently impossible tasks to fulfil, reminiscent of those given in other such wooing stories in the international folklore canon identified as the motif of ‘The Giant’s or Magician’s Daughter’. But it is not a giant or magician who sets the tasks but The Mistress of Northland, and it is now Ilmarinen who must travel to Tuonela to fulfil one of them. Having done so the narrative continues to treat the wedding and subsequent events as if they are the domestic arrangements of ordinary humans, incorporating elements of the folklore wisdom of rural life in Finland. This shifting of the signifier backwards and forwards from mundane through heroic to divine activities occurs quite naturally as the narrative progresses and Bosley’s verse translation (using a short seven-syllable line as a base, but varying from five to nine syllables where required) is always fully engaged with these shifts of significance and evocative in its expression of them at all levels.
In Väinämöinen’s bardic prowess and his claims to having been present at the Creation, there are echoes of the bardic boasts contained in the medieval Welsh Book of Taliesin. Similarly, in his journeys to the Netherwold to get what he wants, in particular to regain words and songs that “should not be hidden” we might also think of the claims of Taliesin or other bards for the source of poetic inspiration or ‘Awen’. Just as The Book of Taliesin has a raid on the Otherworld to capture a magical cauldron, The Kalevala has a raid on what appears to be Lapland in the North to capture a mysterious object called the Sampo which The Mistress of Northland has hidden in a mountain. The North, or Lapland, seems to function here both as a rival territory and as an Otherworld location, but separate from Tuonela, the Netherworld. This parallels the way that ‘Lochlann’ in Irish stories can variously function as a name for Orkney, Scandinavia or as an Otherworld place, or as the ‘Old North’ in Welsh tales is often a location for Otherworld encounters. But The Kalevala raid is not entirely an attempt to loot someone else’s treasure as one of the raiders is Ilmarinen who, earlier in the cycle, had created the Sampo in exchange for being able to woo the daughter of The Mistress of Northland, though she at that time rejected his advances. Here, again, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen seek to free what has been hidden, regaining an object removed from the world that should have a use in the world.
Looking for parallels across different mythologies we should not ignore the differences that make each set of stories culturally specific. The fact that we can identify international folklore motifs in stories from different cultures is certainly significant, and when we encounter them they often resonate both because they are essentially the same story and because of their distinct differences. We recognise the characters in The Kalevala as gods not so much because of who they are but by what they do. Falling into mythological patterns of behaviour which are recognisable across cultures is one of the clues. But characters in folk tales often also do this without obvious signs of divinity. What makes the characters in Bosley’s translation so obviously divine and yet so characteristically human is a mode of presentation that unselfconsciously allows them to be themselves in a particular landscape and yet transcend that particularity by their enactment of divine themes.
These gods are not remote. They can be lived with, admired, disapproved of, sympathised with, just as people we know in our own lives. Yet they remain larger than life and so can speak to us from another culture and also illuminate our own. At the end of The Kalevala there is an account of the coming of a new god, announcing the arrival of christianity (though churches are mentioned in the preceding chapters) as if to say ‘the time of these gods it at an end’. Väinämöinen bows out after the son of a virgin who had become pregnant by eating a cowberry banishes him, declaring as he goes:
Just let the time pass
one day go, another come
and again I’ll be needed
looked for and longed for
to fix a new Sampo, to
make new music
He leaves behind him the Kantele, the source of music which he had created. But he leaves the world he had helped to create. The folklore sources suggest that acknowledgment of the old gods had run concurrently with christianity for some time before this. There are several references to “The Great Bear”, the constellation that dominates the northern skies, as if it were of cultic significance. ‘God, keeper of heaven’ is often invoked as the source of storm clouds as when the trickster figure Lemminkäinen asks him to whip up a storm so he can escape his pursuers after killing The Master of Northland. One of the set formulas of this epic is that things can be tried three times and the attempt to effect things by spells - spoken words of power - generally proceed by first addressing a local spirit, then a demon and finally ‘The Thunderer, the Old Man, the One in the Sky’. The implication is that there is a final resort to an ultimate God figure, but one who can told what to do if the right words are used. He seems to function as one of the multiple identitities and levels of existence that are encompassed in these stories. But when he baptizes the son of the virgin who had eaten the cowberry everything changes, things become set and the old world passes. Yet still lives in this epic.
☼
Show Less
LibraryThing member Czrbr
Book Description: Oxford University Press 01.0. The Kalevala Reissue Oxford World's Classics 01 April 1999 Paperback (B Format), 736 pages, Bibliography Oxford University Press Oxford, UK ISBN 019283570X Dimensions in millimeters: 190 x 120 x 51 Dimensions in inches: 7.48 x 4.72 x 2.01 By Elias
Show More
Lonnrot Translated by Keith Bosley Finnish (Suomi) " Show Less
LibraryThing member Czrbr
Book Description: Oxford University Press 01.0. The Kalevala Reissue Oxford World's Classics 01 April 1999 Paperback (B Format), 736 pages, Bibliography Oxford University Press Oxford, UK ISBN 019283570X Dimensions in millimeters: 190 x 120 x 51 Dimensions in inches: 7.48 x 4.72 x 2.01
LibraryThing member tommi180744
KALEVALA is the name given to the Finnish Language epic verse saga, preceding other Norse sagas plus Beowulf: Chanted from prodigious memory by Norse peoples for at least 2,500 years. Collected and written down for the first time by Elias Lonnrot during mid to late 19th Century. Extensive pre and
Show More
post-Christian tales of the origins of Mother Earth, magical talismanic emblem called the Sampo, legendary heroic talesman, Vanamoinen, beautiful, innocent maidens and wicked crones of sorcery drawn together in the ancient beliefs, rites and customs of an unrecorded era amid nature's bounty and barbarous wilderness of the Pohjola region (almost certainly the flourishing mountains, valleys, forest, rivers, lakes and inland seas of what we call Scandinavia). Largely regarded as essential foundation to the rise of Finnish cultural and political independence from Sweden and Russia the musically rhythmic Kalevala was also part of the inspiration for Hiawatha, Lord of the Rings and many others. A fair portion of modern day Western Prose and Verse can be traced back to literary roots in this immensely adventurous and evocative Scandinavian tale as the Ice Age retreated and the dawn of European civilisation. Show Less
LibraryThing member JVioland
Incredibly boring epic poetry. This book was supposedly written by collecting old Finnish myths of their heroes. Vikings they ain't! Fishermen and farmers, fish bones and wood...good Lord! This is the material from which an epic is made? Don't waster your time on this one.
LibraryThing member antiquary
This is a more modern translation than the other one I have , not necessarily great poetry in its translated form, but with very helpful and compared top y other copies up-to-date information on the background in the traditional Finnish folk poetry. The translator is a disciple of Francis Magoun's
Show More
oral-formulaic school, but even he admits the Finnish epics were being largely transmitted by memory by the time they were compiled by Lonnrot. He has some very interesting comments on the impact of writing down an oral bard's performance line by line by hand versus recording it electronically and transcribing it -- what Lonnrot did was very much what the transcribers of Beowulf and Homer must have done. HIs comments on "stitching" together poetic sequences reminded me of the comments on "bad stitching" in Homer in Renault's The Praise Singer. Show Less
LibraryThing member jamestomasino
I think this is one of those books that needs a few reads with a few years between them. It reminds me of the Odyssey quite a bit, and there are some obvious parallels in the story. It's wrong to think of this as a derivative work, though. It may share some style and elements with it, but the
I can't say much with confidence after this first reading, but I will make note of the really interesting spirituality of the book. While there are many vaguely Christian notions (and a few overt ones), there is still an incredibly strong sense of the earlier pagan animism that is beautifully tied up in it. For that aspect alone I think this book is worthy of a lot of attention from those of you who are interested in comparative religion.
Show More
Kalevala is uniquely Finnish. If you are the type of person who enjoys this type of work then don't miss out. There's more than enough unique material to keep your attention.I can't say much with confidence after this first reading, but I will make note of the really interesting spirituality of the book. While there are many vaguely Christian notions (and a few overt ones), there is still an incredibly strong sense of the earlier pagan animism that is beautifully tied up in it. For that aspect alone I think this book is worthy of a lot of attention from those of you who are interested in comparative religion.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Mithril
Beautiful oral culture and story, and very well translated. Introduced to this via Tolkien.
Language
Original language
Finnish
Original publication date
1849
Physical description
736 p.; 7.3 inches
ISBN
0192817000 / 9780192817006