Finland

Finland is the geographical and cultural homeland through which the preface frames the Kalevala: a northern country whose harsh, varied landscape informs the epic and whose songs passed through generations of singers before scholars gathered them into a national literary work. The account links place, language, oral performance, and literary history, while its own description of Finland reflects the political and scholarly outlook of the period in which it was written.

Geography and Climate

The preface gives Finland the Finnish names Suomi and Suomenmaa and describes it as a swampy region, with the name Finland explained there as a Swedish rendering meaning Fen-land. It portrays a country of marshes and mountains, lakes and rivers, seas, gulfs, islands, and inlets. In the account’s historical present, Finland is a Grand Duchy in the north-western part of the Russian Empire, bordering Olenetz, Archangel, Sweden, Norway, and the Baltic Sea; its area is reported as more than 144,000 square miles and its population as about two million.

Climate gives that geography a sharp seasonal character. The preface says winter lasts seven months in the southern districts, while in the northern provinces the sun disappears entirely during December and January. This is not incidental scenery in its account of the epic: the Kalevala is praised for its detailed and beautiful representation of Finnish nature, and the northern environment helps define the conditions of life imagined in its songs.

Oral Song and the Epic’s Cultural Ground

The preface treats Finland as the home of a living oral tradition rather than merely the setting of a written poem. It describes the Kalevala’s songs as having descended unwritten from a mythical age, preserved from generation to generation by minstrels or song-men. Its opening image of singing makes that inheritance communal: a singer calls on a dear friend and childhood brother to join the stories, and proposes clasping hands so that the songs may be remembered. The epic’s cultural memory is thus represented as an act shared between performers, not simply as a text held by an individual.

Performance also appears within the poem’s social scenes. At a wedding, the question of whom to praise first leads to the bridegroom’s father being named for praise; elsewhere, a child seated on the floor answers in a scene of singing. Such moments make the song tradition audible as a social practice in which praise, response, and the participation of young and old can shape an occasion. The preface presents the poems as carrying more than narrative: they preserve folk knowledge, myth, and accumulated experience.

The account also places Finnish song within a wider field of related traditions. It reports that the Hungarian translator Ferdinand Barna compared incantations recorded in a Hungarian book of 1578 with Kalevala songs used to expel disease and misfortune, and found substantial similarities. The preface interprets these correspondences through a shared Ugrian inheritance, identifying Finns and Hungarians as branches of that larger grouping. It further notes that Hungarian deeds from 1616 to 1660 refer to a customary cup of wine as Ukkon’s cup, connecting the name to Ukko, the chief god in Finnish mythology. These are presented as arguments for the antiquity and cultural connections of Finnish incantatory tradition.

From Collected Songs to a National Epic

The formation of the Kalevala depended on gathering songs from performers across Finland and adjacent Finnish-speaking regions. Zacharias Topelius collected eighty epic fragments by inviting itinerant Finnish merchants from Russia to sing at his bedside and copying their poems as they were performed. Though confined to bed by a fatal illness for the last eleven years of his life, he continued this work; his first collection appeared in 1822 and his last in 1831. The preface credits him with rescuing fragments of the epic from literary oblivion.

Elias Lönnrot extended that recovery through travel and sustained arrangement. He collected songs in Sava and Karjala, went as far as Kajan, and later travelled in the province of Archangel. His encounters took place in varied settings: beside the firesides of the aged, on lakes with fishermen, and among shepherds with their flocks. He crossed wild fens, forests, marshes, and ice-plains on horseback, in reindeer-drawn sledges, and in canoes. In Wuokiniem he met a renowned old singer whose approaching death threatened the loss of precious runes. The detail underscores the urgency of collection: songs survived through particular voices, and their disappearance could mean the disappearance of versions that had not been written down.

In February 1835, Lönnrot sent a manuscript arranged around the idea of a great epic to the Finnish Literary Society, which published it in two parts. He continued collecting, and by 1840 had gathered more than a thousand fragments of epic poetry, national ballads, and proverbs. Additional collectors, including Castrén, Europæus, Polén, and Reniholm, made further material available. Lönnrot then sifted and organized the enlarged body of songs for the 1849 edition: fifty runes comprising 22,793 lines. The epic’s shape therefore arose through both oral transmission and editorial assembly, bringing many collected pieces into a continuous work.

Finland’s Literary Significance

The preface presents the Kalevala as both a national inheritance and a work of international literary importance. It says that scholars had recognized songs clustering around a few principal heroes, especially Wainamoinen, before the material was organized as a single epic. It also describes Finland as the landscape and community through which the epic’s accounts of nature, mythology, and human experience acquire their particular character. The result is not portrayed as a simple record of one ancient performance, but as a body of songs preserved, collected, compared, and arranged across generations.

That cultural status is reinforced by the reception of the 1849 edition. The preface reports that European scholars including Jacob Grimm, Uhland, and Max Müller recognized the epic’s value; Steinthal counted it among four great national epics alongside the Iliad, the Nibelungen, and the Roland Songs. It also invokes similarities between Finnish and Hungarian incantations as evidence of a deep shared tradition. These claims belong to the preface’s argument for the work’s antiquity and standing, while the collection history it recounts shows how Finland’s oral poetry became visible to readers beyond the communities that had carried it in song.