Society of the Fennophils

The Society of the Fennophils was founded by Porthan as part of a sustained effort to collect and advance Finnish literature. The preface presents it as a lasting literary center of Finland, while placing its origins within the wider recovery of national songs that helped make the Kalevala available as a major epic.

Foundation and Purpose

Porthan, a Finnish scholar born in 1766, continued the work of Juslenius by accumulating a great number of national songs and poems. His profound enthusiasm for promoting Finnish literature led him to found the Society of the Fennophils. The preface identifies the society’s institutional importance in broad terms: it formed a literary center for Finland that continued into the author’s own day.

The society’s founding belonged to a larger scholarly movement rather than an isolated act. Earlier collectors such as Palmsköld and Peter Bäng had gathered portions of Finnish national poetry, chiefly wizard incantations and pagan folklore. Gabriel Maxenius published a collection of Finnish poems in 1733, but the preface says he could not explain their significance or recognize their connection with pagan religious worship. Juslenius later demonstrated a stronger understanding of Finnish folklore and the importance of the language and national poetry, though the collection of songs he began assembling was burned.

A Center within the Recovery of Finnish Poetry

Porthan’s collecting carried this work forward. His pupils E. Lenquist and Chr. Ganander wrote on Finnish mythology, while Reinhold Becker and other scholars searched for further fragments of what they recognized as a great Finnish epic. The songs they gathered clustered around a few principal heroes, especially Wainamoinen. This scholarly activity supplied the wider intellectual setting in which the Society of the Fennophils could promote Finnish literature and its inherited song tradition.

The preface does not credit the Society of the Fennophils with compiling or publishing the Kalevala. That work is assigned to Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lönnrot, who collected and arranged the songs; Lönnrot transmitted the manuscript of the first Kalevala to the Finnish Literary Society for publication in 1835. The distinction matters: the Society of the Fennophils is presented as a literary center founded by Porthan, whereas the Finnish Literary Society is the institution named in connection with that publication.

Place in the Epic’s Literary History

The account places Porthan’s society within a chain of collecting, study, and publication that transformed dispersed oral poetry into a recognized national epic. Topelius gathered eighty epic fragments, and Lönnrot continued collecting and arranging materials under the unifying idea of the Kalevala. After further songs and poems were collected by other scholars, Lönnrot prepared a new edition that appeared in 1849, comprising fifty runes and 22,793 lines. These later achievements are not attributed directly to the Society of the Fennophils, but they belong to the broader literary development that its founding helped represent.

The society’s significance in the preface rests on the connection between cultural institutions and the preservation of national literature. Its founding marks Porthan’s commitment to Finnish writing as an organized scholarly and literary pursuit; the epic’s subsequent history shows that pursuit extending through collectors, editors, and publishing institutions. In this account, the Society of the Fennophils stands not as the maker of the Kalevala, but as a durable center within the movement that brought Finnish national poetry into literary prominence.