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[books 2012] The Kalevala
Jan. 26th, 2012 07:45 pm5. The Kalevala
The Kalevala is Finland's national epic. Around the time Finland finally became an independent country, a folklorist called Elias Lönnrot collected folk songs from the Karelia region of Finland and Russia and put them all together as a series of connected stories. It's a bizarre mix of Christian and pagan ideas - the Russians had never bothered much about really establishing Christianity in those areas.
It's enormous, so I had planned to just dip in and out of it. However, I found it completely captivating. It is unbelievably evocative of place - boreal forest with lots of lakes, and of a way of life that hadn't substantially changed in over 1000 years. I really felt like I was there. It wasn't so much a case of not being able to put it down; rather it took me months of reading a few cantos here and there. It starts out with the Finnish creation myth and follows a cast of very human yet also supernatural characters as they make their way and survive in a harsh but fertile environment.
Hats off to the translator, Keith Bosley. Creating a version so lyrical with a cadence that absolutely fits the content from a non-Indo-European Language is quite a feat.
To my not-very-expert mind, it is more reminiscent of Russian folk tales than of Scandinavian, though there are good reasons it might resemble neither. The footnotes keep on about parallels to Greek mythology, but apart from universal features of epic, I really couldn't see it.
The Kalevala is Finland's national epic. Around the time Finland finally became an independent country, a folklorist called Elias Lönnrot collected folk songs from the Karelia region of Finland and Russia and put them all together as a series of connected stories. It's a bizarre mix of Christian and pagan ideas - the Russians had never bothered much about really establishing Christianity in those areas.
It's enormous, so I had planned to just dip in and out of it. However, I found it completely captivating. It is unbelievably evocative of place - boreal forest with lots of lakes, and of a way of life that hadn't substantially changed in over 1000 years. I really felt like I was there. It wasn't so much a case of not being able to put it down; rather it took me months of reading a few cantos here and there. It starts out with the Finnish creation myth and follows a cast of very human yet also supernatural characters as they make their way and survive in a harsh but fertile environment.
Hats off to the translator, Keith Bosley. Creating a version so lyrical with a cadence that absolutely fits the content from a non-Indo-European Language is quite a feat.
To my not-very-expert mind, it is more reminiscent of Russian folk tales than of Scandinavian, though there are good reasons it might resemble neither. The footnotes keep on about parallels to Greek mythology, but apart from universal features of epic, I really couldn't see it.
