In Our Time - The Kalevala

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Finnish epic poem that first appeared in print in 1835 in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire and until recently part of Sweden. The compiler of this epic was a doctor, Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), who had travelled the land to hear traditional poems about mythical heroes being sung in Finnish, the language of the peasantry, and writing them down in his own order to create this landmark work. In creating The Kalevala, Lönnrot helped the Finns realise they were a distinct people apart from Sweden and Russia, who deserved their own nation state and who came to demand independence, which they won in 1917. With Riitta Valijärvi Associate Professor in Finnish and Minority Languages at University College LondonThomas Dubois The Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Folklore and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-MadisonAnd Daniel Abondolo Formerly Reader in Hungarian at University College LondonProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Nigel Fabb, What is Poetry? Language and Memory in the Poems of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2015)Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio and Jarkko Niemi (eds), Versification: Metrics in Practice (Finnish Literature Society, 2021)Riho Grünthal et al., ‘Drastic demographic events triggered the Uralic spread’ (Diachronica, Volume 39, Issue 4, Aug 2022)Lauri Honko (ed.), The Kalevala and the World's Traditional Epics (Finnish Literature Society, 2002)The Kalevala Heritage: Archive Recordings of Ancient Finnish Songs. Online Catalogue no. ODE8492.Mauri Kunnas, The Canine Kalevala (Otava Publishing, 1992)Kuusi, Matti, et al. (eds.), Finnish Folk Poetry: Epic (Finnish Literature Society, 1977)Elias Lönnrot (trans. John Martin Crawford), Kalevala: The Epic Poem of Finland (first published 1887; CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017)Elias Lönnrot (trans. W. F. Kirby), Kalevala: The Land of the Heroes (first published by J.M. Dent & Sons, 1907, 2 vols.; ‎ Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2000) Elias Lönnrot (trans. Francis Peabody Magoun Jr.), The Kalevala, or Poems of the Kaleva District (Harvard University Press, 1963)Elias Lönnrot (trans. Eino Friberg), The Kalevala: Epic of the Finnish People (Otava Publishing, 1988)Elias Lönnrot (trans. Keith Bosley), The Kalevala: An Epic Poem after Oral Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1989)Kirsti Mäkinen, Pirkko-Liisa Surojegin, Kaarina Brooks, An Illustrated Kalevala: Myths and Legends from Finland (Floris Books, 2020)Sami Makkonen, Kalevala: The Graphic Novel (Ablaze, 2024)Juha Y. Pentikäinen (trans. Ritva Poom), Kalevala Mythology, (Indiana University Press, 1999)Tina K. Ramnarine, Ilmatar’s Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music (University of Chicago Press, 2003) Jonathan Roper (ed.), Alliteration in Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), especially chapter 12 ‘Alliteration in (Balto-) Finnic Languages’ by Frog and Eila StepanovaKarl Spracklen, Metal Music and the Re-imagining of Masculinity, Place, Race and Nation (Emerald Publishing, 2020), especially the chapter ‘Finnish Folk Metal: Raising Drinking Horns in Mainstream Metal’Leea Virtanen and Thomas A. DuBois, Finnish Folklore: Studia Fennica Folkloristica 9 (Finnish Literature Society, 2000)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in 1835, the Finnish epic poem,

The Kali Vula, appeared in print in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then in the Russian Empire and until recently part of Sweden. The compiler of this epic was a doctor, Elias Lernruth, who had travelled the land, hearing to additional poems about mythical heroes being sung in Finnish, the language of the peasantry, and writing them down in his own order to create this landmark work. And in creating the Kali Bula, Lernut helped the Finns realise there were distinct people, who deserved their own nation,

and came to demand independence, which they won in 1917. With me to discuss the Carlybulla, the epic that built a nation, are Daniela Bondolo, former reader in Hungarian at University College London, Thomas Dubois, the Hors-Buscom Professor of Scandinavian Folklore and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Rita Ballyarvi, Associate Professor in Finnish and Minority Languages at University of College London. Rita, who was Elias Learn Root? He was a doctor, yes, but he was a polymath, so he was a polymath,

So he was an expert on many things. He was a linguist. He was a folklorist. He was a botanist even during his time. He was born in 1804 in a village called Sammati, not too far from Helsinki. And his family was Finnish speaking. So he spoke Finnish. Later in life, he did switch to Swedish because that was the language you used in the sort of public sphere and academia.

And he spoke Swedish also with his wife and children, presumably. And he finished, he wrote his, let's say, a BA dissertation on Weinamei, one of the key figures of the Kalavala. And then he wrote a dissertation about the traditional medicine of Fence. Then he became consumed with interest in what the notes called the peasantry, people who spoke the original language and decided to collect their stories. Yes, he did. But he wasn't the only one or the first one. So already during Enlightenment, there was interest in his tradition and even in the 1500s people were writing down notes about the ancient god so he wasn't the first one but he saw it as his mission to document his tradition and also he was curious about many many things so he did it for the sake of it he wanted to know more did you have a system

and if he did could you tell us how it worked it worked so that he went on trips so in order to do it He had to go and do fieldwork, and he did 11 in total. And it was the first five that were most important for the Kalevala. And he traveled on foot, he skied, he would row a boat across lakes, and he sometimes went on horseback as well. And he would go to villages to meet people. With him, he had some money, because he did pay these people who sang for him. He also had a gun.

sung, you say. It was always they sung, did they? They sung indeed. And he had a gun and he had a flute with him as well, that he would play when he arrived to a village and that would kind of attract the locals to come and come and speak to him. So he did that as well. And he was looking for these run singers and actively looking for them and finding them in many places.

Of course, at the time, you couldn't record anything. So he needed to write down what he heard and he had this shorthand system whereby he wrote like initials sometimes. And it is, we're not entirely sure what he heard was what he then eventually published because of the system. But yes, he wrote notes. And sometimes there was a lot of noise when he was in someone's house. I read that he even sometimes tried to make notes on a boat. So it was difficult under difficult circumstances where he made it.

Also the terrain that he was going in the furthermost part of Finland, it was hundreds and hundreds of lakes were told sometimes thousands of lakes, great forests, empty stretches of land. It couldn't have been all that comfortable. It wasn't comfortable and it was hard work. So there's some in his diaries he wrote about how hard it was. And what the landscape, it wasn't just lakes, it was also bogs, which meant that there were a lot of mosquitoes and it was very difficult to go from village to village. And he was exhausted.

But he had a very good character, an ideal personality for this because he was very practical, he was very flexible and he had a good sense of humour. So although he was sometimes feeling down, he would carry on and he was very determined. Thank you very much. Daniel Abonle. What was the status of the Finnish language at this time? The time that we're talking about. Well, I think in order to start to talk about that,

I just to reiterate the basic background which you already started to mention, we're talking about an area which we now think of as Finland, but of course it wasn't a country at that time. was a part of originally of the Swedish Empire, and only fairly recently 1809 had become divorced, if you will, from the Swedish Empire, became a grand duchy of Russia, all because the Russians had beaten the Swedes in a thing called the War of Finland, of all things. But Finland actually had no part to plain it, except, of course, that their rulers shifted from being Swedes to being Russians.

So it's the same now. Finland has Sweden to the west, and it has Russia to the east, and those languages are still there. The Russian language is to the east and Swedish is to the west. But you have to remember that during the time of Lernerutus was not really the case. Swedish was a minority language. It still is a minority language in Finland because the Swedes there, the Swedish speakers, were colonists. They were definitely in a minority in what we now think of as Finland, but they spoke Swedish, which was the prestige language. Finnish had a status, that is, the majority of people who were peasants, spoke Finnish, of course, and they used it for just a

everything that they had to use it for, but it was not a prestige language. There was literacy. So it meant that it didn't do, what did it not do? Well, it had no function in state. It had no function in the operation of the state. What it did was domestic life, discussion at work, whatever kind of pastoral or farming work you might have to do. And of course, it was employed in the church because this has been a Lutheran country

since the mid-16th century, Sweden, that is. And so Finland, of course, was Lutheran. to, and that meant again, literacy was very important to the church. And the Finnish peasant, even then, had to pass a literacy exam. In order to get married, you would have to be confirmed in the church, and that meant you had to be able to pass a literacy exam. So the peasants were not ignorant in that sense, but what they were using Finnish for was mainly speaking,

and of course, singing those who were capable of it, singing these amazing songs of various kinds, some of them epic-like, some of them much shorter. So Finnish existed and was the majority language, but it had no prestige at all. That all changed very rapidly once, as you say, in the introduction, 1835, when it first appeared in print, this shorter version of the Kalevala called the Old Kalevala,

suddenly it hit it with an enormous impact. And so within a very short time, I think, certainly in less than 10 years, I think by 1843 or some such time, it was already taught Finnish, it was taught in elementary schools. And the important thing is by 1850, it was already a chair in Finnish language at the university. Can you give us some idea of what it sounds like?

Can you read something? I can. I can. I just happened to have prepared earlier. A very short passage from Calibola. I'm not a native speaker, but I'll do my best to do a phonetically accurate rendition. There are four half lines or two full lines. And it sounds like this.

No, say, you know, norostamie, Urale. Haikhaasi, ha, sta mahan. Sotu Yossanele-Mah. Is it like anything else? Yes. It's like other Finnic languages, of which the most famous is Estonian. But it's not that much like Estonian. And then there's several other languages in the Finnic branch, which have even fewer speakers.

These are all Uralic languages, and therefore they're not at all like Swedish or Russian or English or any of those other languages, except Hungarian. That's the only other one that people will have heard of in Europe that it's a little bit like. So it sounds, it sounds very different. Yeah. Thank you. Tom, Tom Juba, what's the story then of this great poem? Well, that's a complicated question because, of course, as Rita was indicating, Leandroot was a very multi-talented guy and he was able to listen to all sorts of different songs that were about different things. And the son of a tailor and trained as a doctor, he was able to sew these together into this epic.

And so it's an epic that is made up almost like a crazy quilt of different pieces. There are mythic songs that are about the creation, about the first invention of agriculture and fire. There are adventure songs about heroes like Vainamenen and Il Madrid and Lemenkainen. And they're vying with each other for this magic object called the Sampo. There are ritual songs. What is it? What consists of the Sampo? The Sampo is the great mystery.

It's an object that everyone knows what it is. What do you mean? Everyone at that time knows what it is. But nobody knows how to make it. Once you have the sample, it will produce whatever you want. The epic tells us over and over again that it makes things for eating, things for trading, and things for storing up. And so it is this wonderful kind of everything machine once you've made it. But it's made out of totally improbable objects.

So the epic tells us. it's made out of yautzenen and kinest, maho lehmemaitosest, and chesa uhrenuhen untovast. So a swan's feather quill, the milk of a dry cow, a tiny grain of barley, and the fleece of a yew in summertime.

And that's the trick. That's the trick. You got to put those together and make this magic mill that's going to supply the needs of anyone who owns it. And the one who wants to own it is this mistress or the farmwife of Pogila to the north of Kala. And her name is Lohi. And she promises her daughter to whoever will make her the

sample. Is she the one who's known as the Northern witch? She is. Yes. And she's looking out for the welfare of her family and her community. And she knows that whoever has the sample will have things good. And And so she's going to arrange a marriage for her daughter with whoever can make that for her. In the end, it's of those different characters, Ilmarinen, who does that, and the daughter marries Ilmarinen. And in the middle of the epic, we have these wonderful ritual songs about weddings. So there's about five chapters of the epic that are all about advice to the bride and groom and these elements of the traditional Karelian wedding. And then as sometimes happens in life, after the wedding, things start to fall apart. And the daughter gets killed by a very frustrated and unhappy orphan named Culeervo.

And then Ilmarinen and Vaineminen go back to Pohila to try to get a share of the sample, which Lohi understandably says, no, this belongs to me. They end up stealing it. They managed to steal it through Vainemirin singing this with his newly invented, harp, the cantele, and putting everyone to sleep, stealing the sampo and heading back over the sea. But lohi wakes up, pursues them, and the sampo in the struggle falls into the sea and is lost forever, which is why we have to work for a living, because if we had the sampo, everything would be just fine.

Epics like this, and we can go by before Homer, really, the great epics which consolidate countries. and in fact begun to define countries and what makes the country the country but they are often concerned with heroes and gods. Where are the gods in this one? Finnish folk culture, Karelian folk culture was very animist.

People would recite incantations called loitzut when they were doing activities and you're constantly in that framework negotiating with the trees, with the fire, with disease, asking for help and promising some gift to whatever being helps you gain luck and magic. And so this kind of tradition had a kind of sacrality that was all over the creation. But there were certain figures like Weineminen who seemed to have a special amount of that. And Lendruth and other

scholars in Finland thought of him as an ancient Finnish god and were interested in looking at recovering of Finnish mythology from these songs and did so in that way. But they also had this thought, which was a very 19th century scholarly notion, that actually all people at the beginning were somehow monotheists and that they had just forgotten about the one God. And so over and over again in the Kalavala, we see this reference to Ucqo Iliumala, the God on High, who is involved in making the world the way it is. Thank you very much. Rita, this comes from the peasantry, and it's massive, it's 23,000 lines or something like that. What would the performances have been like? It seems very casual,

but polite. He went into their cottages, they're welcome and they were delighted to see him because he was talking about what mattered to them, and they sang it back to him. Can you give us a picture of what might, he doesn't seem to have met any obstruction anywhere? I'm assuming not everyone wanted to perform for him, but the ones who did, they would have been sitting down. So, were never standing up when you sung these songs. If, most likely not in front of Lundrude, but before, if you sung at a party or wedding or something, he would have had a lead singer who would have sung and then someone else would have joined in, a bit like, I don't know, in hip-hop or rap where someone says a word.

And if you had an instrument at these types of events, Kantelet, the traditional string instrument from the Baltics and Finland, you would have played it. You also moved while you were singing, just to, it's like an embodied practice. But like I said, Lerner did it for documentary purposes, so they didn't perform in the same way. But they would have been sitting down. And some of the better singers, like they would have sung for a long time. So it would have been sitting down for a long time listening to them and writing it down. At the time, with what he was doing, catch on, if people say this is happening, we must contribute to this,

so we must get hold of this. So people were very aware of the tradition disappearing. So some of the better singers interviewed or recorded were very aware of it. But their parents were better singers and it was disappearing. In Western Finland, the tradition wasn't there anymore because this was in eastern Finland. And also what is now Carolia part of Russia, white-white Carolia, because the border wasn't so clear between the two countries. So it's like Finnish Carolian epic really.

But yes, people were very aware of this. and they wanted to document it before it disappeared. What drives the words? What sort of stress points? And there's talk of alliteration, for instance. Do you want to take that up? Well, because it is a very different kind of a language, it has its consonants, but it doesn't have that many.

That's the first thing everyone should try to bear in mind. It has roughly half the number of consonants we would expect English speakers or French or German speakers would expect. So that means they have to have those same eight consonants keep cropping up over and over again in many, many words. In short, it's hard not to alliterate in Finnish because if you're just naming the body parts of the head, many of them begin with P and many of them begin with K and so on.

So they're already alliterating. What they do in this kind of poetry is they exploit that. They turn it to account and make art out of it using rather large amounts. If you try to use that amount of alliteration in English, and translators do, you end up creating dogeral I'll read you one translation that tries to do it. It's a translation of the passage I read earlier,

where the translator has written, Rise, O man, from out the marshes. Hero seek another pathway. So he's trying to copy what he thinks the measure of Kaleigh Bala is, and often they'll alliterate, but it becomes too much for English ears usually, and usually that kind of translation doesn't seem to succeed. In Finnish, as I say, it's easy to do it,

and nearly every line alliterates at least in two words, sometimes in four words and in different ways. So that's quite complicated. The other feature that's unique to finish, and this is truly unique because lots of other northern traditions alliterate. But in the Finnish one, the meter is also very specific. It has to do with where the poet or the singer is allowed to place heavy syllables as opposed to light syllables.

And what that is is a little bit like the sort of things that people might have learned in school when they were doing Latin. But this is quite similar to that, except people, of course, are able to improvise in it, or they were back in the 19th century. So it's the kind of meter you might have done when you were a school doing Virgil. One of the main characters is Valnemonin.

Yes, Vainemaneman. Vaineman. I got that, okay. Tom, what are his qualities? What are his strengths? Well, Vaineminen is really the center of the epic. As Ritin mentioned, he was somebody that Lerndrude had an interest in

even before he started to collect songs. And he is this wonderful character in the way we see him in the 1849 Kalaala, because he is born of Ilmantar, this spirit woman who is floating on the sea. And her labor is so long that by the time Vineman is born, he's already an old man. So in that way, he's both very wise, but also very childish in life. And he does all kinds of wonderful things like creating the first forest and doing the first agriculture for help. helping start the first agriculture, but he never seems to get himself a wife. And he's always hoping for one.

And so one of the things that is the driving element in the epic is Weinemernin looking for somebody to love. Rieger, can you tell us about two or three other characters in this epic? Weiner Mernan has a friend, the Smith Ilmarinen, who forged the sky and also this famous sample. And he's not as good at singing. So he's not as good at magic, but he's able to make things. And he's part of, let's say, Aynemannes' posse.

So when they go on these adventures, Ilmarinen is there. And the third person with them is Lemminkainen. It comes from the word Lempi, which means love. So he's a lady's man. He has gorgeous, long red hair, apparently. And he is a risk-taker. And he's also looking for a wife, or is very interested in women.

And these three go on adventures. But I think it's important to highlight that women perhaps don't have such a central role in this epic, but because it's epic literature, it was created at a time when things were different. But Lohi, the Witch of the North, is very powerful. And this lemming canon actually dies during the Kalevala, the story, but his mother, unnamed, comes and puts him back together and revives him. And at the end, there's also a lady called Marjata, a young maiden, who's impregnated by a lingamberry. I'm smiling. because berries are very important in Finnish culture

and that's possibly Mary and the Holy Spirit that is this kind of echoes of Christianity. And another woman worth mentioning is Ayno who is given to promise by her brother as a wife to Vainamem, but she does not want to marry him and runs away because she's much younger, I'm not sure, and sadly drowns in the process.

Can we step sideways, Daniel? What about Christianity? The place that Christianity occupies in this. I don't really know what place, I don't know how much to believe. The last runo is the one that's usually cited this because, as Rita mentioned, there is a character there who can be seen as a kind of merry figure. And there's also, as Tom mentioned, occasional mention of Ucco, there's some kind of high, ultimate highest god, some kind of male figure. But it's such a pastiche.

There's so many different strands and so many different little peasant. patchwork items in Kalavala that I certainly can't call it a Christian document in any sense. How does this epic fit into the great of national epics which you're appearing all over Europe? Well, they certainly were appearing around Europe. And in fact, I did look to see how many of there were. And at least five or six of ones that we've heard of, like the Nibelungen Lied, Beowulf, Chanson de Roland. These all appeared in roughly this time slot between 1800 and 1840 or 50.

And there was a hunger, there was a widespread desire, I think among elites as usual, but it was perhaps trickling down in an enlightenment notion that you can look at culture and you can look at humanities in a scientific way. And Herder is the man famous for writing an essay about the origin of language in which he goes on at great length about how actually it's the language of the people, the peasants, the folk, who embody the heart of the most important part, the kernel of a culture. ignore that, you're missing out. You're just getting the top elites. You're getting French, to put it a bit bluntly. So certainly from a German perspective, they'd had enough of that, always doing French, really. What about German? So let's try to discover German. And again, discovering the reliques that's going back to Percy now again in the previous century in England. So looking for all these things was definitely de rigour at that time in Europe. And these were remarkably powerful at the time. And they had meant a lot to people.

Did you, Tom, was there a feeling at the time when this was being put together? A lot of people know this was being put together. Did they applaud that? Well, the Kalavela took the European intelligentsia by total surprise. They had no idea that there was this rich oral tradition in Finland or in Keralia. And great figures like Jacob Grimm wrote essays about it and were just completely surprised by the notion that this epic was there in the lips of ordinary peasants.

And other communities who hadn't had ancient medieval texts that they could look back at for epics, started to look at their own folklore and try to build their own epics out of that. Much as Daniel is mentioning, we start to have after the publication of the Kalavala, we have the Estonian epic Kalavipoig in 1853 and then a Latvian epic Lachpoy. a few years after that. And over here in North America, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow looks to create an American epic Hiawatha based on Ojibwe and Dakota legends. And then as an homage to the Kala Vala, composes that in the Kala Vala meter in that same meter that we have in the Kala Vala. So he's very much gesturing towards this epic fever that is going on in Europe as different nations are

looking to describe their identity through Epic. So this, as it were, it goes into the heart of the culture quite quickly. It comes from the heart, I would say. It comes from the heart of the culture. You can't really take it out, or if you do, the culture wouldn't exist anymore. It's that big. It's that big. It's crucial, you know, the heart and brain.

And what's so wonderful about the Kalaala is that although it is this important element in the national identity, it's also very down-to-earer. and very full of that kind of peasant know-how. So when Lohi is saying that she's not going to share the sample, she just makes this little proverb in that. And she says, well, you can't make two portions out of a single grouse or feed three men with a single squirrel. So this is her way of talking.

And there's all sorts of very concrete, very familiar moments in the Kalaval about milking cows, about planting seeds, about life in the cabin, about being lonely in an afternoon. And it makes it a very, very familiar and very kind of grassroots epic. Richard, would you like to give us another example of what it sounds like? Yes, I certainly will. I'm going to talk about the third poem because I teach the Kalavala to British students. and I think it's the best example or best poem to use in teaching because it's fun, is exciting and it's practically what is it?

It's a rap duel. So you have the young upstart, Yochahainen, a shaman, younger thin. He's described as being very thin. And he goes looking for Weinemann because he wants to see which one of them is better. Is Weinemann really that good? So he wants to meet him. And they meet on the road and then they're going to start basically using words to battle initially.

And Yochohanan starts listing all the things he supposedly knows. And then he lies, I was there at the start of the world. And Vainaman says, no, you're lying. Then insults fly back and forth. And Yoko Hanen says that you're a pig and all sorts of things, very, very aggressive. And then he even challenges Vainamon into a sword duel. But Vainamon is not having any of that. He gets extremely angry.

And soon I'm going to read a passage. where what happens when he gets angry. What happens is that at the end of it, Yokoainen, he sings Yoko Hinen into a bog. So he's so powerful, his words and he's singing, that this Yoko Hinen ends up in a bog. And the passage I'm going to read, possibly sing, we'll see how this goes,

is this when the earth starts shaking from the kind of the power of Vainanemani's words. Here it is. I'm going to read it first and then I'm going to try and sing it. So, lauloy, Vanhaeinemoy, Jarevet laikui, Ma Jairis,

Wurret Vaskiset, Wapis, Paeat vawatt palkhacktel, Kalli Kalli Kliotksi Lenti, Kivet Ranoil Lagoe. So the lakes are spilling over, The earth is shaking. The mountain,

Coppery Mountains are shaking as well. Large boulders are going to breaking. The rocks are split in half. And even the stones on the, on the shores of a lake, presumably, are kind of split. And now the singing. I'm not much of a singer, but in school, which I'll tell you more about later, we do learn to do this.

So we are able to do it in principle, but my singing is below average. So I'm going to try. Lauloy Vanha Vainamoy, Jairvet, like yuma jerry, Very wavisket wapest, Waiet wavat fawatt pukhaftel, Kalliote ghiot kahecksi lenti, Kivet rannoil la Raqoili. Very good.

It sounds very good. Yeah. Thank you very much for that. Can we turn, Daniel, how did you say very quickly this moved into the national consciousness, the national move? Can you give us one or two pointers as to how that happened and when it happened and so on?

Well, my impression, I'm not an expert on so-called national identity. I sometimes wonder whether there is such a thing. But it is a phrase that's used a lot to try to explain what was going on at this time. Again, starting, 1772 is the date they usually mention, because that's the date of Herder's essay about the core of the kernel, the heart and brain of a culture is in the language of the people. And that meant in a country like Finland, which wasn't a country yet, it meant the peasants.

So, although it starts from the top and you have elites like Lerun Rout, who was by no means a nobleman, but he was educated, and as Rita said, a polymath, going out and collecting these things. Similar things happened elsewhere. Tom's already mentioned

the rush to get other epics. Hungarian starts a little bit earlier here, but it still ends up kind of late. Hungarians looked around and they realized, wait, we don't have an epic. Here we are thinking that we're this great nation, except if you're a nation, shouldn't you have an epic? We've been in Europe

all these years, keeping the non-Christian out of Europe and keeping Christianity safe. So there are many myths and notions to Hungarian culture that they wanted to buttress, but they couldn't hold up on show anything like Kalevola. Now, they weren't trying to emulate Kalevola, but they would certainly want to have something, say, like Virgil. And so they did. There were competitions. By 1825, they had an epic. It was a strange one. It wasn't particularly heroic. It's about a loss in battle, in fact, called Zolan Futashal. But it came out in 1825, and it really was a dynamic kickstart to what they call the national revival in Hungary and national romanticism. There's that word national again twice. By the 1840s, the two most important poets of Hungarian 19th century

literature are already working at full speed and people are reading them and people want to know about them because they're saying this is now we have something to be proud of. It's not an epic, but it's literature. Again, a word we haven't used very much. It's a big question. Is Kalavala literature? Is it more? Is it less?

It's quite complicated. What's your view about Tom? Ellis Lendrut was asked to come up with the word in Finnish that would be used for literature and he came up with this term Kedrial-Isus that we used to. today. And definitely the idea of an expressive tradition that reflects the culture in a rich way is what Lerunrude thought of the Kalavala becoming. And he believed that once this book was published, people would come to really value this oral tradition and would start to build on it in different ways. And that is definitely what happened all over and over again in the rest of the

19th century, the first opera written in Finnish is based on the Kalavala. The first play drama in Finland is based on the Kalaala. Novels are created off of it and symphonic pieces are created out of it and it becomes the basis of paintings. So in so many ways, it becomes the beachhead for a national identity. Would you like to develop that, Rita? Yes, because you need this to become, I feel very much that Finland needed this to become an independent nation. Because then you had the Russification measures twice. There was the end of the era, the Russian era. And to really truly feel this connection to your nation,

you needed something unique. So I think it was crucial. What place does this poem have in Finnish culture today, Daniel? Well, it's the biggest thing. It's the biggest thing on the block. I think in Finnish culture there's no question. Other things that foreigners may think of, like pine trees or sauna, They're there as well, but they're not unique to Finland, whereas this is.

And as Rita said and Tom said it as well, it's the intricate specificity of how Finnish it is that makes it, you can't remove it, you can't take it out of Finland. But over time, has it been modified, has it been nuance, has it been addressed in ways which make it more intricate or more fit for, fit for contemporary consumption? Yes and no. Actually, in two ways it's been made more complicated. One that I don't think we've mentioned enough is you have to remember. it's 22,000 lines roughly, but that's the one that was published in 1849. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The Finns are wonderful archivists, and they've collected at least one and a half million lines. Now all digitalized and freely available online, by the way, and you can use the Finnish software to quickly see which line is repeated or slightly modified in dozens and dozens and scores of different singers throughout Karelia as well as parts of Finland. And so big as this Finnish epic is, Kalalaivala, it's just the tip of an enormous oral reservoir, which was still functioning until the early 20th century. The other thing, though, which I think you were hinting at,

is surely they can do things with it, and yes, they do. Tom mentioned the visual arts. Sibelius spent half of his life writing music inspired by it in one way or another. Again, it's not clear to me. Maybe someone else could explain how you write music based on Kalévala. In fact, Sibelius denied that, was much of an influence, but composers tend to do that. Stravinsky did the same thing.

He said, no, no, Lithuanian and Russian rhythms had nothing to do with it. But musicologists tend to differ about that. Nevertheless, Sibelius definitely spent, I would roughly estimate, half of his works, both large and small, are Kalevala and inspired. And, of course, if they have words, and they often do, oratorio and various kinds of sopranos with a chorus, they are based on episodes from Kalevara. So, again, in music, Sibeliali,

has been synonymous with Finland. There are many other excellent composers, some of whom are even alive, and they also draw on the Kalabala tradition. Because the Kalabala is so long, and it has so many little side streets to it in cul-de-sacs, it becomes each generation of Finns find different things in it. And they bring those forward.

So maybe in the late 19th century, during that really dark period of crucification, It was really the kind of determined nature of the Finns to become independent. That is what the Kalavala became a source for. Nowadays, the Kala is often seen by young people as kind of reflective of a quirky Finnish personality where you have wife-carrying contests and in other kinds of elements of Finnish culture that is really kind of a little bit offbeat and a little bit unexpected. and somehow there's elements of the Kalaala that fit into that worldview perfectly.

Do you want to take that? Yes, we keep going back to it. So, for example, in the 90s, after the fall of Soviet Union, during an era of globalization, Finland's joining the European Union. We're a little bit lost. We don't know who we are. And then again, there was this folk revival, Finnish dialects. It was a dialect boom.

And for example, heavy metal, we started using Kalevala themes, even dialect texts. even direct texts adapting Kalavala to folk heavy metal and it keeps being a source of inspiration. What's been the broader impact of this poem around the world, one might say, starting with you, Tom? Well, the Kalavala is a great example of the way in which a nation can find itself and can share itself with the rest of the world. And I think picking up a little bit on what Daniel has said about translations, you can look at cultural activists in various parts of the world taking the effort to translate the Kala Vala into their own languages and in that way to celebrate their own traditions and their own culture through this act of translating this wonderful piece of world literature into that language.

So we have, of course, translations in English and French and German and the Nordic languages, but we also have translations into Komi and Udmort and Veps and the form of Finnish that's spoken in northern Sweden, Mayankiali, and into modern Karelian, and we have versions

in Yiddish, in Esperanto, and Chinese, and Turkish, and Persian, in Tamil, and Catalan. It's just endless.

Every year there's a new translation into a new language of the world, which is reflective of this significance of expressing your culture through an epic.

Do you want to come in? Yes. Much to say, I'm not a big fan of translation of poetry. I think it can't really happen. But nevertheless, people do it. Poets do it all the time.

And I agree with Tom, it is largely a success in the sense that it gets people interested. They're thinking more about their own language now. So recently there was a trans, not too long ago, a translation of Kalehbala into modern Greek. That got modern Greeks thinking about modern Greek again. Wait, look, we can do this with our language too. It forces a good writer, a good translator.

It forces them to use their language in slightly different ways, which is a good thing, exercising the muscles of your language in a new, unseen way can be very good for you. So that's an important aspect to keep in mind. And in a way, the fins are a slight disadvantage in that they have the original. But they have tried translating it into modern Finnish so that more Finns will be able to read it easily.

And as Tom mentioned, there's the meanchili. There's also a savo dialect, different Finnish dialect. So it's inspiring many people on many different layers, layers and levels. And I think that's the complexity of Kalevalon, why it's so rich. Richard, do you come in here? Yes, I'd like to talk from the Finnish perspective rather than a global perspective, because how is Kalevala visible in Finland now?

What does it mean to people now? And for example, it's in different names. So people are called Ilmari. They're called Weiner. These are names, popular names. Also, Elias, which is Elias Landreau's first name, is a very popular name for boys. Also, we have, I don't know, insurance companies called Sampo and Ilmarine. So these names, they're powerful and reliable, let's say.

I read an Emma dissertation where they discussed, they interviewed Finns and asked them, what does it mean to you? And some people said, oh, I identify with Lohi. I'm like a witch. So that these characters, his archetypal characters that they identify with, whereas others are more critical and say, oh, there's no one there. Women aren't in central role. Some of them say, it's like the Bible.

It's stories. So it's as important as the Bible, it seems, for some Finns. some see it being an essential part of Finnish culture and identity because of its language. And what Tom mentioned earlier, this quirkiness, this creativity, problem solving. It's all connected to the Kalevala. I also asked some of my friends and my family, what does it mean to you in preparation for this? And some said, oh, I don't know. It doesn't really mean anything.

I'm not that sophisticated. I'm not that culture. So as if it was high culture for them. So it's gone from like folk culture to high culture and partly remain there. We all do learn in the school. We do hear about it. So everyone's familiar with these characters. I'm not saying that,

but it didn't necessarily mean anything to them actively in their everyday lives. And an interesting other point is I asked my sister who's doing a master's in design at Aldo University in Helsinki. I said, what do you do the art students think about it now or design students? Do you talk about the Kalevala? And she said, oh, we are very careful. I said, what do you mean? How are you careful about the Kalevala? because there's this thought that maybe it isn't entirely finished

because it is also Carolian. And they're very careful not to sort of colonize this tradition and they're very careful when using it or talking about it. And would your final statement about this be, Daniel? Well, it is this great boundary mark, as I say, because although there are similarities and parallels between the cultures, the Russian culture or Slavonic culture and Swedish culture, the actual words and the actual rhythms and the use of parallelism,

the use of synonyms, all kinds of poetic devices that we haven't had time to go into, can only, they'll only work in Finnish. There's no way, no getting away from that. Is that unusual that those devices you're talking about would only work in one language, can't be transferred to other languages? Think of it this way.

Beowulf is full of synonyms. They're something like 50 or 60 words for ship, partly because they needed to alliterate, but also partly because the culture at that time, the aesthetic, the poetics, treasured the idea of saying the same thing in a different way. Of course, you can't really say the same thing a different way. If you use different words, you're slightly saying something different. And that's part of the richness of Beowulf.

Finnish does the same thing. In Kalai Bala, they're doing that, but of course, none of the words match. So what they have synonyms for in Kalablai Blah is not going to be what they're going to be synonyms for in Beowulf, or for that matter in modern English. So that goes back to the translation problem again. The words that alliterate in Finnish, I can translate them sort of into English, but they won't alliterate in English. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks to Rita and Van der Haibé, Tom Dubois, and Daniel Avondolo,

and to our studio engineer, Donald MacDonald. Next week, Nicola Tesla, the Serbian American inventor and his impact at the dawn of the electrical age. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What you didn't say that you'd like to have said, Rita? I probably would have talked about the sponsors that Lundrude had because his father was a tailor. He was not from a rich family. And there were others who saw his talent and sponsored him. His brother paid for some of his tuition. And also, as I said, going to school was very hard. But if they ran out of money, these students, who wanted to learn, would go and, I don't know, beg and also sing, not Kalevala style songs, but they would sing for money. So that's something I would have wanted to mention. What about you, Daniel? I would have liked to talk in more detail

and more specifically about the poetic devices. So a little more about alliteration and certainly more about parallelism, which again is something that's in art everywhere, not just poetry, but all kinds of art, rug weaving and pottery, all kinds of symmetries and asymmetries. It's global, that kind of thing.

But it takes a unique, specific form in Finnish, in the Kaleiola, which would be nice to be able to illustrate. Can you give us a few more examples of alliteration? Right. Well, I can return, or I can just cite these four lines that have alliteration. I can't point to a blackboard, but you can hear that in the first line, two words begin with the N sound.

So no say no rostap meesi. There are other consonants in that line, but those two ns are considered to alliterate. In the next half line, or the next line, all three words alliterate, and as in, as in, you as in Anglo-Saxon tradition, they alliterate by virtue of having no consonant at the beginning. So zero consonant counts as an alliterating consonant. All three words begin with Uros. Ullé Urali. That's also a form of alliteration.

And when you look at the various translations, they can't come up with this at all. They try, but because of the richness of synonyms and so on, they end up using English words which not only don't alliterate but sound rather strange. So even Keith Bosley of the BBC, who translated this back at 1989, he unfortunately had to translate this as, Rise now out of your marsh man, which just doesn't sound right in 2024,

Fellow onto a new track. So again, in the original, yes, it's the word for man or one of the many words for man, one of the many words for fellow are used, but they alliterate, they occupy the right place in the line metrically, and they don't sound quite as silly as Get Out of the Marsh Man sounds.

So alliteration is still big. So pop songs, tango lyrics, some authors will use it. There are fixed expressions in the language that have alliteration. So we're still into tradition. But just like in English and all these traditions, even French being kind of a crypto-Germanic language also has it. But we have things like pig in a poke or pig in the python and Finnish Sika, Saki. So they have the same thing going on. One way to think of alliteration that makes it seem not so strange is it's sort of like the mirror image of

rhyme. Rhyme is all about final vowels and whatever consonants come after them. This is about initial consonants and whatever vowels come after them. So it's just a different thing. It's the tail wagging the dog. That's focusing on something else. And of course, in the 20th century, some of the more modern poets played with both. So it's very jangly, but it can be very good. Aenol A, made a living out of this writing superb lyrics around the time of the First World War with rhyme at the ends, as we would expect from English or French or a German, and poetry at the time or a little earlier, but plenty of alliteration in there as well because remember, it's hard not to alliterate in Finnish. And there are some formulas that come up over and over again in ready-made lines that you see in the Kalaala over and over again that alliterate in a really strong way. So over and over you hear about Vainemann and Vakha Vainemain

and the serious old Vainamaynen. And that becomes something that I think any person on street in Finland would say, oh yeah, Vakavanha, Vannamorn. And they know that line. Yeah. And what about you, Tom? Well, there's an element of the Kalaala that is really compelling to me. And it's all these songs about feelings and the unhappiness of life or kind of the blues of Kalaala. And Lerner was very interested in those songs. And he actually created another whole very important work, Kanteletar, which is a lot of...

is an anthology of those songs. And I think that the difference between the 1835 Kalaala and the 1849 Kalaala is that Lerendrude determined to share all of those lyrics songs with his audience by stitching them into the Kalaala. And so we have all these wonderful moments of sorrow and sadness and reflection, which are just lovely little moments of pause in the epic. Is there any sense that sometimes it gets in the way of other things happening? It's presence is so overwhelming and overpowerful. It absolutely does. We have these moments where things are moving in a certain direction, and then we suddenly have a long soliloquy or a reflection.

But that was what a 19th century audience expected. They wanted those moments of reflection. This was poetry that they were reading in books. And they were looking for that high literature reflections on life and eternity. Has it mean any film or television about it? Yes, in the 80s, there's a TV Rauta Aika, Iron Age, it's called, and it contains some of the stories. I have not seen it, so I can't comment more.

It looks good, I've seen screenshots. I understand in it, the sample makes money, but it's counterfeit. So it's a rather modern take on it. Yes The influence of Sweden and the Russian Empower and the Russian

Empower and in both cases was very, very strong Does that linger or in anywhere Has that been trampled over? No, I mean obviously Sweden and Finland We're close friends We do things together

We join the European Union together We join NATO together And we didn't call people We were inspired By their welfare systems So we're good friends So we don't see them as a, you kind of colonizers or anything.

We're similar. We're brothers, sisters. And in vocabulary, you see it, and in kind of cultural influences. And the Russia, that's a very, very difficult question at the moment. We are friends. We alternate. We live with this neighbor that we have.

But I would not say, I mean, there are Russian speakers in Finland. We know about Russia. we used to know at least how to deal with them. But I wouldn't say, no, it doesn't linger, I wouldn't say. But things have changed dramatically in the past two years. I think our producers coming in, Simon. Tea, please.

Tea, tea, would be good. Melvin, or you've got to go to the Lord. He's got to push off in a minute. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Have you ever wondered why you see what you see when you're online? I'm Jamie Bartlett, and in The Gatekeepers from BBC Radio 4,

I'm telling the story of how social media accidentally conquered the world. Mark's explaining to me he's going for a billion users. I'm going, for what? I'm sorry, what is it you're going to do? They can give us a voice or silence us, whoever we are. At real Donald Trump, it says account suspended. Everything has been sort of wiped off. To understand how we got here and where it's taking us,

listen to The Gatekeepers with me, Jamie Bartlett. Listen first on BBC Sounds.