The epic is a literary genre, as independent as the lyrics and drama, telling about the distant past. It is always voluminous, long stretched in space and time, and extremely eventful. "Kalevala" - Karelian-Finnish epic poetry. For fifty folk songs (runes) the heroes of Kalevala are chanted. There is no historical basis in these songs. The adventures of the warriors are purely fabulous. The epic also does not have a single plot, as in the Iliad, but a brief summary of Kalevala will be presented here.
Folklore Processing
The Karelian folk epic began to be processed and recorded only in the nineteenth century. The famous Finnish doctor and linguist Elias Lönnrot collected various versions of epic songs, made a selection, trying to plot the individual parts together. The first edition of Kalevala was published in 1835, and only after almost fifteen years the second. The Finnish epic was translated into Russian in 1888 and published in the Pantheon of Literature by the poet L.P. Belsky. Public opinion was unanimous: "Kalevala" - literature and a clean source of new information about the religious pre-Christian views of the Karelian and Finnish nationalities.
The name of the epic was given by Lönnrot himself. Kalevala - thatâs the name of the country in which national heroes live and perform feats . Only the name of the country is a little shorter - Kaleva, because the suffix la in the language denotes just the place of residence: living in Kaleva. It was there that the people settled their heroes: VĂ€inĂ€möinen, Ilmarinen, LemminkĂ€inen - all three were chanted as sons of this blessed land.
The composition of the epic
A poem of fifty runes was composed of separate various songs - there were lyrical, and epic, and even magical contents. Lönnrot recorded most of it directly from peasant lips, and some have already been recorded by folklore collectors. The most songly lands appeared in Russian Karelia, in the Olonets province and in the Arkhangelsk territories, on the shores of Ladoga and in Finnish Karelia, and the people's memory has preserved very, very much.
The runes do not show us historical realities, not a single war with other peoples is reflected there. Moreover, neither the people, nor society, nor the state are shown, as in Russian epics. In runes, everything is ruled by a family, but even family relationships do not set goals for heroes to accomplish feats.
Heroes
The ancient pagan views of the Karelians give the heroes of the epos not only physical strength and not even so much it as magic powers, the ability to conjure, speak, and craft magical artifacts. The heroes have the gift of werewolf, can turn anyone into anything, travel, instantly moving at any distance, and control the weather and atmospheric phenomena. Even a brief summary of "Kalevala" will not do without fabulous events.
The songs of the Karelian-Finnish epic are diverse, and it is impossible to fit them into a single plot. The Kalevala, like many other epics, opens with the creation of the world. The sun, stars, moon, sun, earth appear. The daughter of the wind gives birth to VÀinÀmöinen, it will be the protagonist of the epic who will equip the land and sow barley. Among the many and varied adventures of the hero, something happens that can pretend to set the main, albeit thread-like plot.
Wonderful boat
VÀinÀmöinen meets by chance with a virgin of the North, beautiful as a day. In response to the proposal to become his wife, she agrees, provided that the hero from the fragments of the spindle builds a magic boat for her. The inspired hero so zealously began to work that the ax could not restrain himself and injured himself. The blood did not stop, I had to visit the healer. It talks about how iron happened.
The healer helped, but the hero did not return to work. He spell lifted his grandfather-wind, who sought out and delivered the most skilled blacksmith - Ilmarinen to Pohjela, the country of the North. The blacksmith obediently forged for the maiden of the North the magic Sampo mill, bringing happiness and wealth. These events contain the first ten runes of the epic.
Treason
A new heroic character appears in the eleventh rune - LemminkÀinen, completely displacing previous events from the songs. This hero is warlike, a real sorcerer and a great lover of women. Having acquainted the audience with the new hero, the narration returned to VÀinÀmöinen. That just did not have to survive the hero in love in order to achieve the goal: he even went down to the underworld, gave himself to swallow the giant Viipunen, but still got the magic words that were needed to build a boat from the spindle, which he sailed to Pohjela to marry.
There it was. During the absence of the hero, the Northern Virgin managed to fall in love with the masterful smith Ilmarinen and married him, refusing to fulfill her word given to VÀinÀmöinen. Here, not only the wedding is described in great detail and in detail, with all its customs and traditions, even songs are sung there that clarify the duty and duty of the husband to his wife and wife to her husband. This storyline ends only in the twenty-fifth song. Unfortunately, the very brief content of Kalevala does not contain the exceptionally sweet and numerous details of these chapters.
Sad story
Next, six runes tell of the remote adventures of LemminkÀinen in the northern region - in Pohjöl, where the North reigns, not only not a virgin, but also spoiled spiritually, with an unkind, possessive and selfish character. With the thirty-first rune begins one of the most piercing and deeply sensual tales, one of the best parts of the whole epic.
Over the course of five songs, the sad fate of the beautiful hero Kullervo, who out of ignorance seduced his own sister, is told. When the whole situation was revealed to the heroes, both the hero and his sister could not bear the committed sin and died. This is a very sad story, written (and, apparently, translated) elegantly, soulfully, with a great sense of sympathy for the characters so severely punished by fate. The epos "Kalevala" gives many such scenes where love for parents, for children, for native nature is praised.
War
The following runes describe how the three heroes (including the unlucky blacksmith) joined together in order to take the magic treasure Sampo from the evil Northern Virgin. The heroes of Kalevala did not give up. Here nothing can be solved by battle, and it was decided, as always, to resort to sorcery. VÀinÀmöinen, like our Novgorod hussar Sadko, built himself a musical instrument - a kantele, charmed the game with nature and put to sleep all the northerners. Thus the heroes stole Sampo.
The mistress of the North pursued them and plotted them until Sampo fell into the sea. She sent monsters, pestilence, all kinds of calamities to Kaleva, and VÀinÀmöinen, meanwhile, made a new instrument, which she played even more magically than she returned the sun and moon stolen by the mistress Pokhyola. Gathering the fragments of Sampa, the hero did a lot of good for the people of his country, many good deeds. Here, the rather long joint adventure of three heroes almost ends with Kalevala. A retelling of this narrative cannot replace reading of a work that inspired many artists to create great works. This must be read in full to get real pleasure.
Divine baby
So, the epic approached its last rune, very symbolic. This is practically the apocrypha for the birth of the Savior. The virgin from Kaleva - Maryatta - gave birth to a divinely wonderful son. VÀinÀmöinen was even afraid of the power that this two-week-old child possessed, and advised him to kill him right away. To which the infant of the hero shamed, reproaching injustice. The hero heeded. Finally he sang a magical song, got into a wonderful shuttle and left Karelia to a new and more worthy ruler. So ends the epic "Kalevala".
Reviews
The poetic fabric of Kalevala does not contain any one common thread, linking all episodes into one. Although, according to reviews, literary scholars have always looked for it and continue to search for it. The hypothesis is diverse. E. Aspelin considered that it was the idea of ââchanging the seasons in the northern lands. Lönnrot, the collector of the epic, believed that evidence of the seizure of northern Finnish lands by persistent Karelians was clearing up here. And indeed - Kaleva won, the heroes manage to subjugate Pohyol. However, there are a lot of opinions, and they are sometimes polarly different from each other. Even a brief summary of "Kalevala" can give an idea of ââthe greatness of the folk epic.