second volume

Kalevala, the Finnish national epic and one of the great heroic poems of world literature, took its definitive shape in 1849, but it is directly based on oral poetry that mainly came into being during the first millennium of the Christian era. The work was compiled by the great philologist Elias Lonnrot (1802-1884) from the best and most complete variants of ancient folk songs that he himself and other pioneers of Finnish folklore had collected in the backwoods of Karelia.

Karelia, a vast area now mainly on the Russian side of Finland's eastern border, formed a periphery of Finnish-Karelian culture that was cut off from the centres of civilization by long distances and scarcely inhabited forests. The old folk poetry was preserved there in an oral tradition until the nineteenth and even twentieth century, because the Orthodox Church prevailing in Russia was more tolerant than the Roman Catholic Church current in other parts of Finland until the reformation and the Lutheran Christianity, which after the reformation systematically worked for the eradication of pagan traditions in Finland. While Kalevala on the whole reflects the pre-Christian religion and heroic legends of the Finnish-speaking peoples, its last canto has as its theme the triumph of Christianity, which the Swedish conquerors forced onto Finland in AD 1155.