SOURCE: "Preface to the 'Old Kalevala'," in The Kalevala; or, Poems of the Kaleva District, edited by Elias Lönnrot, translated by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 365-74.

In the following excerpt from his preface to the first edition of the Kalevala, later known as the Old Kalevala, Lönnrot discusses the nature of the poems and the way in which he compiled and organized them.

I have tried to put these songs into some sort of order, a task of which I should give some account. Since to my knowledge no one has previously tried to order them or so much as mentioned doing so, I will first report on how I came upon this idea. Already while reading the songs previously collected, particularly those collected by Ganander, I at least wondered whether one might not possibly find songs about Väin...