SOURCE: "The Kalevala and Finnish Politics," in Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. XII, No. 2-3, 1975, pp. 131-55.

In the following excerpt, Wilson takes a critical look at the historical relationship between Finnish nationalist politics and the study of the Kalevala.

Folklore studies in Finland have from the beginning been intimately connected with the struggle of Finnish nationalists to achieve first cultural and then political independence. Probably in no other country has the marriage of folklore research and national aspirations produced such dramatic results. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Finns, fragmented into several dialect groups and lacking the binding ties of a common literature and a written record of their national past, were ill-prepared to face the century of Russian rule and attempted Russification of their culture that lay ahead. Then in 1835 Elias Lönnrot published the Kalevala, the national epic based on the old...