SOURCE: "Romantic Localism," in Deliberate Regression, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, pp. 115-47.

In the following excerpt, Harbison comments on the absence of a clear scholarly, idealistic, or artistic focus in the Kalevala

[Elias] Lönnrot was a doctor who began to collect fragments of Finnish oral poetry on vacations and tours of medical inspection in rural Finland, without at first the idea of forming them into a whole. After his first publication, The Harp (1829-31), two skilled singers in an eastern district gave him a new conception of the songs' homogeneity, though the possibility of putting together a Finnish Ossian had been broached much earlier in an ethnic newspaper.

As he went on Lönnrot not only collected but embodied the folk tradition, becoming a singer who like peasant ones could recite from memory and improvise links and elaborations as he sang. He differed from peasant singers in using...