Sixty years ago, it may be said, no one was aware that Finland possessed a national poem at all.  Her people—­who claim affinity with the Magyars of Hungary, but are possibly a back-wave of an earlier tide of population—­had remained untouched by foreign influences since their conquest by Sweden, and their somewhat lax and wholesale conversion to Christianity:  events which took place gradually between the middle of the twelfth and the end of the thirteenth centuries.  Under the rule of Sweden, the Finns were left to their quiet life and undisturbed imaginings, among the forests and lakes of the region which they aptly called Pohja, ‘the end of things’; while their educated classes took no very keen interest in the native poetry and mythology of their race.  At length the annexation of Finland by Russia, in 1809, awakened national feeling, and stimulated research into the songs and customs which were the heirlooms of the people.

It was the policy of Russia to encourage, rather than to check, this return on a distant past; and from the north of Norway to the slopes of the Altai, ardent explorers sought out the fragments of unwritten early poetry.  These runes, or Runots, were chiefly sung by old men called Runoias, to beguile the weariness of the long dark winters.  The custom was for two champions to engage in a contest of memory, clasping each other’s hands, and reciting in turn till he whose memory first gave in slackened his hold.  The ‘Kalevala’ contains an instance of this practice, where it is said that no one was so hardy as to clasp hands with Wainamoinen, who is at once the Orpheus and the Prometheus of Finnish mythology.  These Runoias, or rhapsodists, complain, of course, of the degeneracy of human memory; they notice how any foreign influence, in religion or politics, is destructive to the native songs of a race. {160} ’As for the lays of old time, a thousand have been scattered to the wind, a thousand buried in the snow; . . . as for those which the Munks (the Teutonic knights) swept away, and the prayer of the priest overwhelmed, a thousand tongues were not able to recount them.’  In spite of the losses thus caused, and in spite of the suspicious character of the Finns, which often made the task of collection a dangerous one, enough materials remained to furnish Dr. Lonnrot, the most noted explorer, with thirty-five Runots, or cantos.  These were published in 1835, but later research produced the fifteen cantos which make up the symmetrical fifty of the ‘Kalevala.’  In the task of arranging and uniting these, Dr. Lonnrot played the part traditionally ascribed to the commission of Pisistratus in relation to the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey.’  Dr. Lonnrot is said to have handled with singular fidelity the materials which now come before us as one poem, not absolutely without a certain unity and continuous thread of narrative.  It is this unity (so faint compared with that of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’) which gives the ‘Kalevala’ a claim to the title of epic.