Besides the interest of its unique position as a popular epic, the ‘Kalevala’ is very valuable, both for its literary beauties and for the confused mass of folklore which it contains.

Here old cosmogonies, attempts of man to represent to himself the beginning of things, are mingled with the same wild imaginings as are found everywhere in the shape of fairy-tales.  We are hurried from an account of the mystic egg of creation, to a hymn like that of the Ambarval Brothers, to a strangely familiar scrap of a nursery story, to an incident which we remember as occurring in almost identical words in a Scotch ballad.  We are among a people which endows everything with human characters and life, which is in familiar relations with birds, and beasts, and even with rocks and plants.  Ravens and wolves and fishes of the sea, sun, moon, and stars, are kindly or churlish; drops of blood find speech, man and maid change to snake or swan and resume their forms, ships have magic powers, like the ships of the Phaeacians.

Then there is the oddest confusion of every stage of religious development:  we find a supreme God, delighting in righteousness; Ukko, the lord of the vault of air, who stands apart from men, and sends his son, Wainamoinen, to be their teacher in music and agriculture.

Across this faith comes a religion of petrified abstractions like those of the Roman Pantheon.  There are gods of colour, a goddess of weaving, a goddess of man’s blood, besides elemental spirits of woods and waters, and the manes of the dead.  Meanwhile, the working faith of the people is the belief in magic—­generally a sign of the lower culture.  It is supposed that the knowledge of certain magic words gives power over the elemental bodies which obey them; it is held that the will of a distant sorcerer can cross the lakes and plains like the breath of a fantastic frost, with power to change an enemy to ice or stone.  Traces remain of the worship of animals:  there is a hymn to the bear; a dance like the bear-dance of the American Indians; and another hymn tells of the birth and power of the serpent.  Across all, and closing all, comes a hostile account of the origin of Christianity—­the end of joy and music.

How primitive was the condition of the authors of this medley of beliefs is best proved by the survival of the custom called exogamy. {164a} This custom, which is not peculiar to the Finns, but is probably a universal note of early society, prohibits marriage between members of the same tribe.  Consequently, the main action, such as it is, of the ‘Kalevala’ turns on the efforts made by the men of Kaleva to obtain brides from the hostile tribe of Pohja. {164b}

Further proof of ancient origin is to be found in what is the great literary beauty of the poem—­its pure spontaneity and simplicity.  It is the production of an intensely imaginative race, to which song came as the most natural expression of joy and sorrow, terror or triumph—­a class which lay near to nature’s secret, and was not out of sympathy with the wild kin of woods and waters.