‘These songs,’ says the prelude, ’were found by the wayside, and gathered in the depths of the copses; blown from the branches of the forest, and culled among the plumes of the pine-trees.  These lays came to me as I followed the flocks, in a land of meadows honey-sweet, and of golden hills. . . .  The cold has spoken to me, and the rain has told me her runes; the winds of heaven, the waves of the sea, have spoken and sung to me; the wild birds have taught me, the music of many waters has been my master.’

The metre in which the epic is chanted resembles, to an English ear, that of Mr. Longfellow’s ’Hiawatha’—­there is assonance rather than rhyme; and a very musical effect is produced by the liquid character of the language, and by the frequent alliterations.

This rough outline of the main characteristics of the ‘Kalevala’ we shall now try to fill up with an abstract of its contents.  The poem is longer than the ‘Iliad,’ and much of interest must necessarily be omitted; but it is only through such an abstract that any idea can be given of the sort of unity which does prevail amid the most utter discrepancy.

In the first place, what is to be understood by the word ‘Kalevala’?  The affix la signifies ‘abode.’  Thus, ‘Tuonela’ is ‘the abode of Tuoni,’ the god of the lower world; and as ‘kaleva’ means ‘heroic,’ ‘magnificent,’ ‘Kalevala’ is ‘The Home of Heroes.’  The poem is the record of the adventures of the people of Kalevala—­of their strife with the men of Pohjola, the place of the world’s end.  We may fancy two old Runoias, or singers, clasping hands on one of the first nights of the Finnish winter, and beginning (what probably has never been accomplished) the attempt to work through the ‘Kalevala’ before the return of summer.  They commence ab ovo, or, rather, before the egg.  First is chanted the birth of Wainamoinen, the benefactor and teacher of men.  He is the son of Luonnotar, the daughter of Nature, who answers to the first woman of the Iroquois cosmogony.  Beneath the breath and touch of wind and tide, she conceived a child; but nine ages of man passed before his birth, while the mother floated on ‘the formless and the multiform waters.’  Then Ukko, the supreme God, sent an eagle, which laid her eggs in the maiden’s bosom, and from these eggs grew earth and sky, sun and moon, star and cloud.  Then was Wainamoinen born on the waters, and reached a barren land, and gazed on the new heavens and the new earth.  There he sowed the grain that is the bread of man, chanting the hymn used at seed-time, calling on the mother earth to make the green herb spring, and on Ukko to send clouds and rain.  So the corn sprang, and the golden cuckoo—­which in Finland plays the part of the popinjay in Scotch ballads, or of the three golden birds in Greek folksongs—­came with his congratulations.  In regard to the epithet ‘golden,’ it may be observed that gold and silver, in the Finnish epic, are lavished on the commonest objects of daily life.