the oldest of the runolainen in the Russian province of Wuokinlem, who was by far the most renowned song-man of the country, and from him he got many of the most splendid runes of the poem.  And certainly the Kalevala, as it stands, is one of the world’s great poems.  It is perhaps hardly accurate to describe it as an epic.  It lacks the central unity of a true epic in our sense of the word.  It has many heroes beside Wainomoinen and is, properly speaking, a collection of folk-songs and ballads.  Of its antiquity there is no doubt.  It is thoroughly pagan from beginning to end, and even the legend of the Virgin Mariatta to whom the Sun tells where ’her golden babe lies hidden’—­

   Yonder is thy golden infant,
   There thy holy babe lies sleeping
   Hidden to his belt in water,
   Hidden in the reeds and rushes—­

is, according to all scholars, essentially pre-Christian in origin.  The gods are chiefly gods of air and water and forest.  The highest is the sky-god Ukks who is ‘The Father of the Breezes,’ ’The Shepherd of the Lamb-Clouds’; the lightning is his sword, the rainbow is his bow; his skirt sparkles with fire, his stockings are blue and his shoes crimson-coloured.  The daughters of the Sun and Moon sit on the scarlet rims of the clouds and weave the rays of light into a gleaming web.  Untar presides over fogs and mists, and passes them through a silver sieve before sending them to the earth.  Ahto, the wave-god, lives with ’his cold and cruel-hearted spouse,’ Wellamo, at the bottom of the sea in the chasm of the Salmon-Rocks, and possesses the priceless treasure of the Sampo, the talisman of success.  When the branches of the primitive oak-trees shut out the light of the sun from the Northland, Pikku-Mies (the Pygmy) emerged from the sea in a suit of copper, with a copper hatchet in his belt, and having grown to a giant’s stature felled the huge oak with the third stroke of his axe.  Wirokannas is ’The Green-robed Priest of the Forest,’ and Tapio, who has a coat of tree-moss and a high-crowned hat of fir-leaves, is ‘The Gracious God of the Woodlands.’  Otso, the bear, is the ‘Honey-Paw of the Mountains,’ the ‘Fur-robed Forest Friend.’  In everything, visible and invisible, there is God, a divine presence.  There are three worlds, and they are all peopled with divinities.

As regards the poem itself, it is written in trochaic eight-syllabled lines with alliteration and the part-line echo, the metre which Longfellow adopted for Hiawatha.  One of its distinguishing characteristics is its wonderful passion for nature and for the beauty of natural objects.  Lemenkainen says to Tapio: 

   Sable-bearded God of forests,
   In thy hat and coat of ermine,
   Robe thy trees in finest fibres,
   Deck thy groves in richest fabrics,
   Give the fir-trees shining silver,
   Deck with gold the slender balsams,
   Give the spruces copper-belting,
   And the pine-trees silver girdles,