Anyone who has read the collection of ballads which go by this name (more especially if he has read them, or even part of them, in the original – a vastly different thing to any translation) will I think agree to that. Most people are familiar from the days of their earliest books onwards with the general mould and type of mythological stories; legends, tales, romances, and so on, that come to us by many and crooked channels from ancient Hellas and the southern lands, from the North and the grim Germanic peoples, from the islands of the West and their old Keltic lords (whatever Keltic may mean). For some of us, for more than are often willing or honest enough to confess it, these achieved their crowning glory and delight in Stead’s pink-covered Books for the Bairns – that mine of ancient and undying lore. They have a certain style, or savour; a something akin to one another in them, in spite of their vast cleavages; a something that is more than the universal community of human imagination, and that makes you feel that, whatever the ultimate differences of race of those speakers, there is something kindred in the imagination of the speakers of Indo-european languages. Some far off things there were, of course, even in those little pink books; echoes from the black heart of Africa; trickles from a distant and alien East. Nothing in this world can be finally defined, or marked out with rigid lines. So it is with Europe. It has south-eastern frontiers over which have perpetually poured the influences, half-asiatic, half close kindred to ourselves, of the Semitic languages and cultures to be assimilated swiftly and often beyond easy recognition in Europe. But that is an old tale; and even perhaps while we are still arguing whether the Far East has given us more than a plot here, the shadow of an old tale there to be turned to our own uses, you come one very fine day upon the Kalevala, the Land of Heroes. Then you are indeed in a quite new world and can revel in an amazing new excitement.
We will avoid the Peak in Darien, if only for the reason that I at any rate am not remaining silent about/upon it – still you do feel like a Columbus landing on a new continent, a Thorfinn Karlsefni in a Vinland the Good – and better off, for your new heroic acquaintances are better fun than Skraeling or Red Indian. Of course when you first step onto the new ground you can, if you like, at once begin comparing it with the places you have come from. There are mountains, rivers, grass, and other things here much as the[re] were there; many plants and some animals (especially the ferocious human species) may seem familiar – but it is more than likely that an indefinable sense of newness will either delight or disturb you too much for comparisons, there will be a glamour of strangeness even upon the familiar things; the trees will group themselves unusually on the horizon; the birds will make unfamiliar music; the inhabitants will talk a wild and at first unintelligible lingo. After the country and its manners have become better known to you, and you have got on speaking terms with the natives, you will, I hope, find it jolly to live awhile with this strange people and these new gods, with this race of unhypocritical low-brow scandalous heroes, and sadly unsentimental lovers – some there may be who will think with regret that they have ever to go back from that land at all. There are possibly some, however, that I have not yet considered, people of irreproachable education and faultless urbanity who would desire only to catch the first liner back to their familiar cities. These people had better be off soon. I have no defence to offer them for the ‘Land’ or its ‘Heroes’; for to them it is useless to say that, if the heroes of the Kalevala do behave with a singular lack of dignity and even decency, and with a readiness for tears and dirty dealing, that is part of their especial attraction! After all they are not really more undignified – and are much more easy to get on with – than is a medieval lover who takes to his bed to lament the cruelty of his lady in that she will not have pity on him, condemning him to a melting death; but who is struck with the novelty of the idea when his kindly adviser points out that the poor lady is as yet uninformed in any way of his attachment. The lovers of Kalevala are forward and take a deal of rebuffing. There is no Troilus to need a Pandarus to do his shy wooing for him; rather here it is the mothers-in-law who do some sound bargaining behind the scenes, and give cynical advice to their daughters calculated to shatter the stoutest illusions.
Wonder and a little bewilderment were at any rate my experience when I first came upon the Kalevala – crossed, that is, the gulf between the Indo-european-speaking peoples of Europe into the smaller realm of those who still cling in queer corners to half-forgotten tongues and memories of an elder day. The newness worried me, sticking in awkward lumps through the clumsiness of a translation that had not overcome all the peculiar difficulties of its task; it irritated while it attracted – but the more I read of it, the more I felt at home and enjoyed myself. Then I made a wild assault on the original language, and was at first repulsed with heavy losses, and can never be said to have taken the position. Still it is easy to see why translations are not very good, or very near to their original – they are dealing with a language separated by an immeasurable gulf in nature and in method of expression from English. Finnish is an odd tongue, very fitting to the ‘Land of Heroes’ (as is natural), and as different from anything that you are familiar with as the tales of these poems are from the tales you knew before.
One repeatedly hears the ‘Land of Heroes’ described as the Finnish National Epic – as if it was of the nature of the universe that every nation (dreary word), besides a national bank, and government, should before qualifying for membership of the League, show lawful possession also of a National Epic, hall-remark of respectability, evidence indeed of national existence. But Finland does not possess one. The Kalevala certainly is not one. It is a mass of conceivably epic material (I can conceive of the epic that should grow from it with difficulty, I must confess); but – and I think this is the main point – it would lose all that is its greatest delight, if ever it were one unhappy day to be epically handled. The mere stories, bare events, alone could remain; all that undergrowth, that rich profusion and luxuriance, which clothe them would have to be stripped away. Indeed, the ‘Land of Heroes’ is a collection of exactly that absorbingly delightful material which on the appearance of an epic artist, and of an age lofty-minded enough to produce him, has elsewhere inevitably been cast aside, and fallen at last out of even ‘oral literature’ into disuse and final oblivion. Barely in the Kalevala do passages or episodes appear that one can conceive of as capable of being tuned to the higher emotional pitches required by the greater poetry. It is to all that body of strange myth, of queer troglodyte underworld of story, of wild jugglings with the sun and moon and the origins of the earth and the shapes of Man, that in Homer (for instance) has lightly been pruned away till only a few incongruous traces of its former presence are left – it is to this that most of the Kalevala may be compared and not to the large grandeur of the epic theme, nor to its conscious humanity. Or again it is to the weird tales, the outrageous ghosts, and the sorceries and by-tracks of Northern imagination that crop out at times into the usually intensely clear upper air of the Sagas that the Land of Heroes can most often be likened, not to the haughty dignity and courage, the nobility of mind and of body of which the great Sagas tell. Yet the queer and strange, the unrestrained, the grotesque is not only interesting it is valuable: it is one of the eternal and permanent interests and attractions of men. Nor is it always necessary to purge it all out in order to attain to the sublime. You can have your gargoyles on your noble cathedral; but northern Europe has lost much through too often trying to build Greek temples. Tonight I am not in the least concerned however even to be sublime – I am content to turn over the pages of these mythological ballads – full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting away and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people[.] I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English – but my desire is not due to one very dreadful and fatal motive; it is not adulterated with science; it is clear of all s
uspicion of Anthropology. Any such collection as this would be, and indeed I am only too well aware is, the playground of anthropologists and comparative mythologists, where they luxuriate mightily awhile – but however good and interesting in its own way their sport and hunting may be (I fear I am often sceptical) it is as foreign to my present purpose as would be the processes of the manufacture of cheese. Commentators, I know, make many notes to these poems such as: ‘compare this story with the one told in the Andaman Isles’, or ‘compare that belief with the one mentioned in the Hausa folk-tales’, and so forth – but don’t let us. These notes seldom prove anything more than that Finns and Andaman Islanders are though rather different to look at nearly related animals, and that we knew before. Let us rather be glad that we have come suddenly upon a storehouse of those popular imaginings that we had feared lost, stocked with stories not yet sophisticated into a sense of proportion, with no thought of the decent limits even of exaggeration, with no sense (or certainly not our sense) of the incongruous, unless, as we may at times suspect, incongruity is delighted in. We are taking a holiday from the whole course of European progress of the last three millenniums, and going to be wildly un-hellenic and barbarous for a time – like the boy who hoped that the future life would provide for half-holidays in Hell far away from Eton collars and hymns. For the moment we are not to apply our superior modern intellect to the analysing of these things. We should rather try to enter into their especial spirit on terms of equality. The vivisectionist is able to make a case out for himself, but no one believes that he knows more about dogs than the man that keeps them as pets – but even the superiority that enters into the word pet should be got rid of – I should have said who makes a companion of a dog. The only analysis I have allowed myself is a gentle probing into my own feelings of pleasure into the savour perceived in these poems; some little effort to describe the life, the landscape and the people of this land as they presented themselves to me.
The delicious exaggerations of these wild tales could no doubt be learnedly compared to a hundred primitive or modern uncivilized literatures, and collections of legend – but, even if I could, I wouldn’t for the present move outside Europe; for however wild, uncivilized and primitive these things may be their atmosphere and landscape belong essentially to Northern Europe, and to emphasize that I would willingly forgo a hundred parallelisms. It is all the same true that the unrestraint and exaggeration in the Kalevala does at once recall such things as say the Welsh stories of the Mabinogion, and other similar things in Welsh and Irish; but in reality their cases are very different. In the Kalevala there is often no attempt at even the limited plausibility of the fairy-tale, no cunning concealment of the impossible – only the child’s delight in saying that he has cut down a million trees, or that he will knock down some such august personage as his father, if indeed he has not already slain twenty policemen. All this is not intended to take you in, nor even to cast the brief spell of the story-teller’s illusion over you. Its delight depends on the dawning perception of the limits of ordinary human possibility and at the same time of the limitless power of movement and of creation of the human fancy and imagination. Latent in it no doubt is the heroism of the human battles with overmastering fate, and courage undaunted by unconquerable odds – but you do not listen to it on that account, you either like it or despise it as an effort of fresh unsophisticated fancy. Of course in the Welsh tales there is often, indeed continually, in evidence the same delight in a picturesque lie, in a strong breathless flight of fancy; but paradoxically the Welsh tales are both far more absurd and far less so than the Finnish. They are more absurd for they are (when we get them) less fresh than they once were; there is in many places a thick dust of a no longer understood tradition lying on them; strings of names and allusions that no longer have any meaning, that were already nonsense for the bards who related them. Any one who wants to see what I mean has only to look at the catalogue of the heroes of Arthur’s court in the story of Kilhwch and Olwen, or the account of the feats that Kilhwch had to perform for the giant Yspaddaden Penkawr in order to win his daughter Olwen. There is little or nothing of this strange lumber in the Kalevala. On the other hand, the Welsh stories are far less absurd for the pictures painted have far more technique; their colours are cleverly, even marvellously schemed; their figures are cunningly grouped. The fairy-tale’s own plausibility is respected; if a man slays an impossible monster, the story holds firm to its lie. In the Land of Heroes a man may kill a gigantic elk in one line and find it more poetic to call it a she-bear in the next. To elaborate this is perhaps unnecessary; but it might be made the occasion of an attempt to say just what I find the atmosphere of the Kalevala to be – my finding you can correct for yourselves from your own knowledge, or from the extracts that I could wish to read to you until your patience was exhausted, and you felt the appropriateness of the last lines of the Kalevala:
‘Een the waterfall when flowing
Yields no endless stream of water;
Nor does an accomplished singer
Sing till all his knowledge fail him.’
It seems to me that what one feels immediately is that there is no background of literary or artistic tradition. The Mabinogion, for instance, has such a background; it is full of the sense of long years of development and even of decay which has resulted, on the one hand, in the cumbering of the tale with forgotten traditional names and matter, and on the other has produced a field of the most excellently harmonised and subtly varied colours against which the figures of the actors stand out – but they also harmonise with the marvellous surrounding colour-scheme and lose in startlingness if not in clearness. If few have the same intensely vivid feeling for colour that Keltic tales show, yet most similar national legendary literatures have something of this – the Kalevala to me feels to have none. The colours, the deeds, the marvels, the figures of the heroes are all splashed onto a clean bare canvas by a sudden hand; even the legends concerning the origin of the most ancient things in the world seem to come fresh from the singer’s hot imagination of the moment. Certainly there are no modernities in it like trams or guns or aeroplanes; the heroes’ weapons it is true are the so-called antique bow and spear and sword, but at the same time there is a ‘nowness’, a quite unhazy unromantic momentariness and presentness that startles you mightily when you suddenly realize that you are all the time reading about the earth being made out of a teal’s egg, or of the sun and moon being imprisoned in a mountain. All things must be bought at a price and we have purchased the comparat[ive]-consistency and reasonableness of our tales, the clearer crystallisation of our traditions with the loss of this magic and untarnished freshness.
Now as to what is known of the origin of these poems I know little and will not try to tell much more tha[n] I know. Ever since the coming of Väinämöinen and the making of his great harp, the ‘kantele’ fashioned of pike-bone, from what we know of the Finns they have always loved ballads of this sort; and ballads of this sort have been handed on and sung day after day with unending zest from father to son, and from son to grandson down to the present day, when, as the ballads now lament, ‘the songs are songs of bygone ages, hidden words of ancient wisdom, songs which all the children sing not, all beyond men’s comprehension’. The shadow of Sweden and then of Russia has been over the country for many centuries. Petrograd is in Finland. Things are not, it is to be feared, much better now. The remarkable and delightful thing for us, however, is that these ‘songs of bygone ages’ have somehow been preserved without being tinkered with. Sweden finally in the 12th century conquered Finland (or rather the Finns – their land has never had the hard and fast boundaries of the modern European states). Before that there was continual warfare and continual intercourse with the Northerly Germanic peoples that stretches back beyond the beginnings of our era, and in which doubtless the first bearers of the English name in Holstein and the Islands had a good part – but the intercourse goes back even earlier than that far time. By the Swedish con
quest, and by the swords of the Teutonic Knights Christianity began slowly to be introduced – in other words the Finns were one of the last acknowledged pagan peoples of Mediaeval Europe. Today the Kalevala and its themes are still practically untouched by this influence, much less affected by it than the mythology of ancient Scandinavia as it appears in the Edda. Except in the story of the virgin Marjatta at the end, in a few references to Jumala or Ukko god of the Heavens, and so forth, even hints at the existence of Christianity are almost entirely absent; of its spirit there is nothing, as any one can see who compares the crude story of Marjatta with Christian faith. To this is of course largely ascribable the interesting primitiveness of the poems, the ‘undergrowth’ character of them, though it is also partly responsible for their minor emotional key, their narrow and parochial view – things that in our present holiday mood are not without attraction. For another seven centuries the ballads have been sung in spite of Sweden, in spite of Russia, and do not ever appear to have been written down at all till Elias Lönnrot in 1835 made a collection of many of them, and published a selection of these. These were all collected in Eastern Finland and are consequently in a dialect different from that that has since come to be the modern literary dialect of Finnish. This Kalevala dialect has come now to be a kind of poetic convention. Lönnröt was not the only collector, but it was to him that it occurred to string a selection into a loosely connected form – as it would seem from the result with no small skill. He it was who called this string the Land of Heroes, or Kalevala from Kaleva the mythological ancestor of all the heroes. It consisted of 25 runos or cantos. This was enlarged with freshly collected material to double the size and published again in 1849, and almost immediately appeared in translations.
The Story of Kullervo Page 9