Four years after his removal to Borgå, Runeberg published ‘Julqvällen’ (Christmas Eve), the last of his hexameter narratives, — a somewhat less successful idyl than its predecessors. A more important work, also produced in 1841, is the narrative poem ‘Nadeschda,’ a study of Russian character and manners. It is written in a variety of unrhymed measures, and tells of the love of a nobleman for a beautiful serf. In this work, and those that follow, the powers of the poet have outgrown the somewhat close limitations of the idyl, and seek to bring deeper and more tragic themes within their grasp. In ‘Nadeschda’ we have for essential subject-matter the struggle between the institution of serfdom and the freedom of the individual. In a still nobler poem, ‘Kung Fjalar’ (1845), we have the conflict between the will of man and the inscrutable purposes of the gods, presented in the spirit, although not in the form, of a Greek tragedy: an ‘Antigone’ or an ‘Œdipus Rex.’ It is a poem in five cantos of four-line unrhymed stanzas, telling how the king, defiant of the gods, orders his infant daughter to be thrown into the sea, that he may avert the doom that has been prophesied to come upon his race through the child. But the child is rescued, and taken to the Ossianic kingdom of Morven, where she grows to be a beautiful woman. Twenty years later. King Fjalar’s son conquers Morven, and bears away the maiden as his bride. On the voyage homeward she tells him the story of her rescue from the sea: and he, filled with horror when he realizes that his bride is his sister, slays both her and himself. The old king, conquered at last by fate, puts an end to his life, finally recognizing the existence of a power higher than his own.
The poems thus far described, together with a third volume of short pieces, bring us to the year 1848, when was published the first part of ‘Fänrik Stål’s Sägner’ (the Tales of Ensign Stål), Runeberg’s greatest work. The second part bears the date of 1860. This collection of poems, thirty-four in number (besides one that was suppressed for personal reasons), deals with episodes of the war which ended with the annexation of Finland to Russia. The several poems are supposed to be related by a veteran of the war to an eager youth who comes day after day and hangs upon the lips of the story-teller. They are tales of a heroic age still fresh in the recollection of the poet’s hearers, tales of famous battles and individual exploits, of historical personages and obscure peasants united by a common devotion and a common sacrifice, of the maiden who is consoled for her lover’s death by the thought that his life was given for his fatherland, and of the boy who is impatient to grow up that he too may give himself to his country’s cause. The poems are dramatic, pathetic, even humorous by turn; breathing a strain of the purest patriotism, and flowing in numbers so musical that they fix themselves forever in the memory. And besides all this, they are so simple in form and vocabulary that they reach the heart of the unlettered as well as of the cultured; so deep in their sympathy with the elementary joys and griefs of humankind that they found a widely responsive echo from the beginning, and still constitute the most treasured possession of Swedish literature. Indeed, the first poem of them all, ‘Vårt Land’ (Our Country) became at once, and has ever since remained, the national song of both Finn and Swede, bound together by the genius of the poet in a closer union than the old political tie. A close reproduction of the form of this poem, and perhaps something of its beauty as well, may be found in the following translation of its closing stanzas: —
“Here all about us lies this land,
Our eyes may see it here;
We have but to stretch forth our hand,
And blithely point to sea and strand,
And say, Behold this land so near,
Our fatherland so dear.
“And were we called to dwell on high,
Of heaven’s own blue made free,
To dance with stars that deck the sky,
Where falls no tear, and breathes no sigh, —
We still should yearn, poor though it be,
This land of ours to see.
“O land! thou thousand-lakèd land,
With song and virtue clad,
On life’s wild sea our own safe strand,
Land of our past, our future’s land,
If thou art poor, yet be not sad, —
Be joyous, blithe, and glad.
“Yet shall thy flower in beauty ope
Its petals without stain;
Our love shall with thy darkness cope,
And be thy light, thy joy, thy hope,
And this our patriotic strain
To nobler heights attain.”
This song Mr. Gosse declares to be “one of the noblest strains of patriotic verse ever indited; it lifts Runeberg at once to the level of Callinus or Campbell, — to the first rank of poets in whom art and ardor, national sentiment and power of utterance, are equally blended.” 7
The works remaining to be mentioned include a volume of ‘Smärre Berättelser’ (Short Stories: 1854), the sixty-odd hymns written for the official Lutheran hymn-book of Finland, and the two plays, ‘Kan Ej’ (Cannot: 1862) and ‘Kungarne på Salamis’ (The Kings at Salamis: 1863). The former of these plays is a sentimental domestic comedy in two acts, and in rhymed verse. The latter is a five-act tragedy written upon a Greek theme in the classical manner, and in iambic hexameter verse. It was the last work of any importance published by Runeberg, and one of the noblest of all his works, worthily crowning a great career.
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
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Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
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George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
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Robert Louis Stevenson
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The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
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Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert (English)
H. Rider Haggard
Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac (English)
J. W. von Goethe (English)
Jules Verne
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Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust (English)
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Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
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Tobias Smollett
Victor Hugo
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Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
Ann Radcliffe
Ben Jonson
Charl
es Lever
Émile Zola
Ford Madox Ford
Geoffrey Chaucer
George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
Henrik Ibsen
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
J. M. Barrie
James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
John Galsworthy
Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving
Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
(Forthcoming: 2015-2016)
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Ancient Classics
Aeschylus
Apuleius
Apollonius of Rhodes
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Arrian
Bede
Cassius Dio
Catullus
Cicero
Demosthenes
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Diogenes Laërtius
Euripides
Frontius
Herodotus
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Hippocrates
Homer
Horace
Josephus
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Longus
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Martial
Nonnus
Ovid
Pausanias
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Pindar
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Plotinus
Plutarch
Polybius
Propertius
Quintus Smyrnaeus
Sallust
Sappho
Seneca the Younger
Sophocles
Statius
Suetonius
Tacitus
Terence
Theocritus
Thucydides
Tibullus
Virgil
Xenophon
Delphi Poets Series
A. E. Housman
Alexander Pope
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Andrew Marvell
Beowulf
Charlotte Smith
Christina Rossetti
D. H Lawrence (poetry)
Dante Alighieri (English)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Delphi Poetry Anthology
Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)
Edmund Spenser
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Emily Dickinson
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Friedrich Schiller (English)
George Herbert
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Isaac Rosenberg
Johan Ludvig Runeberg
John Clare
John Donne
John Dryden
John Keats
John Milton
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Lord Byron
Ludovico Ariosto
Luís de Camões
Matthew Arnold
Michael Drayton
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Robert Browning
Robert Burns
Robert Frost
Robert Southey
Rumi
Rupert Brooke
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Walter Raleigh
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Gray
Thomas Hardy (poetry)
Thomas Hood
T. S. Eliot
W. B. Yeats
Walt Whitman
Wilfred Owen
William Blake
William Cowper
William Wordsworth
Masters of Art
Caravaggio
Claude Monet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Diego Velázquez
Gustav Klimt
J. M. W. Turner
Johannes Vermeer
John Constable
Leonardo da Vinci
Michelangelo
Paul Cézanne
Paul Klee
Peter Paul Rubens
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Sandro Botticelli
Raphael
Rembrandt van Rijn
Titian
Vincent van Gogh
Wassily Kandinsky
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The room in Runeberg’s Porvoo home in which the poet died
Näsinmäki Graveyard, Porvoo, Finland — Runeberg’s final resting place
> Runeberg’s grave
Collected Works of Johan Ludvig Runeberg Page 38