Kalevala and Finnish Popular Culture

Yksi Suomen taide- ja kulttuurihistoriallisista sivujuonteista on muinaisegyptiläisen kulttuurin ja sen tutkimisen eli egyptologian vaikutus joihinkin Suomen kulttuurin osa-alueisiin 1700-luvulta aina nykypäivään saakka.Tästä vaikutuksesta voidaan käyttää myös yleiseurooppalaista nimitystä egyptomania, joka tarkoittaa innostunutta ja joskus jopa yliampuvaa suhtautumista kaikkeen alkuperäiseen muinaisegyptiläiseen kulttuuriin ja esineistöön samoin kuin usein pseudoegyptiläisen mallin mukaan valmistettuihin esineisiin ja arkkitehtoonisiin yksityiskohtiin. Egyptomania on melko erikoislaaatuinen ilmiö taidehistoriassa. Se yhdistää niin tieteen kuin mielikuvituksen ja sen vaikutuspiiri käsittää arkkitehtuurin, sisustuskulttuurin, kuvanveiston, maalaustaiteen, teatterin, elokuvat, käyttöesineistön ja lukuisat muut mitä moninaisimmat alat ja muoti-ilmiöt. Tässä artikkelissa pyrin valaisemaan hieman tätä osa-aluetta Suomen kulttuurissa.

Egyptomania in Finland. Ancient Egyptian culture has been so fascinating that since the Romans this cultural phenomenon, usually called egyptomania or Nile style has been a part of our culture in various levels, also in Finland.

Completata nel 1789, sotto gli auspici dell'Aufklärung tedesca, quest'opera del curato Christfrid Ganander è in assoluto la prima trattazione scientifica di ampio respiro sulla mitologia finlandese e, insieme, una delle sue più preziose fonti a monte dell'imponente lavoro di riorganizzazione effettuato da Elias Lönnrot per il suo Kalevala. Impostato in forma enciclopedica, il Mythologia Fennica espone elementi tratti da tutti i livelli della tradizione, sia colta che popolare. Da un lato, vi sono i temi legati al mondo letterario delle saghe scandinave, dai miti sul misterioso "fondatore" Fornjótr alle battaglie degli antichi re svedesi contro gli stregoni finnar, per arrivare ai resoconti dei navigatori vichinghi sui misteriosi popoli incontrati lungo le più remote rotte nord-orientali. Ma Ganander riporta anche una notevole quantità di materiale folklorico finnico e lappone, che espone affidandosi all'autorità dei runot raccolti dalla viva voce del popolo. Tra divinità, spiriti guardiani ed esseri  soprannaturali, tra riti sciamanici e celebrazioni sincretiche, spiccano le tradizioni sui possenti Kalewan pojat, i "figli di Kalewa", tra i quali il lettore riconoscerà i principali eroi kalevaliani – Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen, la signora di Pohjola, il malevolo Soini (Kullervo) – le cui fisionomie, non ancora addomesticate dalla penna di Lönnrot, si affacciano qui con tratti sovrumani e terrifici.
Con l’attenzione del naturalista e con l’entusiasmo del pioniere, Christfrid Ganander si sforza di far luce sul materiale mitico-leggendario della più remota periferia d’Europa, con analisi a volte ingenue, a volte sorprendenti, aprendo la strada alla successiva stagione del risveglio nazional-romantico finlandese.

This article examines the diverse and at times hard-to-discern relationship between the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and Finnish popular music. The Kalevala, existing in a number of variations already in the nineteenth century, can be considered part of a long-term process of storytelling by singing. The printed epic is only one phase in this tradition. From this point of view, Finnish culture retains its Kalevalaic singing tradition, which has simply received a new range of features over time. We identify traces of the Kalevala in Finnish popular music, from progressive rock to parody performances, to esoteric experimentation, and to the sounds of the electric kantele, the Finnish zither. The Kalevala appears to hold a special place in Finnish heavy metal culture, which ¬– among its repertoire of mythologies – draws on the myths involved in nation building and in the emergence of Finnishness. Finnish popular music, just like the Kalevala tradition, was born in the riptide of influences from East and West. All in all, this singing tradition has played a part in producing the self-image of the Finns and, in some cases, also the image to the outside world.

J. R. R. Tolkien invests the acts of creation in Middle-Earth with consistent philosophical principles. In deriving these philosophical principles, Tolkien drew from other mythologies he admired—one of which is the Kalevala. Though scholars typically acknowledge Tolkien’s Finnish influence in the form of surface parallels between the Kalevala and plotlines from his legendarium, I argue the Finnish epic poem contributes creative ethics in the form of mythic oppositions that inform several instances of making in Middle-Earth. Using the mythic oppositions of harmony vs. dissonance, antiquity vs. modernity, and remembrance vs. creation, this study examines the ways in which Tolkien synthesizes these motifs to offer the reader an evaluative method applicable to the acts of creation in his oeuvre. Understanding the philosophical values underlying each mythic opposition, the reader will gain an evaluative tool by which to judge between legitimate and illegitimate forms of creation
in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

This article focuses on the films Sampo and Rauta-Aika, the most in-depth audio-visual interpretations of the Kalevala, both born at cultural interfaces: Sampo as a joint Finnish-Soviet production where Finnish research on the Kalevala met the Russian cinematic fairytale tradition, and Rauta-Aika as a meeting ground of two different media, film and television, and drawing on the visual arts, music, and opera. The article analyzes how these two interpretations of audio-visual monuments came about and how contemporaries saw their relationship to the Kalevala. Both films also signified the drawing of a boundary between historical and mythological views of the
Kalevala.

Both re-interpretations sought to distance themselves from the more nationally isolated interpretations of the Kalevala tradition. In Sampo, this distantiation was visible at all levels from the production process to the film’s style. Rauta-Aika, on the other hand, aimed at a materialistic re-interpretation from a monetary
perspective. Despite their differences, Sampo and Rauta-Aika focus on the same problem, the interpretation of the epic through changing audiovisual narrative means. The filmmakers were also fascinated by the same theme: the Sampo, the wondrous Kalevalaic miracle machine.

The goal of the thesis is to provide new approaches for the interpretation of the elaborate Finnish and Karelian bear ceremonial’s songs, which were intensively collected in the 19th Century and in the early 20th Century. The study aims to furnish a better understanding of the meanings of the ceremonial taking in consideration the context of folk beliefs at the time. The chapters will cover all the ritual phases, adapting the classic Hallowell’s typology to the Finno-Karelian case. However, each chapter aims to provide some answers to the main research questions. Why did the bear hunt require such a complex ritualized reciprocity? How were the passages of borders between the village and the forest ritualized? How and why were the forest, its spirits and the bruin personalized? Why do many Bear Songs contain references to wedding songs? How did the Christian faith and the rich cattle holders’ beliefs communicate with the hunter’s rituals, forming a historically stratified tradition? The study reveals that the vernacular definitions of the bear’s personhood changed often in the ritual phases: it was the offspring of the forest spirits or a hunter’s relative; a bride or a groom; a boy or a respected elder. On a general level, the bear had a shifting double identity: it was strictly bounded to the family of the forest spirits, but at the same time the hunter emphasized its human features to make the ritual communication easier and to transform the bruin into the guest of honor of the village feast, in which the bear meat was consumed. The hunter’s self could also change in the ritual: in the songs, he presented himself as a mighty man protected by mythic iron belts and shirts; as a handsome and mimetic seducer of female forest spirits, or as a humble orphan who needed their guidance. During the feast, the roles of the women toward the bear also varied: the mistress warmly welcomed the bruin as a guest or groom, but the women were also guided to protect the cattle. The landscapes acquired mythic features and they could be presented as welcoming or dangerous. These apparently kaleidoscopic changes followed a precise ritual logic: they were elaborate rhetorical devices to make the 'guests' – the bruin and the forest spirits – behave or react in certain ways in different ritual phases and to influence their perception of the hunters’ actions.

This paper was originally written not long after my dissertation, although it was published in 2014. It is centrally related to work I had done on Elias Lönnrot's Kalevala and situates Lönnrot's reinvention of oral epic poems as the most recent stage in the long history of transformations of Finno-Karelian mythology. I must admit, however, that it suffers in the penultimate section: I foolishly tried to summarize the whole of my doctoral dissertation findings with an outline of its argument in a few pages. In retrospect, I see that they turned out more confusing than convincing. Other parts of the article may, however, hold some value and interest.

This monograph examines the way two sets of wide-spread European folktales became incorporated into the storytelling traditions of Europeans. The stories themselves are compared and treated as reservoirs of orally transmitted popular beliefs and traditions that are no longer readily accessible to a modern audience. It is shown that the tales themselves have acted as vehicles for transmitting an earlier animist worldview from one generation to the next, albeit with modifications. When viewed in the longue durée, certain repetitive elements found in the tales reveal their ethnographic value and allow us to reconstruct, always tentatively, the animist ontological framing that contributed to their creation. After carefully exploring the interpretive framework that characterized the tales in times past, a framework shared by storytellers and their audiences alike, what comes into focus is a worldview unfamiliar to most Europeans, but well known to Native Americans and Indigenous groups where bear ceremonialism has been or still is practiced and whose traditional narratives incorporate the belief that bears were ancestors and therefore kin.
The comparative analysis of the European tales serves as an introduction to a larger question, namely, whether traditions associated with the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela (the Way of St. James) have a pre-Christian origin and more specifically, whether the choice of this specific geographic location for the “discovery” of the remains of St. James was motivated by the geomorphological characteristics of the nearby mountain peak called Pico Sacro and the legends that had grown up around it. This approach includes the possibility that the mountain was already the focal point of a pre-Christian pilgrimage tradition. Using the results obtained from analyzing the recurring motifs found in the two sets of folktales, what is suggested is that the ecclesiastic authorities who came up the story about the miraculous discovery of the Saint’s remains eight hundred years after he was allegedly buried, may have been aware that people were already regularly visiting Pico Sacro and that this site was already the subject of veneration and enveloped in a form of sacrality. In this scenario, the founders of the alleged discovery of the relics of St. James may have realized that if they could come up with the right story, they could overlay it on an already existing pilgrimage tradition. In that way they would be able to co-opt the already existing practices and profit from them in a myriad of ways. The process of superimposing a Christian narrative on the pagan practices and beliefs would be facilitated by inventing a story, based on the discovery of the tomb of one of Christ’s own disciples.
In the folktales discussed here there is a motif that surfaces over and over, namely, a journey to a location referred to as Glass Mountain or Crystal Mountain. Furthermore, folkloric references to this steep mountain are widespread in Europe. It is directly linked the belief that upon death one’s soul must successfully scale the peak to be able to enter Paradise. And in some cases, it was customary for the dead to be buried along with the claws of a bear, in the belief that the bear claws would aid the soul to climb that steep mountain. That motif will be analyzed and shown to have a real-world counterpart.

Many world traditions cast medicine women as the greatest healers, so powerful that they are even capable of bringing the dead back to life. This article looks at narratives about Isis of  Egypt; Pa Sini Jobu of Mali; Medea of Colchis; Ilmatar of Finland; the Manchu epic of Nishan Shaman; Bari Gongju of Korea; Lakota medicin woman Lucille Kills Enemy; Yeshe Tsogyal of Tibet; Inanna of Sumer; the Cumaean Sibyl of Italy; and Teresa Urrea of Mexico. Themes include underworld descents, soul flight and soul retrievals, infusions of lifeforce from wings or cauldrons, and a couple instances of calling up the dead. (BTW I do know how to spell "retrieve", as you'll see in the article itself; error in title is an artifact of rushed upload.)

Рахно К.Ю. Арфа Сырдона: западноевропейские параллели //  Коста и мировой историко-культурный процесс. Сборник материалов Международной конференции,  посвященной 155-летию со дня рождения  К.Л. Хетагурова. – Владикавказ: ИПЦ СОИГСИ ВНЦ РАН и РСО-А, 2014. – С. 268–292.

Keywords: Dream, music, modern music, Finnish composers, Finnish poetry, Kalevala, Jean Sibelius, Kaija Saariaho, Tapio Tuomela, Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Elias Lönnrot, Finland, Sámi, Nordic cultures.

Based on a presentation given at the international symposium of the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg ‘Europäische Traum-kulturen’ (University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, 24–25 May 2019): ‘A Gateway to Secret Existences. Dream, Body and Soul in Kaija Saariaho’s Music,’ hosted by Dr Mauro Fosco Bertola.

The thurs (O.N. þurs) is an archetypal monster appearing throughout the literature of medieval Northern Europe. The enduring popularity of this archetype is evidenced by the release of at least three Hollywood movies in the last fifteen years based on Beowulf. But are we only recycling old thurs legends, or is the archetype still useful for creating new stories? One of the most popular monsters of recent years is the title character of the DreamWorks Animation film Shrek (2001), as well as the protagonist of the William Steig book, Shrek! (1990), upon which the film is based. Is Shrek a twenty-first century thurs? Does Shrek have anything in common with historical thurses? And if so, why does the archetype endure?

A study of shields and their use as both defensive weapons and grave goods in Late Iron Age, rather in the Viking Age and Crusading Period in the geographical area of Modern Finland. The focus is both on archaeology and textual sources, using ancient Finnish poetry, as well as Scandinavian sagas as comparative evidence.

M. A. Castrén 1853: Föreläsningar i finsk mytologi. Helsingfors: Finska Litteratur-Sällskapet.

Matthias Alexander Castrénin (1813-1852) Luentoja suomalaisesta mytologiasta on avainteos suomalaisen mytologian tutkimuksen historiassa. Teos ilmestyy nyt ensimmäisen kerran suomeksi käännettynä.

M. A. Castrén tunnetaan siperialaisten kansojen parissa työskennelleenä kielitieteilijänä ja tutkimusmatkailijana, mutta hän oli erityisen kiinnostunut suomalaisuudesta. Luentoja suomalaisesta mytologiasta pohjautuu vahvasti Castrénin omiin kenttätyökokemuksiin.

Castrénin mytologialuennot ovat tärkeä osa suomalaisen uskontotieteen, kielitieteen ja etnologian historiaa. Yleistajuinen ja elävästi kirjoitettu teos avaa kiinnostavan näkökulman mytologiantutkimuksen pioneerivaiheisiin, ja se soveltuu sekä tutkijoiden että muiden aiheesta kiinnostuneiden käyttöön.

Finskan syventävien oppimistehtävässä tarkastelen Kalevalan kieltä, Väinämöistä antisankarina ja Kalevalan naisia, Lönnrotin aikaa. Lönnrotin aika Elias Lönnrot (1802-1883) oli köyhä, opinhaluinen nuorukainen, jonka intohimona oli kansanrunous. Hän toimi lääkärinä rahoittaakseen intohimonsa, kansanrunouden keräämisen.

This paper deals with Finnish lexical loans in modern English relating them to external history and cultural history of Finland. Chronologically the study starts all the way back in the (prehistoric) Old English period and moves on from Beowulf in Finna land to King Alfred’s Cwenas, from Æthelred II’s coins in Finland to the first baroque descriptions of Finland by merchants and travellers, from the Diet of Porvoo to the publication of the Kalevala, from Porthan, Lönnrot and Castrén to Schauman and Bobrikov, Mannerheim and Molotov, with language history documenting this procession in its own peculiar ways. The data for the study come from the Oxford English Dictionary and other lexicographical sources as well as historical and present-day corpora.

Timofeeva, Olga (2013) "The Wor(l)ds of Kalevala: Finnish Lexical Loans in Modern English," in Ex Philologia Lux: Essays in Honour of Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, ed. by Jukka Tyrkkö, Olga Timofeeva, and Maria Salenius, 159-185. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique XC. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

Original article in English (2014) published in the bilingual anthology Kalevala: Epica, Magia, Arte e Musica / Kalevala: Epic, Magic, Art and Music (ed. by Piludu and Frog, 2014, VociFuoriscena-Viterbo). Proceeding of the bilingual scientific seminar "Kalevala: Epica, Magia, Arte e Musica / Kalevala: Epic, Magic, Art and Music" (2012, Bottenicco di Moimacco & Cividale del Friuli, Udine) organized by Kalevalaseura (Kalevala Society), Associazione Sergio Gaggia and many other Finnish and Italian institution to celebrate the centenary of Kalevalaseura.

The article “Translation as Language” is divided into two parts. In the first I discuss the circumstances why, generally speaking, translation fails; why it succeeds; and what I mean by the premise embedded in the title. In the second, I analyze the translational flow between the Finnish poets Eino Leino and Elmer Diktonius (from Finnish into Swedish); an oral section collected from Väinö Linna's Tuntematon Sotilas and its translation from a Finnish dialect into a Finland-Swedish dialect by N-B Stormbom and Sven-Olof Högnäs; and finally two translations of 'Runo' 32, lines 251-272 in Kalevala, the first by Lars and Mats Huldén (Swedish) and the second by Eino Friberg (English). I discuss aspects of asymmetrical translation which may be the consequences of writer idolatry (the genius and the drunkard) or obsession with illusive and fundamentalist concepts such as the dichotomy of source and target, and the romances of 'faithfulness' and the 'origin.' Translations that maintain an interaction between the voices, that respect their individual Otherness, share, in metaphorical terms, a common language. In my analysis I define features that I call 'similarity in Otherness,' translation as language, in Leino--Diktonius, Linna--Stormbom/Högnäs, and Kalevala--Huldén/Friberg.

The aim of this article is to show how the Finnish language and especially the epic poetry of Kalevala formed and inspired J.R.R. Tolkien in the shaping of Middle-earth. The article explores the background of Elias Lönnrot and his compilation, and compares it to the way Tolkien’s interrelated and independent stories grew and took form in what posthumously was published in a series of edited collections by his son Christopher. Reading The Lord of the Rings makes it obvious that it’s part of a bigger collection of stories, unfinished tales that somehow connects with real history, legend and myth. In 2007 Christopher Tolkien published The Children of Húrin, an edited, long version of the tale of Túrin Turambar, a hero bearing close resemblances to the character Kullervo in Kalevala. This is but the tip of the iceberg, and we know from Tolkien’s fictive Elven language Quenya that it is modelled directly on Finnish, which is also true of lot of other names in his works. In his idea of “Sub-creation” he could combine elements from myth, legend, history and folklore with his fictive world, and make it seem like a primarily world. This article shows how close Elias Lönnrot and J.R.R. Tolkien where in their idea of creating what is known as “National Literature”.

There is a growing sense among scholars working in cognitive literary studies that their assumptions and methodologies increasingly align them with another paradigmatically interdisciplinary field: comparative literature. This introduction to the special issue on cognitive approaches to comparative literature explores points of alignment between the two fields, outlining possible cognitivist interventions into debates that have been animating comparative literature, such as those concerning “universals,” politics of translatability (especially in the context of world literature), and practices of thinking across the boundaries of media. It discusses both fields’ indebtedness to cultural studies, as well as cognitive literary theorists’ commitment to historicizing and their sustained focus on the embodied social mind.

Nuova versione riveduta e corretta dell'articolo pubblicato nel 2014 (versione bilingue) e 2015 (versione italiana). La nuova versione del 2021 è pressoché identica nei contenuti, ma ci sono delle piccole variazioni, per esempio alcune correzioni e nuove note editoriali.

This paper explores the use of theonyms as personal names in medieval and post-medieval Finland and Karelia. It examines two groups of theonyms (best known today as 'heroes' of the epic Kalevala) in uses for living people in pre-modern Finland and Karelia: Ilmarinen, Väinämöinen, and Joukahainen, and Lemminkäinen, Kaukomieli/Kaukomoinen, and Ahti. The long-term continuity of the naming practice is discussed in terms local ideologies competing with the Church-authorized stance toward vernacular gods as "pagan". Naming practices exhibit marked variation along and east/west divide, with 16th–17th century evidence of theonyms as personal epithets in Savo and Karelia and 19th-century evidence of ritual specialists being called the 'god' of their village in the west. The word jumala 'god' is shown, however, to have referred to a category of agency rather than 'divinity' in the modern sense, and its usage for living ritual specialist is found across these language areas.

Artikkeli erittelee erilaisia diskursseja, joissa Kalevalaa ja kansanperinnettä käsiteltiin neuvostokarjalaisessa suomenkielisessä lehdistössä vuosina 1928–1958. Aineisto koostuu etupäässä kirjallisuus- ja sanomalehdistöstä. Aineistossa tunnistettavassa Kalevala perinnetekstinä -diskurssissa Kalevalaa käsitellään perinnettä edustavana objektina, johon on vaadittavissa jonkinlainen oikeus. Tästä omistusoikeudesta puhutaan omistajuusdiskursseissa. Niissä omistajuutta oikeutetaan mm. sen pohjana olevan runouden alkuperäisten esittäjien kansallisuuden perusteella, joka määriteltiin eri aikoina eri tavoin. Menneisyysdiskurssissa puolestaan käsitellään mm. Kalevalassa tavattavaa kansanperinnettä teksteinä menneisyydestä, mikä puolestaan mahdollistaa Kalevalan edustaman kansanrunouden retorisen käytön yhtäältä analogiana, toisaalta kontrastina neuvosto-olojen myönteisessä arvottamisessa nykyaikaa korostavassa moderniteettipuheessa. Artikkelissa nostetaan myös esiin, kuinka diskurssit limittyvät keskenään. Diskurssien todetaan olevan reaktioita Suomessa ja muualla porvarillisessa lännessä vallitsevaan keskusteluun ja toisekseen kumpuavan suurelta osin Neuvostoliiton ja Neuvosto-Karjalan historiallisista ja poliittisista vaiheista ja kehityskuluista.

“Kalevala – the marvellous product of the people's creative work”
Discourses surrounding folklore and the Kalevala in Soviet Karelian press 1928–1958

The article discusses different types of discourses connected to folklore and the Kalevala in the Finnish language press in Soviet Karelia between the years 1928–1958. The discourses are labelled “Kalevala as a tradition-text”, “Ownerships of Kalevala as a tradition-text”, and “Tradition as a text from the past”, with certain types of subdiscourses. These interlaced discourses and the publications that embody them seem, on the one hand, to be reactions to discussions on the Kalevalathat were taking place in Finland and elsewhere in the West. On the other hand, they seem to spring from the historical and political circumstances of Soviet Karelia as a part of the Soviet Union.

Il presente scritto si propone come obiettivo l’analisi e la traduzione di alcuni testi poetici di Aleksis Kivi, padre del romanzo finlandese. Nel primo capitolo viene descritto brevemente il contesto letterario e vengono presentati alcuni autori di spicco dell’epoca. In seguito è invece analizzata la produzione poetica di Kivi, accompagnata da un commento personale teso a illustrare le principali tematiche e le particolarità stilistiche dell’autore. Particolare attenzione viene prestata alle interazioni tra gli elementi di innovazione delle poesie d’amore e le componenti tradizionali che rimandano alla mitologia ugro-finnica. Questa compresenza dà vita a una poetica profondamente originale e rinnovata, in contrasto con gli scritti dei contemporanei.

This paper introduces the god/hero Lemminkäinen as developed in Elias Lönnrot's Kalevala in comparison with the oral traditions on which Kalevala is based, their variation and the history behind them. The historical perspectives are largely summarized from my dissertation Baldr and Lemminkäinen. Lönnrot's creation of the story surrounding Lemminkäinen in Kalevala is looked at as one more in a long history of transformations of this traditional narrative material that made it interesting and meaningful for a contemporary culture in which it was used.

The human capacity for oral communication is superbly well developed. While other animals produce meaningful sounds, most linguists agree that only human beings are possessed of true language, with its complex grammar. Moreover, only humans have the ability to tell stories, with their contrary-to-fact capabilities. This fact has momentous implications for the complexity of the oral communications that humans can produce, not just in conversation but also in a wide array of artistic genres.

It is likewise true that only human beings enjoy the benefits of literacy; that is, only our species has developed technologies that enable the sounds of speech to be made visible and construed through one or another type of graphemic representation. Although orality is as innate to the human condition as is breathing or walking, competence in literacy requires training, and it has traditionally been the accomplishment of an educated elite. Correspondingly, the transmutation of oral art forms into writing--that is, the production of what can be called oral literature--is a relatively rare and special phenomenon compared with the ease with which people cultivate those art forms themselves.

All the same, a large amount of the world's recorded literature appears to be closely related to oral art forms, deriving directly from them in some instances. Literature of this kind is an oral/literary hybrid. It can fittingly be called 'literature of the third domain', for while it differs in character from literature produced in writing by well educated people, the fact that it exists in writing distinguishes it from oral communication, even though it may closely resemble oral art forms in its stylized patterning.

Problems relating to the representation of oral art forms via other media are endemic to the category of oral literature and practically define it as such.

This paper focuses on the similarities between the Finnish epic the Kalevala, and J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion. It compares the music at the beginning of the world's creation from the Silmarillion with the music made by Väinämöinen in the epic's 41st poem. It also compares elements from the story of Beren and Luthien with several similar instances from the Kalevala.

This article is about the notions of history and language of a Finnish artist and writer Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa (née Sigurd Asp, 1870–1946), and the Swedish writer August Strindberg (1849–1912), and their interaction. Wettenhovi-Aspa and Strindberg knew each other from Paris, where both lived in the 1890s. In the 1910s they both published books and articles on their respective linguistic views. According to both of them, the languages of mankind had a common origin. Strindberg had a more traditional view, as according to him Hebrew was the original language of the world. For Wettenhovi-Aspa, the original language was Finnish. These ideas may seem eccentric, but I argue that they both reflect the intellectual currents of their own time and are connected with a long tradition as well.

As diferentes formas de imaginação da organização identitária entre os humanos resultou – e resulta – em identificações variadas e muitas vezes interligadas entre si. Entretanto, os habitantes da Europa oitocentista viram o surgimento de uma forma muito singular de identidade, a “nação”. Esta que, obrigatoriamente, depende da apropriação e/ou obliteração – em vários níveis – de formas identitárias estranhas àquela, com o objetivo, sempre consciente, de criar uma entidade política de e para um grupo étnico específico através de um processo político chamado nacionalismo. O objetivo desta pesquisa é analisar um destes vários projetos nacionalistas, o finlandês. Mais especificamente a produção de uma obra literária que comportasse em uma plataforma escrita elementos como um passado imemorial, heroico e, especialmente, vernacular para um grupo étnico específico – homogêneo na visão dos indivíduos proponentes do projeto. Esta intenção materializou-se pela primeira vez em 1835 quando Elias Lönnrot publicou no Grão-Ducado da Finlândia sua primeira versão da obra Kalevala. Que aqui será analisada levando em consideração os mecanismos intelectuais e políticos que regiam os atores envolvidos com a criação da obra e seu conteúdo como material possuidor de uma narrativa específica e escolhida para um propósito. Que serviu de base para a criação de uma identidade nacional que eliminasse os elementos culturais que não pertencessem ao grupo étnico-histórico defendido pelos atores sócio-políticos que se denominavam – e denominavam outros – como finlandeses. Assim, podemos então, de maneira inicial, compreender os elementos culturais básicos que formaram o projeto nacionalista de uma elite intelectual nas primeiras décadas do Grão-Ducado da Finlândia.

In the Finnish short documentary Santra ja puhuvat puut (Santra and the Talking Trees) (2013), the director Miia Tervo travels to Russian Karelia in search of her roots in the cradle of Finno-Ugrian mythology and culture. She finds rune singer Santra Remsujeva and a sense of home that she has longed for. I suggest that Tervo uses filmmaking as a means to 'take root' by connecting with the mythical world of Karelia through a playful aesthetic that engages all the senses. The documentary weaves together the director/narrator's intimate voice-over, observational scenes, animations with traditional cultural motifs, old ethnographic material and archival footage in a process of 'cinematic worlding'. The cinematic rhythms and animated traces of the past create a sensory experience of Karelia – a slowly vanishing culture that Tervo revitalizes in an effort to find her place in the world.

When around the turn of the century (1900), it was said in international artistic circles in Europe that “the light came now from the North”, the North implied also Finland, although without doubt Norway was in this sense most North. In the nineties of the 19th century, Finnish artists rushed to Paris, the centre of the cultural world, and met with the other Scandinavians. As art strove to renew herself through the examples of so called unspoiled cultures, the Finns travelled back to their homeland to visit the province of Karelia (which for a big part was sited at the other side of the Finnish border in Russia). Here, they hoped to find traces of their Golden Age, which had produced the epic Kalevala, and which should help them in creating a renaissance of Finnish art. Finnish art and literature was relatively young. It was only in the course of the 19th century that a full artistic, literary life developed and notably in the 1880’s with the break-through of realism that it came fully to life and kept up with European art in general. Europe was thus very important for the artistic developments in Finland. Nevertheless, a strong movement of nationalism, which was closely related to the political developments Finland went through, was against “borrowing” from Europe. Finnish artists should build Finnish art on their own cultural heritage. Best recognisable as typical Finnish were, firstly, the stories of the epic Kalevala, and, secondly, the Finnish landscapes. This is, naturally, the Finnish perspective. For the artists in e.g. the Netherlands Finland in itself was already an exotic, meaning basically unknown, country. Information on the country had been scarce and was often based on foreign sources, mostly travellers, whose reports often contained many a doubtful fact. Finnish literature and art was terra incognita and until the 1890’s only Runeberg and the Kalevala were introduced to the Dutch reader (notably by De Gids). Around the turn of the century there is a shift in the attention in Holland for Finland. While the general interest in the North played its part here, the reason for this was undoubtedly in the first place the political storm in Finland, whose autonomy was threatened by Russia by the time. This attracted international attention and put Finland on the map. This political issue was relatively closely followed in the Dutch magazines of the day. As for the arts, the first translations of Finnish literature were published, but they were all translations of the same author, Juhani Aho, and – interestingly enough - a realist novel (in 1895) and a naturalist novel (in 1902) of his, i.e. ‘European’ Finnish literature so to speak. It was only 1913-14 that a neo-romantic ‘Finnish’ Finnish novel (Linnankoski’s Het lied van de vuurrode bloem) was introduced in the Netherlands, by Albert Verwey. In the same year a neo-romantic novel of Aho was published. In these books, the Dutch reader could finally meet the exotic Finland. With two other novels translated, Aho was until the mid 1920’s by far the best-represented Finnish author in the Netherlands, while Linnankoski’s novel was best sold and read. The Finnish-Swedish modernists like Södergran and Diktonius did apparently not enter the public eye in Holland. So, the contribution of Finland in bringing light to the Dutch arts seems to have been small and rather late as well and to have been in clear connection with the political developments of the day. Still, the independence of Finland (1917) and the subsequent Civil War (1918) did hardly leave any traces in the reception of Finnish art. The First World War and its consequences were much more important.

Originally this low-budget book was written to form part of a series of studies (Skrifter) from the Department of Finnish at the University of Copenhagen, aiming at strengthening the position of Finnish studies. It was complemented a few years later by an anthology of linguistic articles on Finnish and the Finno-Ugric languages, John Lind & Olli Nuutinen (eds.), Det finske sprogs rødder: artikler om finsk og den finsk-ugriske sprogfamilie (Finsk Afdelings skrifter 4, 1992)

This upload is prompted by the misguided decision a month ago (April 2016) by the Danish government to force the University to abolish a number of smaller language studies at the University, including Finnish. The rationale of the authorities being, it seems, that it suffices for Danes to understand and express themselves in English, even though our faith in our ability in this field is wildly exaggerated as demonstrated by the poor performance by our present prime minister at the COP 15 in Copenhagen 2009: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/video-uheldige-loekke-se-sagerne-gennem-aarene.

Basically the book is about the cultural and political history of the Finnish language in a broad sense with a natural emphasis on the ‘Language Strife’ (Kieliriita) from the mid-19th century up to the present day. This strife divided the politically active, culturally conscious and mainly Swedish speaking upper class in Finland, when a substantial number of this upper class, known as Fennomans, decided to abandon their Swedish mother tongue and adopt the language of the mainly Finnish speaking peasantry. This was a deliberate attempt to create a new uniform ‘nationality’ based on the Finnish language, which, it was thought, would serve to strengthen resistance against Russian influence after Finland in 1809 had been ceded by Sweden to Russia. Those who refused to abandon their Swedish mother tongue became known as Svecomans. From then on the language strife has been a dominant feature of Finnish history and culture, even though, for a short period towards the end of the 19th century, the strife abated when a section of the Fennomans (known as Young Finns) joint forces with the Svecomans in resisting forced russification. In this manner the Language Strife has had a major impact on the formation of modern Finland.

The ‘venska’ and ‘vinska’ of the title reflects these linguistic facts, 1) that the first of two initial consonants in Finnish rendition of foreign words is dropped, hence ‘svenska’ > ‘venska’; 2) the sound ‘f’ does not form part of Finnish phonology, hence ‘finska’>’vinska’. That was how these two words could still be pronounced in the Finnish speaking countryside at the beginning of the 20th century.

As a historian/slavicist the topic was strictly speaking outside my academic field. Against such a background it may not surprise that the Scandinavist W. Glyn Jones gave the book a short but devastatingly negative review in The Slavonic and East European Review (1990, p 531-32). After correctly stating that “this book traces the development of Finnish, as the subtitle suggests, from the language of the common people to the official language and the vehicle of culture”, Jones went on to claim, “The foreword couples this admirable intent with an attempt to counter Danish misinterpretations of the difficulties encountered by Finns in discussions with Nordic colleagues. According to the author, these are often thought to result from one of the following: ‘(1) a conscious protest against using the Swedish language; (2) Finnish schools being inferior to Danish schools; or (3) Finns being either stupid or simple.’ This seems to be a curious basis on which to write a scholarly study”. To me, however, the itemising, construed as a quote from the book, looks like a typical strawman fallacy, because nowhere in the book are there any references to Danish schools or school system nor is there any insinuation anywhere on my part that Finns should be “either stupid or simple”, if anything, quite the contrary.

For a book of this nature, written in one of the smaller languages about another of the smaller languages, it was surprisingly widely reviewed. Thus Jones’ American Scandinavist colleague James E. Cathey gave a very different evaluation of the book in Scandinavian Studies (63 № 3 pp. 404–6, 1991/ http://www.jstor.org/stable/40919323). The book “seeks to remedy that lack [interest in and knowledge of Finnish and Finland] with this thorough and very readable external history of Finnish. By “external history” I mean that we are here presented with a cultural and political account of the long struggle for emergence and consolidation of Finnish as a modern language and of its gradual predominance over Swedish in Finland. … The book presents largely the same story as that found in such books as Matti Klinge's Runebergs två fosterland (1983), William A. Wilson's Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland (1976) or, for the later period, Pekka Kalevi Hämäläinen's In Time of Storm: Revolution, Civil War, and the Ethnolinguistic Issue in Finland (1979). Lind's book does more than any one of these, however, and gives a very thorough and readable history (in Danish) of the long, sometimes bitter, but ultimately healing struggle for supremacy between Swedish and Finnish and for Finland”.

Soon after its publication the Norwegian linguist Trond Trosterud with expert knowledge of both Scandinavian and Finno-Ugric languages in the region gave a detailed review on the internet (http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/vinska.html): ‘God bok om finsk ytre språkhistorie’ (Good book about the external history of Finnish). While deploring from a linguistic point of view that only ten out of 250 pages are devoted to the development of the Finnish language. Trosterud observes that the book displays a strong tendency towards interpreting data, asking whys and applying broader perspectives, … drawing personal conclusions. Also Trosterud stresses that my unconventional background and distance – also geographical – to the problem allows for a more balanced approach and to see the problem in a wider Scandinavian perspective. Thus Trosterud, with reference to my quote from a little known text (1855) by the prominent Norwegian historian Peter Andreas Munch (1810-63), who doubted that Finns were fit to adopt a higher culture like the Indo-European, sees that as a sad forewarning of the handling fifty years later of the Finnish minority population in northern Norway by Norwegian authorities.

It was, of course, most interesting to see if and how the book was received in Finland. Here Henrik Stenius, historian and specialist in popular movements, in Historisk Tidskrift för Finland (‘Finskhetsrörelsens historia fortfarande oskriven’ 1992: 77(2), 283-295) considered the book in a review article together with a large anthology on the history of the Fennoman Movement that appeared the same year (Herää Suomi. Suomalaisuusliikkeen historia – Wake up Finland. The History of the Fennoman Movement [Herää Suomi, being a catchphrase of the mid-19th century]). Here Stenius devoted the last couple of pages to Mellem "venska" og "vinska", which, although its topic was explicitly the position of Finnish language in its entire history, according to Stenius, nevertheless offered the more multifaceted picture of the Fennoman Movement (har den mångsidigare och intressantare bilden av finskhetsrörelsen); Stenius also found that the book presented interesting points, based fx on an ability to penetrate the minds of the Finnish militaries of the young republic and the situation of the students in the independent Finland (I rask fart tar han upp den ena frågan efter den andra, beledsagade med intressanta poänger, som ofta bygger på inlevelseförmåga … i de finska militärernas psyke i den unga republiken, i studenternas situation i det självständiga Finland ...).

The first and largest review to appear was, however, also the most surprising. On February 1 1990, Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s main newspaper and by far largest newspaper in Scandinavia, both with regard to size and circulation, presented the publication of the book as a major event. Its appearance was signalled already on the front page of the News Section (Tanskalaistutkija arvioi uudestaan Suomen kieliriitoja), while in the Culture Section the linguist and expert on Finnish dialects Erkki Lyytikäinen on half a page over all six columns discussed the book under the title ‘The Language strife from hubris to reconciliation. A Danish scholar paints an uglier picture of the Fennoman movement compared to the Finnish view (Kieliriita uhosta sovintoon. Tanskalaistutkijan kuva fennomaniasta on rumempi kuin suomalaisten käsitys). Here Lyytikäinen critically discussed several points I made, but nevertheless found that the book despite differences in opinion was both ‘interesting, exiting, deserving all attention (… teos on mielenkiintoinen, jännittävä, kaiken huomion ansaitseva).

Since this upload was prompted by the decision to remove Finnish studies from the academic curriculum of Danish universities, it is worth quoting Lyytikäinen’s final paragraph. With reference to my acknowledgements in the preface, where I expressed my gratitude to the teachers of Finnish at the University, Olli Nuutinen and Tarja Soutkari, Lyytikäinen maintains, ‘both works as lectures in Finnish in Danish universities. The importance for Finnish culture of their work … is impossible to overestimate’ (… Heidän … työn merkitystä Suomen kulttuurille on mahdoton yliarvioida). This has now come to an end! A dire consequence of the removal of Finnish and a number of other language studies from the curricula of Danish universities may well be that Danish studies of linguistics on a sufficient scholarly level will die out. Certainly it will be impossible for a book like this to be written at a Danish university in the future.