In the Peace of Hamina, the treaty concluded in 1809, Finland was ceded to Russia having been a part of the Swedish Kingdom for the preceding six centuries. Alexander I granted Finland an autonomous status as a Grand Duchy of Russia and it was during this period that the Finnish nationalist movement grew. It was a movement connected to the general European trend towards national self-determination in the mid-nineteenth century.
Research undertaken into Finnish folklore by scholars such as von Becker, Lönnrot, Borenius and Kaarle Krohn, flourished as the Finnish nationalist movement grew. In fact, folklore was to play a significant role in the development of a national identity and in the process of nation-building. This was largely due to the publication of the Kalevala in 1835, Lönnrot's compilation of Finnish folk poetry which was heralded as the national epic. From 1888, folklore was represented at the University of Helsinki when the scholar, K.Krohn, was nominated its Docent, and a permanent chair was established in 1908. Folklore research, with its focus on Finnish folklore and Finnish culture, assumed great significance at a time when Finland was not yet a political state. The importance attached to 'cultural matters' had counterparts elsewhere, for example in Wales, where much attention, according to Morgan (1983:98), was paid to 'the recovery of the past and, to where the past was found wanting, to its invention', due to the fact that Wales was not a political state.
Before turning to Finnish folklore research and to Lönnrot's Kalevala, I want to point out one striking feature of folklore studies in general, which is that a large proportion of the folklore material collected consists of songs, yet the musical aspect of these traditions has been somewhat neglected. There were exceptions, of course: musicians like Bartok in Hungary, and folklorists or ethnomusicologists who collected specifically musical material - including Borenius, sometimes called the 'father of modern Finnish folklore research' or the 'father of ethnomusicology' in Finland, and Väisänen who collected music for the kantele (a traditional Finnish zither instrument). Furthermore, because the musical side has been overlooked, whilst most attention has been directed towards the examination of folk song texts, these songs have often been referred to as folk poetry. The distinction between what was recited, and what was sung, has not always been made clear. It should therefore be borne in mind that what is conventionally called folk poetry probably refers equally well to folk song. In Finland, the emphasis on the text may be partially explained in terms of the concern at the time to raise the status of the Finnish language.
There are important sources of information about Finnish folklore which precede nineteenth century scholarship and the Kalevala. These are, however, isolated examples and much of the nationalism which has been attributed to these earlier sources is by implication only. Mikael Agricola (c.1510-1557), bishop of Turku, mentioned Finnish gods, although his references were made only in connection with furthering the cause of Lutheranism. At the time when Sweden was a great power, one of the most notable writers to deal with Finnish folklore material was Daniel Juslenius (1676-1752), a professor at Turku University who later became the Bishop of Porvoo and then of the Skara diocese in Sweden. His writing is interesting since he was particularly concerned with the people of Finland and the Finnish language, and he was the first of the eighteenth century scholars to turn his attention to this area. Using the Bible as the basis for his arguments, he praised Finland, its people, their language, and their past. He placed the Finnish language on the same level as the 'holy, original languages', Hebrew and Greek, claiming that it was easy for Finns to learn these languages as they are related to their mother tongue. This attitude parallels that prevalent in other parts of Europe where Greek antiquity was often considered as the prototype for folklore research. Greece was conceived as the 'source of Europe' and as 'having originated European culture' (Herzfeld 1982:11).
The writing of Juslenius differed from Swedish patriotic tracts as his praise was directed not to the Swedish kingdom as a whole, of which Finland was a part, but specifically to Finland. He used folk song texts (folk poetry) as proof of the ancient Finnish civilization, believing, as did many others at that time, that epic song recounted actual historical events. The influence of Juslenius on Finnish folklore research is noteworthy. With his patriotic sentiments, he drew the folklore collectors and scholars who followed in his footsteps in a patriotic direction.
Another important, though later scholar of the eighteenth century, was Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739-1804). With views similar to those of Juslenius, Porthan followed the ideas of the romantic movement awakening in Europe, which looked to 'a distant, idealised ancient time, towards a mythical past which was considered more noble than the present' (Hautala 1968:17). These ideas were leading to the search, the collection, and the publication of folklore material throughout Europe. It was understood that folklore material contained messages from a 'golden age' (ibid). This ideological background may furnish a further reason as to why folklore research centred around the study of text. Texts could be interpreted as giving indications of the historical past, in contrast to the music, the melodic line of the song itself, which had no narrative content and could not be interpreted in this way. As Lewis suggests, claiming an ancient history or 'inventing' history has been a way of either legitimizing or undermining authority, in asserting 'new claims and new arguments, sometimes even a new identity' (Lewis 1975:64). It was common in European nationalist history, where the 'nation' was defined by 'language, culture, and origin' (ibid).
Although Porthan was a contemporary of the German philosopher, J. G. Herder (1744-1803), who wrote about folk song and poetry as the property of all the people, debate at the University of Turku, where Porthan taught, centred more around Macpherson's Poems of Ossian. Ossian was reputedly a third-century Gaelic bard whose works were 'translated' by Macpherson in the 1760s. These poems were popular all over Europe and were translated into several European languages. The poems inspired other artistic endeavours: Mendelssohn composed the overture 'Fingal's Cave' after visiting the Hebrides, Herder collected folk songs in Riga and the German poet, Goethe, collected material in Alsace. Ossian was described by Blair, a friend of Macpherson, as the Celtic Homer (Burke 1978:10).
Porthan wrote the first detailed account of Finnish poetry, De Poesi Fennica (1778), which deals with Finnish poetry in general, and with Finnish folk poetry. His views were developed by his students and influenced research well into the nineteenth century. One of his students, Eric Lencqvist (1719-1808), anticipated later comparative research which took into account the migration of tradition. In De Poesi Fennica, Porthan had begun comparative work, looking at variants of the same song. This approach laid the foundations for future research, most significantly for Lönnrot's work in the compilation of the Kalevala.
Nationalistic ideas emanating from Germany spread around university circles in Finland. Porthan set up a literary association, known as the 'Aurora Society' whose patriotic ideals were expressed in terms of the promotion of the Finnish language and culture. It was active in Turku from 1770 to 1779. Although interested in Finnish history and folklore, Porthan did not write about Finland as a 'nation'. When he died in 1804 Finland was still no more than a province of the Swedish kingdom, 'his nation was largely dormant, unaware of itself' (Honko 1979:141). It was six decades after his death, in 1864, when Porthan was identified as a national hero and his statue was unveiled in Turku.
Continuing after Porthan, in the early nineteenth century, Herder's ideas and the Poems of Ossian still influenced scholars at Turku University. This period is referred to as 'Turku Romanticism', and its main proponents were A.I Arwidsson (1791-1858), A.J Sjögren (1794-1855), A. Poppius (1793-1866), and C.A Gottlund (1796-1875). Arwidsson and Gottlund collected and published folklore material. As early as 1817, Gottlund conceived the possibility of combining folk poems into 'a systematic entity, be it an epic, a drama or whatever' (quoted by Asplund and Lipponen 1985:10).
Rheinhold von Becker (1788-1858), a contemporary of the Turku Romanticists, though not closely associated with that circle, can be seen, according to Hautala (1968), as the link between them and their predecessor, Porthan. He established a paper, Turun Viikkosanomat (Turku Weekly News), in 1820, and in the paper, he published an article about Väinämöinen, a mythical character who appeared, and still appears in numerous folk song texts. His influence on his student, Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), was substantial, for it was under von Becker's guidance that Lönnrot became familiar with the work of Porthan and Lencqvist. For Lönnrot's first written research work, published as an academic thesis under the title De Väinämöine, priscorum Fennorum numine (1827), von Becker gave Lönnrot the poems about Väinämöinen which he had used himself for the article in Turun Viikkosanomat , and some additional poems which had not been used for that article. Although the aim of the thesis was simply to collate and order information on a particular subject, the thesis foreshadowed Lönnrot's later work. As Hautala explains:
'While composing it, Lönnrot had to get thoroughly acquainted with everything written about Finnish folk poetry and with all publications of poems, and he had to link those songs which followed the same hero, into one continuous whole. This kind of procedure was in its way the first step towards the Kalevala'.
[Hautala 1968:22]
So far, I have drawn attention to some aspects of the history of Finnish folklore research which have a bearing upon Lönnrot's work. This procedure is commonly adopted in writings which examine the history of Finnish folklore research, in order to discover the principal reasons why Lönnrot became the 'greatest figure in the Finnish Romantic movement' (Hautala 1968:21). Nineteenth century folklore research generally focused on his work, the Kalevala , which so completely fulfilled romantic nationalist aspirations and which, down to the present day, is still described as the national epic of Finland.
Lönnrot's studies coincided with a time of change in Finnish intellectual life. The University of Turku was destroyed by fire in 1827, and its members moved to the University of Helsinki, newly established under the auspices of Alexander I. Lönnrot, who had begun his studies in Turku (1822) working with folklore material and writing his dissertation about Väinämöinen, embarked on a study of medicine at the new university. There was some continuity in his work however, for he wrote his dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Medicine on the topic of Finnish folk medicine. Shortly after the University of Helsinki had been opened, the Lauantai Seura (Saturday Society) was formed. From this informal circle, there arose the idea of establishing a society whose object would be to create a national culture, and in 1831, the Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura (Finnish Literary Society) was founded. The aim of the SKS was to collect, publish, and study folklore material, and one of its first decisions was to award a grant of one hundred rubles to Lönnrot, enabling him to travel to Russian Karelia and collect folk poetry.
Lönnrot made several field trips, mainly around the Finnish speaking area and on both sides of the present-day Finnish-Russian border in Karelia. He continued to make field trips and to collect folklore material even after beginning his practice as a district doctor in Kajaani (1833). Plans to construct a literary epic from this material, for the nation, were being conceived by Lönnrot by 1834. In a letter, he wrote that:
'a desire to organise and unify them [folk poems] awoke in me, to extract from Finnish mythology something corresponding to the Icelandic Edda ...I do not know, however, whether the work of linking the mythological poems into one whole should be attempted by one man, because our descendants will possibly esteem such a collection as highly as the Gothic nations regard Edda or the Greeks and Romans, if not Homer, at least Hesiod.'
[Hautala 1968:24]
During this year, Lönnrot worked on Runokokous Väinämöisestä (The Väinämöinen poems), also known as the 'proto-Kalevala'. His fifth field trip was made to North East Karelia, where he met one of the most renowned singers, Arhippa Perttunen, in Latvajärvi. Perttunen was sixty -five years old at the time when Lönnrot met him. He had learnt his songs as a child from his father and had an extensive repertoire. In two days, Perttunen sang over four thousand lines of poetry to Lönnrot and his repertoire contained nearly all of the narrative elements which were to make up the future Kalevala. As a result of this meeting, Lönnrot obtained many additions to his material. Runokokous Väinämöisestä was left unpublished while Lönnrot worked with the new material, and in 1835 the SKS published what is known as the 'old' Kalevala, consisting of 12,078 lines arranged into thirty two poems.
The publication of the Kalevala had an important effect on the process of nation-building. With its appearance, the status of the Finnish language and of Finnish literature was immediately elevated. A major work, demonstrating the richness of the Finnish language, had appeared and it gave to Finnish literature 'what the period held as most valuable in literature: an ancient epic, a national epic' (Hautala 1968:25). Still today, the poems which constitute the Kalevala are believed to have had their origins in the distant past. These poems are said to be 'ancient', and are differentiated on stylistic grounds from other song traditions - such as ballads and rhyming songs - which appeared later in Finland and co -existed alongside the ancient songs. Such a distinction is maintained partly through examination of the content of the songs, and partly on the basis of the metric structure of the poems, a trochaic tetrameter now known as the 'Kalevala metre'.
Such was the positive response to the Kalevala that Lönnrot expanded the work using his further collections and material made available to him by other collectors, notably D.E.D Europaeus (1820-1884) who collected material in Ingria. A new edition, known as the 'new' Kalevala, was published in 1849 and contained 22,795 lines arranged into fifty poems. This epic provided the foundation for the presentation of a 'national' art. Characters from the Kalevala were painted by artists such as Akseli Gallen-Kallela and titles of musical works were also based on these characters (eg. Sibelius's Kullervo Symphony , Luonnatar, and Pohjola's Daughter).
The Kalevala profoundly influenced the development of folklore research. This research focused on Lönnrot's work in one way or another for over a century, beginning with the study of the Kalevala itself. In the 1870s, Julius Krohn turned his attention to the original poems from which the Kalevala had been written, but it was thought that the collections still being made would provide additional material for the Kalevala, thus enabling all the separate parts of what had once been a whole epic to be reassembled. Lönnrot was regarded by his contemporaries, and indeed even until the mid-twentieth century, as the writer who had begun to piece together the remaining fragments of an ancient, forgotten, epic poem. The fact that the Kalevala had been constructed into a unified whole from disparate elements was later acknowledged, particularly since Lönnrot had been quite clear about his methodology.
Following Bakhtin's (1973) notion of monologue containing the voices of many people, and the construction of Dostoevsky's novels as polyphonic, there is a duality in the Kalevala between the work as the literary expression of Lönnrot as an individual writer, and the work as a compilation of the words of many singers. Bakhtin writes about Dostoevsky's novels:
'Where others saw a single thought, he was able to feel out and find two thoughts, a divarication; where others saw a single quality he revealed in that quality the presence of another, contradictory one. All that was simple became in his world complex and multistructural. In every voice he could hear two contending voices, in every expression a split and a willingness to immediately turn into another, contradictory expression. In every gesture he perceived confidence and lack of confidence simultaneously; he perceived the profound ambiguity of every phenomenon. But all of these contradictions and divarications did not become dialectical, they were not developed temporally, in an evolutionary series, but rather were manifested as standing side by side or opposed face to face in a single plane, either consonant but not merging, or irreconcilably contradictory; either the eternal harmony of unmerged voices, or a ceaseless, hopeless argument. Dostoevsky's vision was locked up in that instant in which this diversity manifests itself.'
[Bakhtin 1973:25]
In the 'New' Kalevala, Lönnrot departed from the original poems in his collection much more extensively than he had done previously. He assumed the role of a singer himself, explaining this procedure in the periodical Litteraturblad (1849):
'I considered that I had the same right that, I am convinced, most singers take upon themselves, namely to organise the poems according to how best they fit together...in other words I regard myself as being as good a singer as they are.'
[Asplund and Lipponen 1985:27]
Lönnrot also made this explicit in the opening lines of the Kalevala, thus inextricably linking the work to himself:
'I am driven by my longing,
And my understanding urges
That I should commence my singing,
And begin my recitation.
I will sing the people's legends,
And the ballads of the nation.
To my mouth the words are flowing,
And the words are gently falling,
Quickly as my tongue can shape them,
And between my teeth emerging.'
[Kalevala poem 1 lines 1-10, translation by Kirby ]
Lönnrot was one of the few collectors who mentioned the singers from whom he collected songs, but these are passing references, and only the material from about twenty singers can be identified in the first edition of the Kalevala. Collectors of folklore material generally did not mention the singers. They did not seem to be interested in their lives or in the singers as people, but only in the songs they sang which were collected as products. There is a contradiction here in the perception of folk song, on one hand as the musical expression of people, of communities, and ultimately of the nation, and on the other hand as a product which can be collected and used in a quite different context. In addition to the material collected by Lönnrot from the singer Perttunen, two more examples of material contributed by folk singers can be noted here. In June 1833, Lönnrot heard the singer Ontrei Malinen in Vuonninen (Russian Karelia). One of his songs was the substantial 366 lines about the forging of the sampo which Lönnrot heard for the first time, and which was to become one of his central themes. The sampo is a mythical, magical object which has been variously interpreted as a symbol of, for example, the sun, a shaman's drum or even of culture. Not many female singers are mentioned, but Lönnrot does write about a widow called Matro in the village of Uhtua (renamed Kalevala by Soviet authorities), who performed lyric poetry and narrative poetry about women and family relationships. One of her songs, which Lönnrot heard for the first time from her, was 'The Hanged Maid', about a girl called Anni, who commits suicide when approached by an unknown man. This song provided the basis for Lönnrot's poem about Aino. He changed the name Anni to Aino, the girl who is unwillingly betrothed to the hero, Väinämöinen, and who commits suicide by escaping into water, only to be turned into a fish.
It is clear from the above examples how Lönnrot's Kalevala was compiled from the repertoire of many singers, yet it was the work of Lönnrot as an individual which was used to build a national identity. In a sense, the individual's monologue was taken into the public sphere. The other multiple voices which are contained therein remained private, hidden from view, although the fact that they are contained in the work was one of the reasons why it was seen as representing the people. The transfer from multiple voices to monologue, from the 'folk' to the 'intellectual', from the private to the public sphere, was effected by a change in idiom. The spoken voices of the rural people became the written record of an educated man which could be promoted for political purposes.
The ways in which an individual's work incorporates that of many other people can also be seen on a broader scale, in connection with the paradox that a work which inspired strong nationalist sentiments, and which seemed to embody the spirit of a particular people, was nevertheless compiled as a result of ideas and trends prevalent among a cosmopolitan elite. Lönnrot belonged to a generation which was influenced by ideas of the 'nation state' which were current throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Kalevala fulfilled the conditions enunciated by Herder, who argued that a nation's need for a distinctive identity should be founded on the language and literature of the ordinary people. From this perspective, Lönnrot's individual voice (incorporating within itself the multiple voices of his informants) could be seen as one of a multiplicity of voices making up the discourse of nationalism. A polyphony of voices was thus transformed into a monologue which in turn became a part of a recontextualised polyphonic discourse. In Finland, those operating within the political sphere and involved in the process of nation-building gained access and were able to use the language and literature of the ordinary people, by virtue of their links with folklore collectors from university circles. The Kalevala was the work of an educated person with connections to Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806-1881), a founder member of the Saturday Society, the dominant political thinker of his time and the leader of the Finnish national movement. As elsewhere in Europe, the discipline of folklore studies provided 'intellectual reinforcement for the political process of nation building' (Herzfeld 1982:4).
This leads to another paradox, that folklorists belonging to university circles, who were actively involved in promoting an identifiable 'national' culture, were in some ways separate from the folk culture which was being upheld as constituting the essence of the nation. The case is similar to that of Greek folklorists who, as Herzfeld notes: 'saw their nation's culture as a unity in which they were themselves fully participating members', but whose separation from the folk was marked by their 'willingness and ability to think in terms of studying folklore (Herzfeld 1982:8).
In the case of Finnish folklore research, the distance between the rural folk and the folklorists was additionally marked by differences in the respective languages they used. The language of the folk was Finnish and the Kalevala was also in Finnish. By contrast, the main language of the folklorists and of other intellectuals who worked with folklore material, as well as the language of government and of education, was Swedish. Moreover, much scholarly work was written in Latin. Research writings about folk traditions were therefore largely inaccessible to the folk whose traditions were being studied. Even the Kalevala, although immensely influential in furthering the aims of the nationalist movement, attracted only a small readership for several years after its publication. Those most interested in reading the Kalevala were the educated Finns who realised the work's significance as a 'national' epic. Yet many educated (Swedish-speaking) Finns were unable to understand its poetic language, hindered by their lack of competence in Finnish. Nevertheless, despite this separation between 'folklorist' and 'folk', there are also links between them, as in the case of Lönnrot himself, who was born as one of the 'folk', the son of a tailor in a Finnish-speaking family.
Until the late nineteenth century, the Kalevala was read more widely in translation than in its original language. Parallels drawn between different folk traditions demonstrated that what had been regarded as peculiar to one nation was in fact common to many. It has already been noted how folklorists from all over Europe were eager to make comparisons between the folk poetry of their regions and ancient Greek poetry, with the political motive of establishing an ancient history for this or that nation. Lönnrot had taken Homer as his model, writing in 1883: 'I shall not cease collecting until these poems form a collection comparable to half of Homer' (quoted by Asplund and Lipponen 1985:24).
But comparisons were not only made with Greek poetry. Grimm, at a lecture given at the Berlin Academy of Science in 1845, compared the Kalevala to Nordic mythology and German verse epics and fairy tales.
In Finland there was much debate as to whether the Kalevala should be interpreted as myth or as history. Lönnrot himself favoured the historical interpretation and adhered to the belief that the poems had been handed down from the ancient Finns. This concern about historical authenticity can be related to subsequent folklore research which tried to establish whether the poems originated from the West or the East. These concerns were linked to the developing sense of a distinct Finnish identity, one which entailed a long history and in which Finland was more aligned to the West. Borenius (1846-1931) concluded in his study, Missä Kalevala on syntynyt? ('Where did the Kalevala originate?', 1873), that the poems did not have their origin in the places where they were last sung, that is in Eastern Finland or in Karelia:
'The poetry has come to Russian Karelia from the West, from Finland, and not spread from there in the opposite direction into Finland.'
[Hautala 1968:65]
As proof, he pointed to Swedish loanwords which had been distorted in the songs since these words were unknown in the ordinary language of the song regions. In a later work Suomen Keskiaikaisesta runoudesta I, Luojan virsi ('On Finnish Medieval poetry I, the song of the Creator', 1886), Borenius compared Kalevala poetry to equivalents in English, German, Danish and Norwegian, to demonstrate that the Finnish poem cycle was linked to the medieval tradition of Western Europe.
Another prominent scholar of this period, Julius Leopold Krohn (1835-1888), posed the question of whether the poems were Karelian or common to Finland, in an article entitled Väinämöisen ja Lemminkäisen asunnoista sekä Kalevalan runoin syntymäpaikoista ('On the dwellings of Väinämöinen and Lemminkäinen, and also the birthplaces of the Kalevala poems', 1869). In response, he concluded that the Kalevala was the creation of the entire Finnish nation, since the poems originated from Western Finland and partly from Ingria and Estonia too. But in his view, the poems had been developed into the form that constituted the Kalevala by the Karelians.
Julius Krohn's research method, which he called local-historical, was developed by his son, Kaarle Krohn, and it became known as the geographical-historical or 'Finnish' method. This method, influenced by Darwin's positivistic and evolutionary doctrines, was used to examine the migration, diffusion and borrowing of tradition. The basic assumption of this method was that all variants of a folk poem are 'historically and genetically interconnected' (Honko 1979:144). In theory it should have been possible to locate the time, place and language of origin of a folk poem, and by reconstruction, to delineate the original form of the poem.
One of the few scholars to examine the links between Finland and the East was one of Kaarle Krohn's students, V.J. Mansikka (1884-1947), Docent in Slavonic and Comparative Folklore Research from 1910. He examined the relation between Finnish and Slavonic folklore, and published articles in Russian journals.
Questioning the origins of Finnish poems/songs, and comparing Finnish folklore material to Swedish and Russian material, were ways of defining what Finnish identity meant. Finnish identity had to be asserted and constructed in relation to the similarities and differences between Finland and its neighbours. This idea corresponds to Bakhtin's analysis of the interaction between individuals in Dostoevsky's works:
'...the consciousness is never self-sufficient; it always finds itself in an intense relationship with another consciousness. The hero's every experience and his every thought is internally dialogical, polemically coloured and filled with opposing forces or, on the other hand, open to inspiration from outside itself, but in any case does not simply concentrate on its own object; it is accompanied by a constant sideward glance at the other person.'
[Bakhtin 1973:26] [1]
It follows from the above that the way in which identity is constructed must also be in relation to what lies beyond the self. Thus Melucci argues that identity should not be considered as a 'thing', an object which can be attained, but as 'a system of relations and representations' (quoted by Schlesinger 1987:237). His concept of identity is linked to action and the importance of individual action and this is addressed in the question he poses as to why any given social actor should appear on the stage at a given moment. Schlesinger expands Melucci's argument to the context of 'national identity', where 'identity is seen as a dynamic, emergent aspect of collective action' (Schlesinger 1987:237). He argues that 'national identity' is best understood as a 'specific form of collective identity' (ibid). Linking these arguments to Bakhtin's notions of the coexistence of contrary voices, of 'multileveledness' and 'multivoicedness', of polyphony in monologue - Lönnrot and his work in assembling the Kalevala can be seen as an example of what can be achieved by an individual who appears on the public stage at a time when national identity is being formed. His work was central to the construction of national identity as an embodiment and a representation of collective action.
I have shown how folklore research contributed to the development of a national identity, focusing on the assertion of a Finnish national identity in relation to its immediate neighbours. The Kalevala played a central role in this process. Earlier folklore work was interpreted as setting a precedent and foreshadowing the national sentiments which could be more fully realised with the appearance of the Kalevala. Folklore research following its publication focused on the expansion and analysis of the national epic. Folklore contributed to the construction of a national identity by developing the native language and national literature, by proclaiming national heroes (e.g. Lönnrot, the mythical Väinämöinen, Porthan), and by providing symbols such as the national epic which could represent Finnish culture worldwide.
The collection of folklore and its use in the political process of nation-building had many parallels throughout Europe, and indeed, Finnish folklore research and the nationalist discourse to which it contributed, was linked to the general European development of the nation state. Nineteenth century folklore work is still relevant to the construction and maintenance of national identities in Europe, evident in the continued designation of the Kalevala as the national epic of Finland, a work which is studied by contemporary Finnish schoolchildren and which continues to inspire musicians, artists and folklorists.
1.
Adding to my own polyphonic texture, the 'sideward glance' that
Bakhtin writes about reminds me of a joke related by Olli-Pekka
Hietanen (Vantaa) as I carried out fieldwork research in Finland
(1991-1992): 'An American, a German and a Finn are looking at an
elephant. The American wonders if the elephant would be good in a
circus, the German wonders what price he would get if he sold it, and
the Finn asks himself "I wonder what that elephant thinks of
me?"'
Asplund, A and Lipponen,U 1985 The Birth of the Kalevala Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Bakhtin, M. 1973 Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics trans.R.W.Rotsel. Michigan: Ardis.
Burke, P. 1978 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe London: Temple Smith.
Hautala, J. 1968 Finnish Folklore Research 1828-1918 Helsinki: Finnish Society of Sciences.
Herzfeld, M. 1982 Ours Once More Texas: University Press.
Honko, L. 1979 'A hundred years of Finnish folklore research: a reappraisal' in Folklore 1979:141-152.
Lewis, B. 1976 History: remembered, recovered, invented Princeton: University Press.
Lönnrot, E. 1835 Kalevala translated by Kirby 1985[1907] London: Athlone Press.
Morgan, P. 1983 'The hunt for the Welsh past in the romantic period' in The Invention of Tradition eds. E. Hobsbawm & T.O. Ranger. Cambridge: University Press.
Schlesinger,P. 1987 'On national identity: some conceptions and misconceptions criticised' in Social Science Information 26(2):219-6