It was bound to happen – I got hooked on Kalevala and the whole Finnish mythos! And now I can’t get enough of articles, books and even plays on it.
Kalevala is a Finnish epic, a collection of songs about myths especially from Karelia, a region in eastern Finland. It holds its own alongside the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Eddas and all the rest of the world’s local epics.
And it’s just something else – a look into the psyche of a people who lived hundreds of years ago. Not frozen in time in the same way as those previous epics were, because these songs were amazingly written down only in the 18th & 19th century! That gives them a completely different narrative curve than written epics have. The stories don’t seem to follow our western ideas about narrative. Which can make them a bit challenging to read, but also fun and very, very interesting for a geek like me!
We recently attended the Kalevala-play at Åbo Svenska Teater, and I think it must have been one of my top 3 best theater experiences ever! The choreography, the scenography, the stories told – it all lifted the Kalevala in a way you rarely see. Unfortunately the show isn’t still running at ÅST, but the book is still available in multiple languages – I read Kalevala in Swedish, and the translation by Lars and Mats Huldén is excellent!
My favorite story (for the moment) has to be the allegory about how Christianity came to Karelia and kicked out the old gods (Väinämöinen). In this story, Marjatta is a maiden so chaste that she can’t eat the meat of hens who have known roosters etc. Then she goes to the woods and sees a lingonberry bush. And one of the lingonberries travels up across her body, through her mouth and she becomes fat, even fatter, the fattest. Until she gives birth to a boy. That particular story was just hilarious at ÅST, with the round red berry-theme.
P.S. Tolkien borrowed heavily from both the Kalevala and the Eddas – which is why you can’t simply use old Norse and Finnish mythology when you write your stories! It’s so much fun to read the old mythologies and see what he was inspired from. And perhaps get inspired yourself.