Description

Kalewala taikka Wanhoja Karjalan Runoja Suomen kansan muinosista ajoista (The Kalevala or old Karelian poems from the ancient days of the Finnish people), better known as simply the Kalevala, is the national epic of Finland. The work was compiled by Elías Lönnrot, who collected Finnish-Karelian folk poems from the oral tradition to create the so-called “old Kalevala,” consisting of 32 poems in about 12,100 verses. Lönnrot combined and organized the sometimes conflicting poems and song styles of the traditional rune singers into a unified, larger work. The epic is ...