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The Adaptability of Myth in Old Norse and
Finnish Poetry
Clive Tolley
I
In 1817, K. A. Gottlund wrote in a review in the Svensk Literaturtidning:1
Thus the youth of Finland, writers who care more about the products of their fatherland
(for in this respect little may be expected of their elders), should try to cherish and nurture
the literature of their homeland — in whatever field of work should help in their
endeavour! They would encounter passages such as they would search for in vain in
foreign literature — indeed, the reviewer will go so far in his claim, that if it should be
desired to gather the ancient folk-poems and to form from them an orderly whole, be it an
epic, a drama, or whatever, it would be possible for a new Homer, an Ossian, or a
Nibelungenlied to arise; and a Finnish nationhood would awake, famed for the lustre and
glory of its own particularity, conscious of itself, the admiration of contemporaries and
aftercomers, made fair by its own aura. The reviewer asserts that in his view he has never
used his time better than in sacrificing it to the gathering of the incomparable remains of
the songs and poems of our forefathers, poems which contain so much philosophy and
beauty.
1 No. 25, 21.6.1817, p. 394. I have translated from the Finnish translation cited in Kaukonen 16.
11th International Saga Conference
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Elias Lönnrot probably never read these words, but within a few years he had
realized Gottlund’s desire. By publishing the Kalevala in 1835 he not only won
fame for himself as Finland’s Homer, but also provided the nation with a
symbolic focus for its growing self-awareness. With an echo of the
resurrectional activity of Lemminkäinen’s mother in the poem as she gathers
the remains of her son from the river of Tuonela, the Finnish Literature
Society’s assessment of Lönnrot’s achievement records that:2
The sharp-sighted recorder and arranger has assembled the shattered pieces of this ancient
Finnish song and thus saved it from imminent destruction, or