“Ne loitsut kuitenkin piti panna täydellisyyden voittamiseksi siinäkin tarkannossa, että kerto-, laulu, ja loihturunot kun olivat alussa veljeksiä, tässäkin alkuaikain kuvaavassa kokouksessa eivät erouisi” (Borenius and Krohn 1895, 3; They charms/incantations had to be included to gain completeness since epic, lyric and charms were like brothers in the beginning, so they would not get separated in this picture of genesis).1 This quotation is from a draft supplemental version of the Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884). After publishing in 1835 the first version of the epos (epic), which scholars today call the “Old Kalevala,” Lönnrot started working on supplementing it with additional oral folk song material accumulated during several collecting trips (he made a total of eleven trips between 1828 and 1844). For this work of expansion, Lönnrot made an interleaved version of the Kalevala where he could directly add verses of songs during his journeys, a process that began with his collecting trip of 1836–1837 (Borenius and Krohn 1895, I). The quotation reveals Lönnrot's guiding principle in his work of textualization: It was to be comprehensive, encyclopedic (Hyvönen 2001), following oral singers’ models and uniting diverse Finnish and Karelian oral poetry into a single literary entity. In this compilation, different genres of oral poetry played a crucial role, for, as Lönnrot put it, they were “brothers” in the beginning.Elias Lönnrot compiled both the “Old” (1835) and the “New” (1849) Kalevala based strongly on oral Kalevala-meter poetic sources.2 Therefore, as a piece of epic literature written by an elite person, the Kalevala is defined as a tradition-oriented or oral-derived epic (Honko 2000, 7–8). This distinguishes the Kalevala from its counterpart Kalevipoeg, for instance, by F. Kreutzwald (1857), and other more literary-based epics, such as Vergil's Aeneid. However, the Kalevala also represents the era in which it was created. Lönnrot wrote the epic narrative of the peoples of Kalevala and Pohjola for the Finnish-minded elite, who at that time were mostly Swedish-speaking. Sitting on a Biedermeier sofa, as Satu Apo (2004, 292) puts it, they were more familiar with romantic literature and literary genres—such as epos, drama, and tragedy—than oral vernacular poetry. The significance of the Kalevala for Finnish literature was great, especially since written literature was just beginning to develop in the Finnish language in the 1830s and 1840s. It took a half century to form the literature that today is recognized as “Finnish literature.”3 Julius Krohn, folklorist, poet, and historian of Finnish literature, noted in the 1890s that Finnish literature and its history could be designated by the term “kurjallisuuden historia” (history of miserable literature) rather than “kirjallisuuden history” (literary history; 1885, I).Understandings of literary genres were negotiated in the nineteenth century (see the contribution by Isomaa in this issue), and the Kalevala gave one option for this discussion. Later, it became the basis for the development of the fields of folklore studies and literary studies. Folklore studies, in particular, as a discipline established in 1890s, with Kaarle Krohn as its first professor, focused initially and almost exclusively on Lönnrot's epos (see Hautala 1954, 117). Soon, however, scholarly interest in the Kalevala waned, and it became neglected as an object of research. One of the main reasons for this was the development of a new method of analyzing oral poetry and other types of oral literature, the historical-geographic or “Finnish” method developed by Julius and Kaarle Krohn. This method aimed at amassing a substantial body of long epic songs, charms/incantations, or narratives in order to abstract an original core text of a specific folklore item (Hämäläinen 2023, 95–96.) However, another, more implicit, reason for declining interest in the Kalevala among scholars of folklore/oral tradition may have been the complexity of genres, both in oral tradition and in written literature. Lönnrot not only blurred different oral poetic genres and disconnected them from their original vernacular uses as he drew them into the Kalevala but also embedded ideals of nineteenth-century European literature, for example, using tragedy as a framing of his epic's narrative (see the contribution by Karhu in this issue). In this respect, the Kalevala is clearly a hybrid: It emerges from the oral singing tradition but is shaped by literary conventions; it narrates a mythical world of the past but articulates nineteenth-century ideals and values (Apo 2004; Hämäläinen and Karhu 2023).Oral poetic genres—such as epic, lyric, charms, and wedding songs—were in many ways intertwined in Karelian-Finnish-Ingrian oral singing tradition. Genres represented specific types of performing values, expressions, and ways of making the world comprehensive. They lived in intertextual dialogue, as Lotte Tarkka notes, and were used in certain occasions, such as weddings or in hunting and fishing (2013, 67.) However, as Lauri Honko (1988, 104–105) has emphasized, folklore genres are primarily comprehended as systematic categories that provide set taxonomies for researchers rather than for oral singers. Oral singers did not name different songs by genres in the way that collectors and scholars did. Lönnrot shaped oral songs in the introduction of the interleaved Kalevala: “Lemminkäisen, Kullervon, Joukahaisen sisaren—huolilauluja voisi paljonkin lisätä. Raudan, Tulen, Käärmeen, Kosken j. n. e. luvut ovat tavallisista luvuista, niin myös metsämiehen” (Borenius and Krohn 1895, 2; To those songs of sorrow and worry of Lemminkäinen, Kullervo, and the sister of Joukahainen, much more could be added. Charms of iron, fire, snake, rapids etc. are the most common ones, as well as of the forest man). In the introduction to the folk lyric anthology Kanteletar (1840), Lönnrot divided oral poetic genres into four main categories: epic songs, lyric songs, charms, and wedding songs. His ideals of oral poetic genres were specified in the long introduction of the Kanteletar (for further discussion, see Tarkka in this issue), a work that has been considered one of the most important writings in Finnish in the Romantic era of the Grand Duchy of Finland (Karkama 2001, 202). Lönnrot stated that he had added all the folk lyric songs to the Kanteletar, while the Kalevala contained all kinds of epic songs. He planned to publish an anthology of the third genre, charms, but other commitments, such as enlarging the Kalevala, took all his time, and Suomen kansan muinaisia loitsurunoja (Ancient Charms of the Finnish People) was published only in 1880. Lönnrot aimed to combine a representative and encyclopedic selection of different genres in different publications (Hyvönen 2001).In creating a solid narrative for the Kalevala, Lönnrot utilized oral poetic genres other than epic in his compilation work. However, the function of the poetic genres placed in the epic story was different from that in oral culture: They served a plot-based narrative set in an imaginary story world. Further, Lönnrot's genre embeddings in the Kalevala were ideological (see Tarkka in this issue) and they were gendered.4 For example, through the lyrical sequences placed in the Kalevala, Lönnrot shaped gender relations and propagated family aspects in accordance with the ideology of his era and his own worldview (Apo 1995; Hämäläinen and Tarkka 2025). In the Kalevala, genres functioned as gendered but also as ideological and ethnographic tools for creating characters. They also served as determinants of social relations and discourses and complemented the course of the plot by transitions to real event contexts.Lönnrot justified the extensive genre embeddings in the Kalevala with the model and comprehensiveness provided by singers: With the help of different genres, the life and customs of the people could be described in a diverse way. Lönnrot noted that he simply followed the oral singers in combining different elements of oral poetry: “Hyvät runoniekat laulaessaan vähän hätäilevät, jos eivät muistaisikaan sana sanalta jota kuta runoa, kutenka sen muilta, edellisiltä laulajoilta kuulivat, vaan laulavat läpensä unohetunki paikan, ehkä omilla sanoillansa” (Borenius and Krohn 1895, 2–3; In singing good singers are a little bit hesitant if they are not managing to remember a poem word by word, but still, sing a piece of the poem totally forgotten by using their own words). Further, Lönnrot considered himself a good oral singer: “Itse loime loitsijaksi, laikahtime laulajaksi, (toisin sanoen) pidin itseäni hyvänä laulajana siinä kuin hekin itseään” (Lönnrot 1990, 403; I started singing, in other words, I was as good as them the rune singers). This was also Lönnrot's strategy to distance himself from the status of the author of the goal-directed epic work (see DuBois 2000; Hämäläinen 2023).Lönnrot's work on the Kalevala was also guided by the literary conventions and genres of the nineteenth century—an aspect not yet widely studied. Genres in literature function more directly than in oral tradition. They intend to affect different ways, such as the thoughts and emotions of a possible audience, the readers. Literary genres can be considered as a shaping collective emotional atmosphere and as shared values through which it is possible to abstract the effectiveness of genres (Isomaa 2016, 58–59). In the Kalevala, literary genres such as drama played a great role in making the epic understandable to bourgeois readers, touching their emotional ambiance. References to the literature of the time acted as an identifiable vocabulary through which the audience could navigate in a vernacular epic world (see Karhu in this issue). As Jacob Grimm put it in 1845, drama was meant to make the past closer to readers, while epic was meant to take the readers closer to the past (see Leerssen 2023, 13). As a literary genre, epos was still the master literature of the era, even though there were new literary ideals emerging, such as the lyric and novel. Lönnrot was influenced by the modern Romantic conception of genre, which emphasized the ideal of genre hybridity containing various elements. The epic genre was a defining feature and a central, partly contradictory, reference point in relation to literature. Romanticism revived the epic, although the nineteenth century was no longer considered a favorable era for writing this genre. However, the epic genre was a significant literary model that was commented on in other fiction of the century (see articles by Isomaa and Karhu in this issue).It is widely known among scholars, though not well studied, that the Kalevala consists of various poetic genres and materials, but this diversity is not known to the public, and the plurality of genres makes understanding the Kalevala difficult and confusing. After publishing the Kalevala, especially the longest 1849 version, Lönnrot received criticism from readers: They regarded the Kalevala as containing the wrong ordering of songs and superficial exaggerations of genres (see Hämäläinen 2023, 100–101; Tarkka in this issue). The challenge of the Kalevala has been, and still is, that it has not been considered as a piece of epic literature compiled and interpreted by one author; rather, it has constantly been compared with the oral tradition as if the Kalevala were a collection of oral folk songs. The hybridity of intertwining oral tradition and literature has made the Kalevala difficult for readers to comprehend. As Pertti Anttonen notes: “Both scholars and the general public have been uneasy about how to categorize what Lönnrot has accomplished with the Kalevala, except for acknowledging its national and literary significance” (2015, 74). The two-fold nature of Lönnrot's epic has also led to its being left out of the core study of both folklore and literary studies: It has been defined as being either too oral-derived or too literary referential (Hämäläinen 2023, 96–97). Saija Isomaa (in this issue) describes the peculiarity of the Kalevala in terms of literature: The Kalevala is “a rather exceptional work of Finnish literature in that it transforms an extensive amount of oral poetry into an epic through transmedial adaptation, opening a peephole into the oral tradition for entirely new audiences. This combination of oral materials and artistic adaptation has also been a source of controversy.”This special issue of the Journal of Finnish Studies, “Genres, Ideologies and the Kalevala,” aims to make the Kalevala comprehensible as a combination of oral tradition and literature by concentrating on one of the key concepts of the two disciplines—the genre. The articles unpack and reveal how Lönnrot utilized, exaggerated, and modified genres of oral tradition as part of a literary narrative framework and investigate to what extent literary concepts and perceptions of genre of the time guided Lönnrot's work. The special issue examines Lönnrot's ways of adjusting oral poetic genres to fit a literary format by asking what kind of consequences and ideologies were intertwined through genres in the Kalevala. Five articles analyze both literary and folklore genres in terms of textualization of the Kalevala and of contextualization of nineteenth-century literature.The special issue draws on two research projects on the Kalevala: the critical, digital edition, Avoin Kalevala (Open Kalevala, 2019–2026; http://kalevala.finlit.fi) and its sub-project, “The Kalevala, Genres and Ideologies” (2021–2023), which has been integrated into the Open Kalevala.5 The Open Kalevala is an open-access critical edition of the 1849 Kalevala, containing the published Kalevala, transcriptions, and manuscript. It is based on a careful analysis of the source material and on commentaries made of the poems and words of the epic. The edition is linked to other digitized sources concerning the Kalevala. There are also short articles on Lönnrot's editorial methods, the Kalevala language, oral Kalevala-meter poetry, and ideals of the nineteenth century as well as visualizations of the oral poetry material utilized in the Kalevala. The main idea of the edition is to provide solid knowledge and source materials on the Kalevala and its creation on a single platform. A number of the authors of the articles in this special issue—scholars of folklore studies and literature—have been principally involved in these two projects.The articles by folklorists Tuukka Karlsson, Venla Sykäri, and Lotte Tarkka are based on Lönnrot's method of textualization in combining different oral poetic and literary sources in order to create an epic story. The focus is on examination of conscious and intentional choices of Lönnrot on several levels as he acted to transform oral poetry sources into literature. The articles examine what has been included, what has been excluded and silenced, and to what extent Lönnrot as editor has changed linguistic, poetic, and textual elements of oral poetry, along with an analysis of how the products were assessed. (The articles draw centrally on theories of textualization; see, e.g., Bauman and Briggs 2003; Hämäläinen and Karhu 2023; and Hämäläinen and Tarkka 2025). Literary studies articles by Saija Isomaa and Hanna Karhu deal with the era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and literary models and conventions of the times in relation to Lönnrot's work in creating the Kalevala.The first two articles of the issue examine the Kalevala and genres theoretically through folklore studies and literary research. Lotte Tarkka focuses on the textualization of oral genres by Lönnrot in his work of producing the Kalevala. Tarkka introduces Lönnrot's genre ideals as fundamental, stating that to Lönnrot “the question of genre was a question of human evolution from childhood to maturity.” In her article, Tarkka elucidates how Lönnrot's way of textualizing poetic materials was based primarily on the source poems, but that Lönnrot also “exaggerated and mechanized manifestations of generic intertextuality, and the elusive generic allusions were displayed explicitly and expanded, often disproportionately.” This was done for readers of his day who did not have any knowledge of oral poetry or its different genres and their functions in oral tradition. The expectations and knowledge of literary genres guided the literary audience even more when the Kalevala is studied in terms of literature. Saija Isomaa approaches the Kalevala as a literary work in relation to literature through the lens of historical poetics that analyzes the poetics of literature diachronically or contextually. Suggesting different ways of analyzing the Kalevala as literature, Isomaa makes use of Alastair Fowler's (1982) genre categories, calling the Kalevala “epicyclic or elaborative.”The remaining three articles of the special issue are specific case studies. Venla Sykäri gives insight into traditional wedding poetry and Lönnrot's way of manipulating wedding songs to create the wedding of Pohjola in the Kalevala. The wedding of Pohjola covers six poems of the Kalevala (poems 20–25), but “remains largely unnoticed in the analysis,” as Sykäri notes. Sykäri argues that wedding songs and a personal experience of wedding festivities greatly influenced Lönnrot in his work of creating the Kalevala. Sykäri analyzes the development of wedding songs in the different versions of the Kalevala, illustrating how, for example, the literary author emphasizes emotional relationships between the bride and mother, while also adding long monologues, features unfamiliar in oral vernacular wedding events. Tuukka Karlsson focuses on incantations that Lönnrot utilized and how their use becomes exaggerated in the extended (1849) version of the Kalevala. The case study is of Lönnrot's textual strategies within the “Polvenhaava” (Knee Wound) poem (poem 9 in the 1849 Kalevala), with the mythic hero Väinämöinen as its main protagonist. The textual analysis reveals that Lönnrot's knowledge of oral tradition, and his encyclopedic aim, guided him in incorporating incantations into the epic narrative. Hanna Karhu scrutinizes the not widely studied literary-historical context of the nineteenth century in which the Kalevala was written. Karhu reads the Kalevala in relation to genre discussions of the day by elucidating the influence of eighteenth-century literature and the genre of epos on the Kalevala. Interestingly, the literary genre that Lönnrot was greatly fascinated by was drama. Karhu points that “the reference to the central literary genre of the time, drama, served as a mediator between the oral poetic material and the educated reader.”“What could the Kalevala be?” Elias Lönnrot asked himself while compiling the epic. This special issue gives one, though not the final nor all-encompassing, answer: The Kalevala is a literary and ethnographic hybrid of different genres, texts, worlds, readers, and ideologies—and much more.
Niina Hämäläinen (Thu,) studied this question.