Kalevala

The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland, compiled by physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot from oral folk poetry (runo) collected across Finland and Karelia, and published in two editions: the Old Kalevala (1835, 12,078 lines) and the expanded New Kalevala (1849, 22,795 lines). The title means 'Land of Kaleva' — the mythological homeland of the Finnish heroes. Rather than a single narrative, it is a tapestry of loosely connected mythological stories organized around three central heroes: the wise shaman-poet Väinämöinen, the smith Ilmarinen, and the trickster-warrior Lemminkäinen.

The poem's narrative arc encompasses the creation of the world from a cosmic egg, the adventures and rivalries of the three heroes in their pursuit of women and the magical artifact the Sampo (a world-mill of abundance), conflict with the northern realm of Pohjola, Väinämöinen's descent to the realm of the dead, and the birth and triumph of Christ (in a remarkable final canto that Lönnrot added, blending Christian and pre-Christian traditions), after which the old hero Väinämöinen departs the world.

The Kalevala was central to the formation of Finnish national identity in the 19th century, providing a mythological past for a people who had been under Swedish and then Russian rule and who were asserting cultural distinctiveness. It inspired Sibelius's tone poems, Akseli Gallen-Kallela's paintings, and influenced J.R.R. Tolkien, who encountered it as a young scholar and whose mythology of Middle-earth bears deep traces of Kalevala influence.

• Genesis 1:1-2
• Genesis 1:14-18
• Exodus 16
• 1 Kings 17:14-16
• Psalm 130:1
• Luke 1:26-38
• Luke 2:7
• 1 Corinthians 15
• John 20:1-18

J.R.R. Tolkien taught himself Finnish to read the Kalevala in the original language, and described the experience as 'like discovering a magnificent wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.' The tale of Túrin Turambar in The Silmarillion is directly based on the Kalevala's Kullervo episode.