KALEVALA, the Finnish national epic collected and arranged by Elias Lönnrot (see LÖNNROT, ELIAS), with an inestimable effect on Finnish self-esteem, cultural identity, and the development of scholarly research, and the arts.
Spoken Finnish has a history of thousands of years and the roots of the oral cultivation and transmission of folk poetry reach far into the dim past. The history of written Finnish literature, however, does not begin until the time of the Reformation. The literature which appeared...