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Updated: May 5, 2025
She went out into the forest and cast a magic spell upon the hugest bear in all the Northland the great Otso and he hastened from his Pohjola home and began to kill the flocks and herds in Kalevala. Otso = bear. Then Wainamoinen hastened to Ilmarinen, and bade him make a triple-pointed spear with which to kill Otso.
The metre in which the epic is chanted resembles, to an English ear, that of Mr. Longfellow's 'Hiawatha' there is assonance rather than rhyme; and a very musical effect is produced by the liquid character of the language, and by the frequent alliterations. This rough outline of the main characteristics of the 'Kalevala' we shall now try to fill up with an abstract of its contents.
Wainamoinen then brought forth the seven magic barley-seeds from his skin-pouch, and sowed them in the ashes, and as he sowed he prayed to great Ukko to send warm rains from the south to make the seeds sprout. And the rain came, and the barley grew so fast that in seven days the crop was almost ripe. Thus Wainamoinen finished his labours and began to lead a happy life on the plains of Kalevala.
'What's the name of this little stone in the middle of the ocean? asked one of them. 'Ahtola, answered the old man. 'Well, you should want for nothing when you live in the Sea King's dominion. Matte did not understand. He had never read Kalevala and knew nothing of the sea gods of old, but the students proceeded to explain to him.
In recording their adventures, the 'Kalevala, like the shield of Achilles, reflects all the life of a race, the feasts, the funerals, the rites of seed-time and harvest of marriage and death, the hymn, and the magical incantation.
The fame of the Runoia's singing excited jealousy in the breast of one of the men around him, of whose origin the 'Kalevala' gives no account. This man, Joukahainen, provoked him to a trial of song, boasting, like Empedocles, or like one of the old Celtic bards, that he had been all things.
Return with me to Kalevala to thy home, and thank and praise thy Maker, Ukko, that he hath saved thee, for I alone could never have saved thee from dismal Manala. So Lemminkainen hastened home with his mother, back again to his pleasant home in Kalevala.
Later on we become acquainted for the first time with the potent motive of the restoration of the dismembered one, the revivification of the dead. For example, in the Finnish epic, Kalevala, Nasshut throws the Lemminkainen into the waters of the river of the dead.
The very want of this idea of family and aristocratic pride gives the 'Kalevala' a unique place among epics. It is emphatically an epic of the people, of that class whose life contains no element of progress, no break in continuity; which from age to age preserves, in solitude and close communion with nature, the earliest beliefs of grey antiquity.
The last lesson we would attempt to gather from the 'Kalevala' is this: that a comparison of the thoroughly popular beliefs of all countries, the beliefs cherished by the non-literary classes whose ballads and fairy tales have only recently been collected, would probably reveal a general identity, concealed by diversity of name, among the 'lesser people of the skies, the elves, fairies, Cyclopes, giants, nereids, brownies, lamiae.
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