The Doctor Who Sang a Nation Into Being

In January 1833, Elias Lönnrot took up his post as district health officer of Kainuu, a remote region in the eastern part of what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland. By day he treated the sick; but he carried another obsession with him, one that had taken root years earlier at the Imperial Academy of Turku, where his master's thesis had been on Väinämöinen, a divinity of the ancient Finns. That thesis's second volume had been destroyed in the Great Fire of Turku, but the fascination survived the flames.

Lönnrot was born in 1802 in the village of Sammatti, Uusimaa, the son of a tailor. After earning his first master's degree in 1826, he set out in the spring of 1828 to collect folk songs and poetry, before pausing to complete medical studies at Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki. Once settled in Kainuu, he resumed his true calling in earnest. Over fifteen years he made eleven field trips, traveling through Finland and Karelia to seek out singers who still carried the old runic songs in memory.

This oral tradition, known as Kalevala poetry or runic song, had once been common across Finland and Karelia but had begun disappearing in the 18th century, first in the west, as European rhymed poetry took its place. Some of it had been written down as early as the 17th century, but most survived only in the mouths of singers passed from generation to generation. Nationalist linguist Carl Axel Gottlund had dreamed of compiling such songs into a Finnish epic comparable to the Iliad or the Nibelungenlied, hoping it might awaken a sense of nationhood. Reinhold von Becker's 1820 articles on Väinämöinen had already planted that seed in young Lönnrot's mind.

Before the Kalevala itself took shape, Lönnrot produced several related works: the three-part Kantele between 1829 and 1831, and later the Kanteletar in 1840, a more lyrical sister collection. His travels brought joy not only to himself but to the people he visited, who delighted in his retellings of songs he'd gathered and in trading new verses with him.

The first fruit of this labor, the Old Kalevala, was published in 1835, comprising 12,078 verses. Lönnrot kept working, and in 1849 he released the version most widely known today: 22,795 verses divided into fifty runot, or folk poems. A shorter, abridged edition with all fifty poems but only 9,732 verses followed in 1862.