This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... PREFACE. The following translation was undertaken from a desire to lay before the English-speaking people the full treasury of epical beauty, folklore, and mythology comprised in The Kalevala, the national epic of the Finns. A brief description of this peculiar people, and of their ethical, linguistic, social, and religious life, seems to be called for here in order that the following poem may be the better understood. Finland (Finnish, Suomi or Suomenmaa, the swampy region, of which Finland, or Fen-land is said to be a Swedish translation.) is at present, a Grand-Duchy in the north-western part of the Russian empire, bordering on Olenctz, Archangel, Sweden, Norway, and the Baltic Sea, its area being more than 144,000 square miles, and inhabited by some 2,000,000 of people, the last remnants of a race driven back from the East, at a very early day, by advancing tribes. The Finlanders live in a land of marshes and mountains, lakes and rivers, seas, gulfs, islands, and inlets, and they call themselves Suomilainen, Fen-dwellers. The climate is more severe than that of Sweden. The mean yearly temperature in the north is about 27 F., and about 38 F., at Helsingfors. the capital of Finland. In the southern districts the winter is seven months long, and in the northern provinces the sun disappears entirely during the months of December and January. The inhabitants are strong and hardy, with bright, intelligent faces, high cheek-bones, yellow hair in early life, and with brown hair in mature age. With regard to their social habits, morals, and manners, all travellers are DEGREESmanimous in speaking well of them. Their temper is universally mild; they are slow to anger, and when angry they keep silence. They are happy-hearted, affectionate

This book is a reproduction of the first complete English translation of the Kalevala, the epic poem of Finland, which was originally published in 1888 by John Martin Crawford. Crawford-who kept to the original meter, the "archaic trochaic tetrameter" or Kalevala-meter, unlike some later translators-based his translation on Franz Anton Schiefner's earlier (1852) German edition, which was in turn based on Elias Lönnrot's. Lönnrot, who originally compiled the Kalevala, significantly edited the work to form a coherent whole. His publication, "The Kalevala, or old Karelian poems about ancient times of the Finnish people" (also called the Old Kalevala), was published in two volumes in 1835-36.This volume is complete and unabridged.

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Excerpt from The Kalevala, Vol. 1 of 2: The Epic Poem of Finland, Into English It may be interesting to note in this connection that Canon Isaac Taylor, and Professor Sayce have but very recently awakened great interest in this question, in Europe especially, by the reading of papers before the British Philologicalviii. The Kalevala. Association, in which they argue in favor of the Finnie origin of the Aryans. For this new theory these scholars present exceedingly strong evidence, and they conclude that the time of the separation of the Aryan from the Finnie stock must have been more than five thousand years ago. The Finnish nation has one of the most sonorous and flexible of languages. Of the cultivated tongues of Europe, the Magyar, or Hungarian, bears the most positive signs of a deep-rooted Similarity to the Finnish. Both belong to the Ugrian stock of agglutinative languages, t.e., those which preserve the root most carefully, and effect all changes of grammar by suffixes attached to the original stem. Grimm has shown that both Gothic and Icelandic present traces of Finnish influence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.