Elias Lönnrot

Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) was a Finnish physician and philologist, born in Sammatti in southern Finland. From 1828 he made a series of collecting journeys through Finland and Russian Karelia, on foot, on horseback, by sledge and by canoe, writing down the rune-songs that country singers still chanted from memory. In 1835 he published the first Kalevala, and in 1849 an enlarged edition of fifty runes; the Finnish Literature Society, which he helped to found, issued both.

Lönnrot is the compiler-author of the Kalevala, not its sole poet. The verses are drawn from oral folk songs, which he selected, ordered and joined into a continuous narrative of the hero Wainamoinen, the smith Ilmarinen and the Sampo, in the unrhymed trochaic metre of the tradition. The poem became a foundation of Finnish national culture. He later served as professor of Finnish at Helsinki and compiled a Finnish dictionary. This archive holds John Martin Crawford's 1888 English translation.