Johan Ludvig Runeberg

Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–1877) is honoured as Finland's national poet, though he wrote in Swedish, the language of the educated class of his day. Born in Jakobstad (Pietarsaari) on the Ostrobothnian coast, he studied at Turku and Helsinki, taught for a time as a tutor in the Finnish interior, and spent most of his working life in the town of Porvoo, where he was a schoolmaster and lived until his death.

His best-known work is The Songs of Ensign Stål (Fänrik Ståls sägner), a cycle of narrative and lyric poems on the Finnish War of 1808–09, in which Sweden lost Finland to Russia. The first series appeared in 1848 and the second in 1860. An old, half-forgotten soldier tells the stories, and the cycle turns defeat into a moral portrait of a people, in the figures of the common soldier, the officer, and the women who wait at home.

The prologue, 'Our Land' (Vårt land), was set to music by Fredrik Pacius in 1848 and became the national anthem of Finland. The English text here is the first complete English translation, by Clement Burbank Shaw (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1925), in the original metres. Only the cantos of the 1848 series that the Wikisource transcription has fully proofread from the scan so far are given here.