The Kalevala

Finland’s national epic was assembled by Elias Lonnrot, a country doctor who spent years walking through Karelia and the eastern woodlands writing down the old sung poems of farmers and folk singers, then stitched them into a single continuous story. It runs from the creation of the world through the deeds of the wise singer Vainamoinen, the smith Ilmarinen, and the reckless Lemminkainen, and turns on the forging and later theft of the Sampo, a magical mill that grinds out grain, salt, and gold. Its rolling runic meter later shaped Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ and fed Tolkien’s imagination. This is John Martin Crawford’s English translation. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.