SOURCE: An Introduction to Finnish Folk Poetry-Epic: An Anthology in Finnish and English, edited and translated by Matti Kussi, Keith Bosley, and Michael Branch, Finnish Literature Society, 1977, pp. 21-77.

In the following excerpt, the authors discuss the historical context of Lö nnrot 's compilation of the Kalevala and review its popular and critical reception.

The ideas that inspired Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Johann Herder's Stimmen der Vö lker in Liedern (1st ed. 1778) found a response in Finland when in 1766 a young academic, Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739-1804), roundly condemned those of his contemporaries who did not share his admiration for Finnish folk poetry. Porthan, who was to become the most distinguished Finnish scholar and teacher of his day, personally inspired several of his contemporaries and his students to undertake a serious study of folk poetry. He himself wrote about prosody and in 1789 his close...