Kalevala | Suggested Reading

Kalevala What Do I Read Next?

Elias Lonnrot's Kanteletar, a collection of lyric poems and ballads, was published in 1840-41 as a companion work to the Kalevala, The poems in the Kanteletar, which come from the same oral sources Ldnnrot used for his epic work, give a vivid and varied picture of daily life in rural Finland: there are laments and jokes; songs of courtship, marriage, and loss; tales of hunters, heroes, women, and children; and much more. Keith Bosley translated one hundred of the Kanteletar poems into English for Oxford University Press's World's Classics series, 1992.

Lonnrot's Old Kalevala (1835) and Proto-Kaleva (c. 1835), along with excerpts from his 1927 university dissertation on Vainambinen, have been translated into English by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., The Old Kalevala and Certain Antecedents (1969).

The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) attempted to imitate the meter and spirit of the Kalevala in his narrative poem The...
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