Kalevipoeg, English translation: The Hero of Esthonia

[The Ripper]

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/hoe/map.jpg

The Hero of Esthonia
by W. F. Kirby
in two volumes
[London, 1895]

Volume 1

Title Page

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PART I — THE HERO OF ESTHONIA

ARGUMENT OF THE “KALEVIPOEG”
 CANTO I — THE MARRIAGES OF SALME AND LINDA
 CANTO II — THE DEATH OF KALEV
 CANTO III — THE FATE OF LINDA
 CANTO IV — THE ISLAND MAIDEN
 CANTO V — THE KALEVIDE AND THE FINNISH SORCERER
 CANTO VI — THE KALEVIDE AND THE SWORD-SMITHS
 CANTO VII — THE RETURN OF THE KALEVIDE
 CANTO VIII — THE CONTEST AND PARTING OF THE BROTHERS
 CANTO IX — RUMOURS OF WAR
 CANTO X — THE HEROES AND THE WATER-DEMON
 CANTO XI — THE LOSS OF THE SWORD
 CANTO XII — THE FIGHT WITH THE SORCERER’S SONS
 CANTO XIII — THE KALEVIDE’S FIRST JOURNEY TO HADES
 CANTO XIV — THE PALACE OF SARVIK
 CANTO XV — THE MARRIAGE OF THE SISTERS
 CANTO XVI — THE VOYAGE OF THE KALEVIDE
 CANTO XVII — THE HEROES AND THE DWARF
 CANTO XVIII — THE KALEVIDE’S JOURNEY TO PŌRGU
 CANTO XIX — THE LAST FEAST OF THE HEROES
 CANTO XX — ARMAGEDDON


PART II — ESTHONIAN FOLKTALES

 SECTION I — TALES ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE “KALEVIPOEG”
  THE MILKY WAY. (JANNSEN.)
  THE GRATEFUL PRINCE. (KREUTZWALD.)
  SLYBOOTS. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE GOLD-SPINNERS. (KREUTZWALD.)

 SECTION II — ORPHAN AND FOUNDLING TALES
  THE WOOD OF TONTLA. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE ORPHAN BOY AND THE HELL-HOUNDS. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE EGG-BORN PRINCESS. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE ROYAL HERD-BOY. (KREUTZWALD.)
  TIIDU THE FLUTE-PLAYER.
  THE LUCKY EGG. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE MAGICIAN IN THE POCKET, THE GOD-DAUGHTER OF THE ROCK-MAIDENS, and THE FOUNDLING

Volume 2

Title Page

CONTENTS

 SECTION III — COSMOPOLITAN STORIES
  BLUEBEARD. (KREUTZWALD)
  CINDERELLA. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE DRAGON-SLAYER.
  THE DWARF’S CHRISTENING. (JANNSEN.)
  THE ENVIOUS SISTERS.
  THE GIFTED BROTHERS. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE IDIOT’S LUCK.
  THE MAGICIAN’S HEIRS. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE MAN IN THE MOON.
  VIDEVIK, KOIT, ANDÄMARIK (Twilight, Dawn, and Evening Twilight).
  THE MAIDEN AT THE VASKJALA BRIDGE. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE WOMAN IN THE MOON. (JANNSEN.)
  POLYPHEMUS. (JANNSEN.)
  RED RIDING-HOOD.
  SNOWWHITE, THE GLASS MOUNTAIN, AND THE DESPISED YOUNGEST SON.
  THE THREE SISTERS. (JANNSEN.)
  THE THREE WISHES.
  THE WITCH-BRIDE.
  THE STEPMOTHER. (KREUTZWALD.)

 SECTION IV — FAMILIAR STORIES OF NORTHERN EUROPE
  THE FISHERMAN AND HIS WIFE.
  THE MERMAID. (KREUTZWALD.)
  HOW THE SEA BECAME SALT. (JANNSEN.)
  THE TWO BROTHERS AND THE FROST. (JANNSEN.)
  THE SOLDIER AND THE DEVIL. (JANNSEN.)

 SECTION V — STORIES OF THE GODS, AND SPIRITS OF THE ELEMENTS
  THE SONG-GOD’S DEPARTURE. (JANNSEN.)
  JUTTA. (JANNSEN.)
  THE TWELVE DAUGHTERS. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE FOUR GIFTS OF THE WATER-SPRITE. (JANNSEN.)
  THE LAKE-DWELLERS. (JANNSEN.)
  THE FAITHLESS FISHERMAN. (JANNSEN.)
  THE SPIRITS OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS. (JANNSEN.)
  THE SPIRIT OF THE WHIRLWIND. (JANNSEN.)
  THE WILL O’ THE WISPS. (JANNSEN.)
  THE FOUNDLING. (JANNSEN.)
  THE CAVE-DWELLERS. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE COMPASSIONATE WOODCUTTER. (JANNSEN.)
  THE GOOD DEED REWARDED. (KREUTZWALD.)

 SECTION VI — HEATH LEGENDS. (JANNSEN.)
  THE WONDERFUL HAYCOCK. (JANNSEN.)
  THE MAGIC EGG. (JANNSEN.)

 SECTION VII — LAKE LEGENDS.
  LAKE PEIPUS. (JANNSEN.)
  THE LAKE AT EUSEKÜLL. (JANNSEN.)
  EMMU LAKE AND VIRTS LAKE. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE BLUE SPRING. (JANNSEN.)
  THE BLACK POOL. (JANNSEN.)

 SECTION VIII — STORIES OF THE DEVIL AND OF BLACK MAGIC.
  THE SON OF THE THUNDER-GOD. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE MOON-PAINTER. (JANNSEN.)
  THE TREASURE-BRINGER. (JANNSEN.)
  THE WOODEN MAN AND THE BIRCH-BARK MAID. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE COMPASSIONATE SHOEMAKER. (JANNSEN.)
  MARTIN AND HIS DEAD MASTER.
  THE BEWITCHED HORSE.

 SECTION IX — HIDDEN TREASURES
  THE COURAGEOUS BARN-KEEPER. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE GALLOWS-DWARFS. (KREUTZWALD.)
  THE TREASURE AT KERTELL. (JANNSEN.)
  THE GOLDEN SNAKES. (JANNSEN.)
  THE DEVIL’S TREASURE. (JANNSEN.)
  THE NOCTURNAL CHURCH-GOERS. (KREUTZWALD.)

 SECTION X — ORIENTAL TALES.
  THE NORTHERN FROG. (KREUTZWALD).
 SECTION XI — CHURCH-STORIES
  THE CHURCH AT REVEL.
  THE CHURCH AT PÜHALEPP.
  THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY CROSS.
  THE CHURCH AT FELLIN.

 SECTION XII — UNNATURAL BROTHERS
  THE RICH BROTHER AND THE POOR ONE.

 SECTION XIII — PLAGUE-LEGENDS
 SECTION XIV — BEAST-STORIES
  THE MAN WITH THE BAST SHOES.
  WHY THE DOG AND CAT AND THE CAT AND MOUSE ARE ENEMIES.
  THE ORIGIN OF THE SWALLOW.
  THE SPIDER AND THE HORNET.
  THE OFFICIOUS FLIES.
PART III — ESTHONIAN BALLADS, &C.

  THE HERALD OF WAR
  THE BLUE BIRD (I.).
  THE BLUE BIRD (II.).
  CHARM AGAINST SNAKE-BITE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


PREFACE

WHEN I took up the study of the Kalevala and Finnish literature, with the intention of publishing a critical English edition of the poem, on which I am still engaged, the accumulation of the necessary materials led me to examine the literature of the neighbouring countries likewise. I had expected to find the Kalevipoeg an Esthonian variant of the Kalevala; but I found it so dissimilar, and at the same time so interesting, when divested of the tedious and irrelevant matter that has been added to the main story, that I finally decided to publish a full account of it in prose, especially as nothing of the kind has yet been attempted in English, beyond a few casual magazine articles.

 The Esthonian folk-tales are likewise of much interest, and in many cases of an extremely original character; and these also have never appeared in an English dress. I have, therefore, selected a p. x sufficiently representative series, and have added a few ballads and short poems. This last section of the work, however, amounts to little more than an appendix to the Kalevipoeg, though it is placed at the end of the book. Esthonian ballad literature is of enormous extent, and only partially investigated and published at present, even in the original; and it would therefore be premature to try to treat of it in detail here, nor had I time or space to attempt it. I had, however, intended to have included a number of poems from Neus’ Ehstnische Volkslieder in the present volumes, but found that it was unnecessary, as Latham has already given an English version of most of the best in his “Nationalities of Europe.”

 The Introduction and Notes will, it is hoped, be sufficiently full to afford all necessary information for the intelligent comprehension of the book, without overloading it; and it has been decided to add a sketch-map of this little known country, including some of the places specially referred to. But Esthonian folk-literature, even without the ballads, is a most extensive study, and I do not pretend to do more than offer a few specimens culled from some of the most easily accessible sources. My professional work does not allow me time to attempt p. xi more at present; and it is from the same cause that my work on the Kalevala has been delayed so long.

 In outlying parts of Europe like Finland and Esthonia, which were not Christianised till long after the southern and western countries, primitive literature has survived to a much greater extent than elsewhere; and the publication of the Kalevala and the Kalevipoeg during the present century furnishes a striking example before our very eyes of the manner in which the Iliad and the Odyssey grew up among the Greeks, before these poems were edited in the form in which they have come down to us, by order of Pisistratus.

 The principal books used in the preparation of this work are mentioned in the short Bibliography. The names of others quoted or referred to will be found in the Index, which has also been drawn up in such a manner as to form a general glossary.

W. F. KIRBY. 

 CHISWICK, September 1894.


You can find the whole work translated into English at Sacred Texts (http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/hoe/index.htm).

[The Ripper]

I stumbled upon this analysis of the social, cultural and political background of the Kalevipoeg and Kalevala in Finland Estonia respectively, but mainly focusing on the Kalevipoeg and the Estonian perspective, which is less known to myself.


Finnish kalevala and Estonian Kalevipoeg
by Jaan Puhvel


Finnish Kalevala and Estonian Kalevipoeg

The title of my presentation requires some minor fine-tuning in relation to the topic. From the sound of it I might be expected to consider how the Kalevala impacted upon the Kalevipoeg, that is, trace the direct influence of opus A on opus B. This can of course be done, but it would end up being a minor topic of limited interest. For the Kalevipoeg is not merely some kind of epigonic afterthought brought to fruition in the glorious wake of the Kalevala as an outgrowth or imitation of the latter. The two are largely parallel phenomena in geographically adjacent, ethnically akin, and culturally related milieus; and yet the political, intellectual and other dynamics that led to their creation largely constitute two solitudinal developments which ultimately converged only belatedly and tangentially. It is this comparative and contrastive story of underpinnings that I wish to tell from the Estonian vantage point, and how at the last minute the actual appearance of the Kalevala did in fact provide the catalytic and inspirational final impetus that put the Estonian epic over the top.

The reopening of the university in 1802 produced the path of higher education for at least a few of the newly freed Estonians. The two heroes of that process, F. R. Faehlmann and F. R. Kreutzwald, both ethnic Estonians, were able to enter the university in 1818 and 1826 respectively.

But they were no longer alone. While the belated fallout of the enlightenment in Western Europe triggered the end of serfdom, it was instead its intellectual antidote, romanticism, that created the climate for the rise of a national epic. Johann Gottfried Herder spent youthful years in Livonia and Riga in the 1760s and started the first transmissions of Estonian folksong to the wide world of letters. Christian Schlegel came to Estonia as a young tutor in 1780 and developed a sincere enthusiasm for the native poetry. When he came again in 1807, he instituted some organized collecting. In the meantime a local coterie of so-called ‘Philestonen’ or ‘Estonophiles’ had taken shape among the local clerical intelligentsia, leading to the creation by J. H. Rosenplänter in Pernau of the first periodical devoted to Estonian language and literature, Beiträge zur genauern Kenntnis der ehstnischen Sprache (20 volumes, 1813-1832).

The idolizing of folk genius almost inevitably brings in its wake a certain manipulation. Estonian folksong turned out to be in the main lyrical and produced by women – quite the opposite of what the sturdy old epic bards of Karelia had in their repertory – and it was hence in the main unsuitable for epic use. Therefore the movement towards an Estonian epic had to draw sustenance from other, and less pure, wells than the wondrous reservoir of Farther Karelia [= East Karelia, Riip].

Two landmarks on the path to the Kalevipoeg deserve mention. The first is Garlieb Merkel’s Die Vorzeit Lieflands. Merkel was a somewhat pathos-ridden romantic firebrand of Livonia-Latvia, who had imbibed Voltaire, Rousseau and Herder in equal measure, and whose publicistic activism bore on social justice and literature alike.

Another work introduces the Finnish dimension for the first time, and in fact marks the first pre-Kalevala impact on the pre-Kalevipoeg. In volume 14 of Rosenplänter’s Beiträge in 1822, the first great Estonian literary poet Kristjan Jaak Peterson, in the year of his death at age 21, published a German translation and adaptation of Christfrid Ganander’s Mythologia Fennica of 1789. Ganander’s was a second-rate piece of work to begin with, not up to the standards which Porthan had set; and Peterson’s knowledge of Swedish and Finnish was not the best. Yet the transposition was a landmark in creating by inference and adaptation an Estonian pantheon matching the Finnish one, for example Vanemuine drawn from Väinämöinen, and so forth. Inferentially, of course, these figures must have once been common to the Proto-Finno-Estonians of the first millennium, and their recovery for Estonia from the Finnish archaic fringe was merely an act of restoration, but it nevertheless earned the dubious label of pseudo-mythological manipulation.

With heroic pseudo-history and an Olympian-type pseudo-pantheon in place, it did not take long until the Estonophile cleric Heinrich Jannau produced in 1828, in volume 19 of Rosenplänter’s journal, a fanciful treatise Über die Grund- und Ursprache der Ehsten where the Estonians figure as the premier ancient nation of the North, with a high civilization and contacts with the Roman empire, immortalized as the Aestii of Tacitus’s Germania. Such pipedreams have since been perpetrated repeatedly by nationalistic amateurs down to our own day.

Then, largely spearheaded by Faehlmann, and inspired by the appearance of the Old Kalevala, the Estonian learned Society is founded at Tartu in 1838, and in Volume I of its transactions Faehlamnn begins a series of articles on Estonian mythology, embroidering further where the Ganander-Peterson opus had left off. From 1839 dates his tract “Die Sage vom Kallewi poeg”. The new, liberal-minded periodical Das Inland had started up in 1836 and also published a string of folktales on “Kaallew’s Sohn” who was hitherto known mostly by name only or as a prodigious legendary plowman with a propensity for molesting women. There is no question that the sudden emphasis on the figure of the strongman Kalev was nurtured by name-affinity to the just-appeared Kalevala; the first runo of the Kalevala appeared in German and Estonian translation in that same first volume of transactions in 1840.

If a lost pantheon could be inferentially resurrected on Finnish models, the reasoning went, so could a lost epic. At the time of Faehlmann’s 1839 presentation, his friend and fellow physician Georg Schultz-Bertram returned from Finland with a copy of the Kalevala and some Finnish parallels to the Kalevipoeg sagas, and reinforced his colleague in a famous speech in which he said that the recreation of an epic was essential to restore the self-respect of the Estonian nation, and that it was a matter of the highest cultural priority, like revealing to a beggar that he is in truth the long-lost son of a king.

But even that galvanization proved transitory. The 1840s went on and nothing much happened. Lönnrot himself spent the latter half of 1844 in Estonia, but even that failed to move things. It was a difficult time socially and politically. Poor harvests, famine, peasant revolts, and emigration coincided with counterattacks by Baltic German ideologues. Faehlmann seemed the obvious man to do the epic, but an overload of commitments, both as physician and as university lecturer of Estonian, coupled with declining health, deterred him until his death in 1850 at the age of 51. Only bits and pieces of his ongoing efforts remain.

In 1849, of course, the definitive Kalevala was published. This event, coupled with the death of Faehlmann, caused the Estonian Learned Society to practically commission his remaining closest friend and fellow Estonian, Kreutzwald, to carry the task to completion. The latter thus undertook the task, primarily to rescue for posterity the traditions of a disappearing mini-nation. At least such was the stance which helped keep the censor at bay.

Kreutzwald knew something of how lays might be joined and internally expanded into epics, but of course he had no lays to work with, only prose sagas and interspersable lyric pieces. His task was not only one of combination, but largely also of versification into trochaic tetrameter. Although a good specialist in folksong and a poet in his own right, he took considerable liberties which detracted somewhat from the final result. Only about twelve percent is from original folksongs, versus about ninety-seven percent in the Kalevala; the whole is far less genuine and original than what Lönnrot stitched together into the Kalevala (although it is also a frequently committed mistake to consider the Kalevala a pure folk-epic merely mediated by Lönnrot).

Years of preliminary prose and then versified versions resulted in piecemeal publications in the Transactions of the Estonian Learned Society between 1857 and 1861, with parallel German translations by Carl Reinthal. The complete Estonian text of about 19 000 trochaic tetrameters was printed at Kuopio in Finland in 1862 and carried the work into the world. Henry Longfellow who died in 1882, had a copy, for I found it with his autograph in the Harvard University Library. In 1895 William Kirby, translator of the Kalevala, also mediated a mostly prose summary of the Kalevipoeg in his book The Hero of Esthonia. In 1982 a sumptuous full English verse translation was issued by Jüri Kurman, by Symposia Press in New Jersey. In the same year a certain Lou Goble committed something called The Kalevide, a Kirby-based pastiche of the Kalevipoeg, published by “Bantam Science Fiction and Fantasy Books” and subtitled “The spellbinding saga of a legendary warrior-king, a modern retelling of Northern Europe’s greatest epic.”

The significance of Kalevipoeg for Estonian culture has been great, but not as pervasive as that of the Kalevala for the Finns. It certainly deserves to be read and, perhaps, even imitated. Just as the songs that went into the Kalevala are now available for public inspection in the multi-volume Suomen kansan vanhat runot (1908-1948), a hefty collection of of the original Kalevipoeg-legends was published in Tallinn in 1959, in the series Monumenta Estoniae Antiquae.

On those bases anyone who does not like the original Kalevala or Kalevipoeg is free to create his own. Friedebert Tuglas suggested early in this century that the Kalevipoeg be overhauled by more competent hands. Whimsical authors of our day have in fact had their go at it – Paavo Haavikko with his Rauta-aika in Finland and Enn Vetemaa in Estonia with his Memoirs of Kalevipoeg. The days of a possible impact of the Kalevala on the Kalevipoeg (or vice versa) are not necessarily over.

(Abbreviated from The World of Kalevala. UCLA Folklore and Mythology Publications, Los Angeles)

Jaan Puhvel,
Prof. emeritus
of the University of California

Estonian Literary Magazine (http://elm.estinst.ee/issue/17/finnish-kalevala-and-estonian-kalevipoeg/)

[The Ripper]

Another article (http://elm.estinst.ee/issue/17/kalevipoeg-great-european-epic/) about Kalevipoeg from the Estonian Literary Magazine.


Kalevipoeg, a great European epic
by Jüri Talvet


KALEVIPOEG, A GREAT EUROPEAN EPIC
On the bicentenary of birth of Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald,
the author of Kalevipoeg and the founder of Estonian literature

Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-1882) was born in a humble serf family in the county of Kadrina (North-Eastern Estonia, or Virumaa; Kreutzwald has been revered by posterity as “the Poet of Viru” or “the Father of the Song”). His father, a granary keeper, and mother, a chambermaid, were liberated from serfdom in 1815, a year before the Russian Tsar’s decree, abolishing serfdom in Estonia, was passed. Like the great majority of his autochthonous fellow-countrymen, peasant serfs or their children, Kreutzwald received his name from his German landlord, and that is why, instead of Ristmets (as the name would have been in Estonian), he had a German name.

Despite a number of difficulties, Kreutzwald managed to receive a reasonably good education. He studied at a district school in the capital Tallinn and was first trained as an elementary school teacher. After a failed attempt to enter the Military Medical Academy of St. Petersburg (he was not admitted because of his peasant origin), Kreutzwald started in 1825 studies of medicine at Tartu (Dorpat) University, the most renowned educational centre of Estonia, founded in 1632 by the king of Sweden Gustav Adolf II and re-inaugurated by the Emperor of Russia, Alexander I, in 1812.

Besides medicine, Kreutzwald became fascinated with literature at quite an early stage. For instance, even before entering the university, he had translated into his native Estonian fragments from Friedrich Schiller’s famous first play The Robbers (1781), one of the boldest calls for social justice and freedom voiced by the influential German pre-romantic Sturm und Drang movement. By the way, one of the key figures of Sturm und Drang, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger who became a high-ranked military officer in St. Petersburg, was the curator of Tartu University from 1803 to 1917.

As a young and bright student, Kreutzwald soon became influenced by the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder, the great “architect” not only of Sturm und Drang and German Romanticism, but of the mighty wave of national “awakening” and liberation of the peoples of Eastern Europe, from the start of the 19th century. Incidentally, as a young man, Herder was active as a pastor and freemason in Riga, the capital of Latvia. He later published his influential collection of folksong Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1788-89), where he gathered also folk lyrics of Baltic people, Estonians included.

During the student years Kreutzwald became a friend of another student of Estonian origin (they were in those times a tiny minority at the university!) Friedrich Robert Faehlmann. From the small nucleus of Estonian students there the germ of defending Estonian nation, language and culture started to sprout. Faehlmann was the principal founder, in 1838, of Gelehrte Estnische Gesellschaft (Estonian Learned Society) that Kreutzwald joined a year later. Under the influence of the famous Finnish epic Kalevala (1836), created by Elias Lönnrot, Faehlmann also started to envisage the first contours of a similar Estonian epic, Kalevipoeg. In 1839 he presented at the Estonian Learned Society his Ancient Tales, where, in the spirit of Romanticism, he had converted the figure of Kalevipoeg (the son of Kalev), known in the Estonian folklore rather as a malevolent giant, into an ancient king of Estonians who fights for his country’s liberty.
One should not forget either that the author of Kalevala, Lönnrot, visited Estonia in 1844, meeting Faehlmann in Tartu, and Kreutzwald in Võru.

Another key “engineer” of the epic was G. J. Schultz-Bertram, a Baltic-German medical doctor and folklorist who passionately advocated the creation of an Estonian national epic, following the Finnish example, and thus, laying a firm foundation for the further spread of the ideas of national independence of the Estonians.

Faehlmann died in 1850. Kreutzwald, by that time (from 1833) a medical doctor and people’s enlightener in Võru, a small town in southern Estonia, turned the idea of the epic into reality. His verse epic Kalewipoeg, eine Estnische Sage (‘Kalevipoeg, an old Estonian Tale’) was first published (with a parallel translation in German accompanying the original Estonian text), by instalments, in the proceedings of the Estonian Learned Society (1857-1861). As a book, first the German translation appeared in 1861 in Tartu. The Estonian original came out a year later in the Finnish town Kuopio (1862). In Estonia itself, Kalevipoeg appeared in book form only in 1875 (in Tartu), two years before Kreutzwald moved from Võru to Tartu, where he spent his old age.

By that time Kalevipoeg was well known all over Estonia and its author became to be considered the true founder of Estonian literature, as well as a principal fomenter of the idea of a free Estonian nation. Outside Estonia, however, Kreutzwald was hardly known beyond the fact that the Russian Academy of Sciences gave him a prize for Kalevipoeg, in 1860, and that he was named a foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 1871.

As can be seen, the “official” honours conferred on Kreutzwald in his lifetime recognised his merits as a learned man, first of all. Later, too, there has been a tendency to value Kreutzwald’s work, in the first place, from a folkloric point of view. The most extensive monographs on Kalevipoeg, so far, have been written by Estonian folklorists, like August Annist (1899-1972; he was also the Estonian translator of Kalevala) and Felix Oinas (b. 1911).
On the other hand, there has been a considerable failure to appreciate Kreutzwald duly as a writer and a poet.

Despite being influenced by Kalevala, the epic of Kreutzwald differs radically from the Finnish epic. Kreutzwald’s folkloric sources were much scantier than those of Lönnrot. He had to invent himself the myth and folklore. Kalevipoeg is, first and foremost, a literary work. As such, it should not be researched, really, in the canon of the ancient Greek Iliade, the medieval Icelandic songs of Edda or Lönnrot’s Kalevala, all of which are based predominantly (though not entirely either!) on authentic folklore, reflecting primeval tribal conscience.

Kalevipoeg, on the contrary, belongs clearly to another – by no means less valuable! – canon, the one of individual verse epics, starting in the West from Virgil’s Aeneid, to be followed in the late Middle Ages by the French Chanson de Roland, the Spanish Cantar de Mío Cid, the German Nibelungenlied and, in the Renaissance, by Os Lusiadas (‘The Lusiads’), the great epic written by the founder of Portuguese literature, Camões.

A number of outstanding poets of the past have tried to create majestic epic works. Not all of them succeeded in finishing their epics (thus, the Frenchman Ronsard managed to write only the initial part of his planned Franciade). Sometimes historical conditions were unfavourable to the enterprise, in other cases, epic poets let themselves be influenced by a “genre contamination” to the extent that the outcome were “novels in verse”, rather than true epics, capable of reflecting reality beyond amorous love stories.
Kreutzwald, without any doubt, is one of the few European late romantic writers who did succeed in creating a verse epic in its full rights.

Kalevipoeg’s “national” Estonian dimension can be seen, in the first place, in the verse form employed by Kreutzwald. He basically used in Kalevipoeg the 4-feet trochaic meter, with abundant alliterations and parallelisms, characteristic of all the rich treasury of Finno-Ugric folksongs – thus a form that has emerged from the very national poetic soil. For instance, the US poet H. W. Longfellow was like Kreutzwald influenced by Lönnrot’s Kalevala in creating his Song of Hiawatha (1855), a work that was meant to be “American indigenous epic”. However, Longfellow could not rely on any verse form of the American indigenous people, but had to “import” it from the Finno-Ugric traditional poetics. The English 4-feet trochee, besides, can never convey the interior flexibility and rhythmic variety of the Finno-Ugric traditional meter. To say nothing of the fact that even though Kreutzwald did not dispose of such ample folkloric material as Lönnrot, he genially imitated it (like the Scotch James Macpherson, in his Ossian’s Songs). As a result, Kalevipoeg is abounding with lyrical metaphors and subtle poetic imagery as intensely as Estonian genuine folksongs.

Kalevipoeg is a “nation-building” epic. I do not know any other European epic of Romanticism that would have emphasised, with such intensity as Kalevipoeg, the patriotic ideal. The only possible parallel for Kalevipoeg in this sense could be found in Camões’s The Lusiads, from the European Renaissance. Both are national-patriotic epics par excellence, designed to inspire a nation by its great deeds in the past, to project its future.

In Kalevipoeg’s plot and even philosophical structure a certain similarity with Goethe’s Faust could be observed. (The great difference, naturally, lies in the fact that Goethe employed amply Greek mythology and ancient verse meters, whereas Kreutzwald relied exclusively on national folkloric sources: even when complementing them by his own invention and “imported” intertextualities, he “Estonised” the whole story).

Kalevipoeg is first presented as the youngest son and successor of Kalev, the ancient mythic king of the Estonians. Linda, his mother, brings him into the world, when the old Kalev is already dead. Soon Linda, too, dies, as she is raped by a Finnish sorcerer and, though saved from the latter by Heavens, is converted into a rocky pillar in Iru (near Tallinn). From Linda’s tears, when she mourned her husband, Kreutzwald claims, the lake Ülemiste (today there is the Tallinn International Airport nearby) was formed. Kreutzwald mythologised the geophysical Estonia, scattered its soil with the seeds of spirituality.

There is a special relationship between the hero, Kalevipoeg (also called, like his father, simply Kalev) and his parents. At the most dramatic moments of his life he returns to his parents’ grave: they give him advice, how to find his way in the world. Kalevipoeg’s conversation with his dead mother and father are really among the most lyrical episodes of the whole epic. In one episode, Kalevipoeg confesses that he has no intention to marry any girl. The highest goal for Kalevipoeg, like for the count Roland, as well as Faust, is to serve his country and people.

Yet Kalevipoeg’s path to such a lofty moral understanding is gradual and painful. As a young man (cf. a young nation) he commits several grave sins. He causes the death of the Island Maid to whom he had made love (parallels not only with Faust but also with Don Juan are not missing!) and in a gust of anger, being drunk, he kills a son of a Finnish blacksmith. The latter event provides the main turning point for the following dramatic developments. Even though Kalevipoeg subsequently, thanks to his noble actions – he regrets his sins, has compassion for the weak and the humble, builds a town, makes, like Ulysses, an exploratory ship voyage to the end of the world, fights the Devil and the hostile troops of invading nations – achieves a genuinely ethical dimension, the imprecation on him of the Finnish blacksmith is fulfilled. Kalevipoeg loses his legs by his own sword and dies. However, in the same way as Faust’s soul is finally redeemed by Heavens, the ancient Estonian gods led by Taara (the thunder god, comparable to Thor, in Scandinavian mythology) decide to bind the revived Kalevipoeg to a rock at Hell’s gate (a parallel with Prometheus), making him the guardian of the inferno.

Kreutzwald’s epic ends with the author’s augury that one day Kalevipoeg would be freed from the rock and he would return to Estonia, to bring freedom and happiness to his people.
Kalevipoeg has inspired in Estonia numerous works of art (including a ballet, by Eugen Kapp) and the hero’s figure has expanded through a great number of interpretations in Estonian literature, ranging from pathetic images to humorous and parodic travesties. Beyond doubt, Kreutzwald’s great work has been essential in the forging of the national “awakening” movement in the 19th century and in the persistence of national memory and the ideal of freedom during the 20th century, under foreign occupations and repressions that Estonians have had to suffer.

Kreutzwald’s augury is not, however, devoid of ambiguity. In a sense, it may well be even more subtle than the final symbol in Goethe’s Faust. One should not overlook the fundamental relatedness of Kalevipoeg’s life and action with nature around him. The epic, in fact, is saturated with lyrical (and sometimes also coarsely sexual-physical) images that bind the hero to the nature and the soil of his country. It restrains the hero’s actions, makes his moral growth a slow process, contrary to any too straightforward rationalistic optimism. The same could be true of Kreutzwald’s prediction about the return of Kalevipoeg. Estonia is now free again, but Kalevipoeg still seems to be lingering on his way.


Jüri Talvet,
Professor of Comparative Literature
University of Tartu