Kalevala. This is followed in the third part by a discussion of the Finnish language, which ‘makes a strong bid for the place of most difficult in Europe’ (p. 76), and of the metre of the poems. He mentions that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow pirated the metre and some incidents for his poem Hiawatha.
In the fourth part he describes the religion of the Kalevala as ‘a luxuriant animism – it can hardly be separated from the purely mythological: this means that in the Kalevala every stock and stone, every tree, the birds, waves, hills, air, the tables, swords and the beer even have well defined personalities’, and may speak (p. 80). In addition, ‘every tree wave and hill again has its nymph and spirit’ (p. 81), and there is a ‘jumble of gods great and small’ (p. 82).
In the fifth part Tolkien notes that Finland is also known as the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, and that the Kalevala describes a land of lakes and marshes and trees, and a fauna including bears, wolves, and subarctic animals. The customs and social relationships of its people are strange – travelling in sleighs, walking on snowshoes, the sauna or bath-house, and mothers who are very powerful. Characters sometimes travel north ‘to Pohja, a mirky misty northland country … whence magic comes and all manner of marvels’ (p. 85).
In the sixth part Tolkien mentions ‘some very curious tricks’ which add colour to the verse. After a statement in one line, ‘the next line contains a great enlargement of it, often with reckless alteration of detail or of fact: colours, metals, names are piled up not for their distinct representation of ideas so much as just for the emotional effect. There is a strange and often effectively lavish use of the words gold and silver, and honey, which are strewn up and down the lines’ (pp. 85–6). He notes many, sometimes lengthy, incantations. There is a certain amount of humour, and those with ‘dulled vision’ may laugh at the simplicity of some passages. But there are also ‘passages which are not only entertaining stories of magic and adventure, quaint myths, or legend; but which are truly lyrical and delightful even in translation’ (pp. 86–7). The formal text ends with this part, but is followed by a list of passages to be read.
THE SECOND VERSION
The second version of the paper survives in an unfinished typescript with the title The Kalevala. In the first edition of our Chronology, based on our examination of these works in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives), we dated the typescript to ?1921–?1924, when Tolkien was teaching at *Leeds; Verlyn Flieger (in both 2010 and 2015) questions this range of dates, preferring 1919–21. We stand by our reasoning, however, which is as follows. A reference in the typescript version (not in the manuscript first version) to the ‘late war’, that is the First World War, takes it to after 1918, while a reference to the League of Nations (in relation to the Kalevala being called the Finnish National Epic – ‘as if it was of the nature of the universe that every nation …, besides a national bank, and government, should before qualifying for membership of the League, show lawful possession also of a National Epic’, p. 103) moves it further to no earlier than 1920. (The League of Nations was created in the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, but the Treaty did not go into effect until 10 January 1920, the first meeting of the League council was not until 16 January 1920, and the first General Assembly meeting did not occur until 15 November 1920.) The typescript (only) also refers to the recording of the Kalevala a century earlier, and Lönnrot began his work in the 1820s. ‘?1921–?1924’ seemed, and seems, a reasonable period for this version of the talk. Like the manuscript, it refers to Petrograd, which was renamed Leningrad in 1924.
The typescript, which unlike the first version is not divided into parts, breaks off halfway through the manuscript’s Part V, before reaching a discussion of customs and social relationships. With some reordering it makes much the same points as the manuscript, but at more than double the length for the extent it covers. The whole is subject to minor additions and improved phrasing, such as Tolkien’s summing up the cast of the Kalevala as ‘this race of unhypocritical low-brow scandalous heroes, and sadly unsentimental lovers’ (pp. 101–2), but mainly by the expansion of previous matter and the introduction of new topics.
Tolkien now says much more about the Mabinogion in comparing it with the Kalevala:
Of course in the Welsh tales there is often, indeed continually, in evidence the same delight in a picturesque lie, in a strong breathless flight of fancy; but paradoxically the Welsh tales are both far more absurd and far less so than the Finnish. They are far more absurd for they are (when we get them) less fresh than they once were; there is in many places a thick dust of a no longer understood tradition lying on them; strings of names and allusions that no longer have any meaning, that were already nonsense for the bards who related them …. Any one who wants to see what I mean has only to look at the catalogue of the heroes of Arthur’s court in the story of Kilhwch and Olwen, or the account of the feats that Kilhwch had to perform for the giant Yspaddaden Penkawr in order to win his daughter Olwen. There is little or nothing of this strange lumber in the Kalevala. On the other hand, the Welsh stories are far less absurd for the pictures painted have far more technique; their colours are cleverly, even marvellously schemed; their figures are cunningly grouped. The fairy-tale’s own plausibility is respected; if a man slays an impossible monster, the story holds firm to its lie. In the Land of Heroes a man may kill a gigantic elk in one line and find it poetic to call it a she-bear in the next. [pp. 107–8]
Tolkien also has more to say about paganism and Christianity, noting that the Finns were one of the last peoples of Europe to become Christian.
Today the Kalevala and its themes are still practically untouched by this influence, much less affected by it than the mythology of ancient Scandinavia as it appears in the Edda. Except in the story of the virgin Marjatta at the end, in a few references to Jumala or Ukko god of the Heavens, and so forth, even hints of the existence of Christianity are almost entirely absent; of its spirit there is nothing …. To this is of course largely ascribable the interesting primitiveness of the poems …. [pp. 110–11]
He defends the Kalevala against those who wonder about the genuineness of works so recently collected by declaring that its lateness is the reason it has not been ‘whitewashed, redecorated, upholstered in the eighteenth century manner’, or ‘roughly or moralistically handled’ (pp. 112–13).
There appears to be no evidence that the later version of the paper was delivered, but it was certainly tailored for delivery – even though, strangely, it begins with the introductory sentence about being a stop gap on the collapse of the proper speaker. It stops in mid-sentence at the bottom of a page. Perhaps Tolkien was updating it for himself, and in the latter part adding too much that he could not bear to omit.
It should be noted that a sentence added to the second version has had an unfortunate effect on Tolkien scholarship. In Biography Humphrey Carpenter wrote that in ‘a paper on the Kalevala [read] to a college society’ Tolkien
began to talk about the importance of the type of mythology found in the Finnish poems. ‘These mythological ballads,’ he said, ‘are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people.’ And he added: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ An exciting notion; and perhaps he was already thinking of creating that mythology for England himself. [p. 59]
The implication is that both sentences come from the paper Tolkien delivered at Oxford in 1914 and 1915 – words which have been frequently quoted in association with the earliest poems of his *‘Silmarillion’ mythology, and as written before he commenced *The Book of Lost Tales in which the history of the Elves has close ties with that of England. Although a variant of his first sentence (‘These mythological ballads …’) is in the paper as given in 1914/15, the second sentence appears only in the version of the 1920s (p.
