Identifying England's Lonnrot

Abstract

Tolkien’s fascination with the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, created by nineteenth-century physician and folklorist Elias Lonnrot, is well recognized. Anyone who has read his collected letters knows this. In 1914, he wrote the following to his fiance Edith Bratt: “Had an interesting talk with that quaint man Earp I have told you of and introduced him (to his great delight) to the ‘Kalevala,’ the Finnish ballads. Amongst other work I am trying to turn one of the stories—which is really a very great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between” (Letters 7). Fifty years later he was still fascinated, as he revealed in a 1964 letter to Christopher Bretherton: “The germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala. It remains a major matter in the legends of the First Age (which I hope to publish as The Silmarillion), though as ‘The Children of Hurin’ it is entirely changed except in the tragic ending” (345). That fascination went further and deeper than the single story idea of the hapless Kullervo, as I intend to show in this study. The attractiveness of the Kalevala, according to Michael Branch, in A History of Finland’s Literature, “lies in the grandeur and universality of its themes, the coherence of its plots, and the splendor of its poetry” (4), qualities that kept Tolkien engaged with the material for many years of his life. Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s official biographer, dates Tolkien’s first encounter with the Kalevala around 1911 during his final term at St. Edward’s School, shortly before his enrollment at Oxford. According to Carpenter, “He wrote appreciatively of ‘this strange people and these new gods, this race of unhypocritical lowbrow scandalous heroes,’ adding ‘the more I read of it, the more I felt at home and enjoyed myself.’ He had discovered the Kalevala in W. H. Kirby’s Everyman translation, and he determined to find an edition in the original Finnish as soon as possible” (57). Thus began Tolkien’s long-term association with this Finnish source that would surface in his own work as both content (the Silmarils, and various treatments of Turin Turambar) and form (the sprawling collection of myths, tales, annals, poems, and chronicles of the Silmarillion proper, as well as Quenya, the Elvish language inspired by Finnish). In casting his vast world of Middle-earth as England’s pre-history, transmitted from fictional sources (Elves of Tol Eressea) to historical

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