often spoken of as the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. The language they speak belongs to a group called Finnish-Ugrian, or Altaic, and is allied to Lappish and Esthonian, and more distantly to Turkish and Hungarian. There are only twenty-one letters in the alphabet; the letter J is pronounced like Y (as a consonant), and Y almost as a short I. The first syllable of every word is accented. This renders it difficult to accommodate such words as Kālĕvălā to the metre; but I have tried to do my best.
The Finlanders are very fond of old ballads, of which a great number have been collected, especially by Elias Lönnrot, to whom it occurred to arrange a selection into a connected poem, to which he gave the name of Kalevala. This he first published 1835, in two small volumes containing twenty-five Runos or Cantos, but afterwards rearranged and expanded it to fifty Runos, in which form it was published in 1849; and this was speedily translated into other languages. Perhaps the best translations are Schiefner’s German version (1852) and Collan’s Swedish version (1864). Several volumes of selections and abridgments have also appeared in America and England; and an English translation by John Martin Crawford (in two volumes) was published in New York and London in 1889.
Schiefner used a flexible metre for his translation, which resembles the original as closely as the different character of Finnish and German would permit, a metre which had previously, though rarely, been used in English. His work attracted the attention of Longfellow, whose "Song of Hiawatha" is only a rather poor imitation of Schiefner’s version of the Kalevala, some of the lines being almost identical, and several of the characters and incidents being more or less distinctly borrowed from those in the Kalevala. The incidents, however, are generally considerably altered, and not always for the better.
It will be seen that Lönnrot edited the Kalevala from old ballads, much as the poems of Homer, or at least the Iliad and Odyssey, are said to have been put together by order of Pisistratus.
In the preparation of my own translation, the flexibility of the metre has permitted me to attempt an almost literal rendering; without, I hope, sacrificing elegance. The simplicity of
