The Kalevala by Elias Lonnrot
The Finnish language belongs to a non-Indo-European group of languages whose origins have been traced to a region just west of the Urals. During the first milennium of our era, Uralic-speakers in the Baltic region developed the oral poetry which is the basis of the Kalevala, the epic poem of Finland which was assembled only 150 years ago as a portrait of an ancient people in war and peace. This poem, which has often been compared with the epics of Homer, played a central role in the process towards Finnish independence and inspired the classical composer Sibelius. This version of the Kalevela has been translated by Keith Bosley, who has been awarded the first Finnish State Prize for Translators for his work on the anthology "Finnish Folk Poetry".
Elias Lönnrot was a Finnish country doctor born in 1802. During twenty years spent working in a remote part of eastern Finland, Lönnrot collected fragments of folk tales and poetry which he believed formed a continuous epic. He undertook eleven field trips on a quest to gather as much material as he could, partly funded by the Finnish Literary Society, of which he was a founding member. The result was the Kalevala, first published in 1835. Lönnrot continued to collect material, eventually bringing out the version we know today in 1849. It consists of 22,795 verses, divided into fifty songs. Lönnrot most likely merged similar variants and stitched fragments together with his own words. Lönnrot became a professor of Finnish language and literature at the University of Helsinki in 1853. His work paved the way for the development of modern Finnish literature and promoted Finnish as the national language over Swedish. From 1866 he worked on the fourteen-year-long task of compiling the first Finnish-Swedish dictionary which contained over 200,000 entries. Many of the translations were coined by Lönnrot himself. He died in 1884. Horatio Clare is the bestselling author of numerous books including the memoirs Running for the Hills and Truant and the travel books A Single Swallow, Down to the Sea in Ships, Orison for a Curlew, Icebreaker and The Light in the Dark. His books for children include Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot and Aubrey and the Terrible Ladybirds. Horatio's essays and reviews appear on BBC radio and in the Financial Times, the Observer and the Spectator, among other publications. He lives with his family in West Yorkshire.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780192817006 |
| ISBN 10 | 0192817000 |
| Title | The Kalevala |
| Author | Elias Lonnrot |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year published | 1989-06-01 |
| Number of pages | 736 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |