The underlying pencil version might have been that given to the Sundial Society, and the rewriting and reworking in ink done for Exeter College, but the latter work seems extensive for a ‘stop-gap’ paper. The ink manuscript, which refers to the Saxons as the enemy and Russia as an ally of Britain, certainly dates from the First World War. Some support for an earlier date for the pencil text or for a lost earlier version, and at least some passage of time, is given in the second paragraph: ‘If I continually drop into talking as if no one in the room had read these poems before, it is because no one had, when I first read it …’ (p. 67).
In the first part of the paper Tolkien discusses why he likes the Kalevala. Its poems are literature ‘so very unlike any of the things that are familiar to general readers, or even to those versed in the more curious by paths’, coming from Classic, Celtic, and Teutonic sources (‘I put these in order of increasing appeal to myself’), which in spite of differences imply ‘something kindred in the imagination of the speakers of Indo-European languages’ (pp. 67–8). ‘When I first read the Kalevala’, he continued, ‘that is, crossed the gulf between the Indo-European-speaking peoples of Europe into this smaller realm of those who cling in queer corners to the forgotten tongues and memories of an elder day’, the newness worried him, yet the more he read, the more he felt at home and enjoyed it. ‘When H[onour]Mod[eration]s should have been occupying all my forces I once made a wild assault on the stronghold of the original language [Finnish] and was repulsed at first with heavy losses’ (p. 69).
He admits that ‘heroes of the Kalevala do behave with a singular lack of conventional dignity and with a readiness for tears and dirty dealing’, and that its lovers ‘are forward and take a great deal of rebuffing. There is no Troilus to need a Pandarus to do his shy wooing for him: rather here it is the mothers-in-law who do some sound bargaining behind the scenes and give cynical advice to their daughters calculated to shatter the most stout illusions’ (p. 70).
Although the work is often described as ‘the national Finnish epic’, it is not an epic, but rather
a mass of conceivably epic material: but … it would lose all that which is its greatest delight if it were ever to be epically handled. The main stories, the bare events, alone could remain; all that underworld, all that rich profusion and luxuriance which clothe them would be stripped away ….
We have here then a collection of mythological ballads full of that very primitive undergrowth that the litterature [sic] of Europe has on the whole been cutting away and reducing for centuries with different and earlier completeness in different peoples …. Therefore let us rather rejoice that we have come suddenly upon a storehouse of those popular imaginings which we had feared lost, stocked with stories as yet not sophisticated into a sense of proportion; with no thought of the decent limits of exaggeration …. [pp. 70–72]
Both the Kalevala and the Mabinogion (*Celtic influences) delight in a good story and in exaggeration, but the former pays no attention to plausibility and has no feel of a background of literary tradition. To Tolkien, in the Kalevala ‘the colours, the deeds, the marvels, and the figures of the heroes are all splashed onto a clean bare canvas by a sudden hand: even the legends concerning the origins of the most ancient things seem to come fresh from the singer’s hot imagination of the moment’ (p. 73).
In the second part of the paper Tolkien provides details of Finnish history and the transmission of its songs and ballads, and of Elias Lönnrot’s forming of the 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