It has long been known from Tolkien’s letters that his discovery as a schoolboy of Kalevala or ‘Land of Heroes’, a then recently-published collection of the songs or runos of unlettered peasants in Finland’s rural countryside, had a powerful impact on his imagination and was one of the earliest influences on his invented legendarium. In his 1951 letter describing his mythology to the publisher Milton Waldman Tolkien voiced the concern he had always had for the mythological ‘poverty’ of his own country. It was lacking in his eyes, ‘stories of its own’ comparable to the myths of other countries. There was, he wrote, ‘Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian’, and (singled out for special mention) ‘Finnish,’ which he said, ‘greatly affected’ him (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 144, hereafter Letters). Affect him it most certainly did, his engagement with it nearly ruining his Honour Moderations examinations of 1913, as he confessed to his son Christopher in 1944 (Letters, p. 87), and ‘set[ting] the rocket off in story’, as he wrote to W.H. Auden in 1955 (Letters, pp. 214–15).
At the time Tolkien was working on his story its source, the Finnish Kalevala, was a latecomer to the existing corpus of world mythologies. Unlike the myths of longer literary provenance such as the Greek and Roman, or the Celtic or Germanic, the songs of Kalevala were gathered and published only in the mid-19th century by a professional physician and amateur folklorist, Elias Lönnrot. So different in tone were these songs from the rest of the European myth corpus that they brought about a re-evaluation of the meaning of such terms as epic and myth.* Difference and re-evaluation notwithstanding, the publication of Kalevala had a profound effect on the Finns, who had lived under foreign rule for centuries – as part of Sweden from the 13th century to 1809, and from then to 1917 as a sub-set of Russia to which large parts of Finnish territory were ceded by Sweden. The discovery of an indigenous Finnish mythology, coming as it did at a time when myth was becoming associated with nationalism, gave the Finns a sense of cultural independence and a national identity, and made Lönnrot a national hero. Kalevala energized a burgeoning Finnish nationalism and was influential in Finland’s declaration of independence from Russia in 1917. It seems more than possible that Kalevala’s impact on the Finns as ‘a mythology for Finland’ might have made as deep an impression on Tolkien as the songs themselves, and played a major part in his expressed desire to create his so-called ‘mythology for England’, though what he actually described was a mythology that he could ‘dedicate’ to England (Letters, p. 144). The fact that he would go on to absorb his Kullervo into the character of his own mythology’s Túrin Turambar is evidence of Kalevala’s continuing influence on his creativity.
Tolkien first read Kalevala in the 1907 English translation of W.F. Kirby while in his last year at King Edward’s School in Birmingham in 1910–11. The primitive tales so captured his imagination that when he went up to Oxford in the autumn of 1911, he borrowed C.N.E. Eliot’s Finnish Grammar from the Exeter College Library in an attempt to learn enough Finnish to read them in their original language. He thought Kirby’s translation ‘poor’, but found Finnish itself to be like ‘an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before’(Letters, p. 214). In spite of this, he confessed that he ‘never learned Finnish well enough to do more than plod through a bit of the original … being mostly taken up with its effect on “my language”’ (214). Nevertheless, his effort to read Kalevala in its original language is testament to his growing awareness that story and language are inseparable, indeed, that (as he wrote much later in Manuscript A of ‘On Fairy-stories’‘mythology is language and language is mythology’ (TOFS, p. 181).
Tolkien was particularly taken by the character he called ‘Kullervo the hapless’ (Letters, p. 214), Kalevala’s closest approximation of a tragic hero. So taken, indeed, was he that in his final year as an Oxford undergraduate he wrote to his fiancée Edith Bratt, some time in October of 1914, that he was ‘trying to turn one of the stories – which is really a very great story and most tragic – into a short story ... with chunks of poetry in between’ (Letters, p. 7). This was ‘The Story of Kullervo’, the bulk of which was produced, as nearly as can be ascertained, some time during the years 1912–14 (ibid., 214) and almost certainly before his war service intervened and he was sent to France in 1916. The dating is problematic. Tolkien himself placed it as early as 1912; scholars Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull prefer 1914; and John Garth sets it at late 1914. The manuscript title page (Plate 1) carries a date in parentheses ‘(1916)’ in Christopher Tolkien’s hand, but as this is written on the verso of an appreciation on the occasion of Tolkien’s honorary Doctorate from the National University of Ireland in 1954, the 1916 date is retrospective by almost forty years. The 1916 date is further called into question by a notation written below it in pencil: ‘HC [Humphrey Carpenter] says 1914.’ This comment would have been made during or after the time when Carpenter was at work on his biography of Tolkien, published in 1977.
Any work’s time of composition is often difficult to determine with precision, since most creative activity develops over an extended period from first idea to final version and can be started, stopped, revised and re-revised along the way. Without more manuscript evidence than we now possess, it is impossible to pinpoint the time of Tolkien’s work on ‘Kullervo’ from inspiration to cessation any more narrowly than during the years 1912–1916. What is fairly certain is that he did not begin work on the story before he read Kalevala in 1911, and may not have done further work on it after his posting to France in June of 1916. From Tolkien’s comment in the letter to Edith, it seems to have been the story’s tragic qualities as much as its mythic qualities that ‘set the rocket off in story’, and so powerfully attracted him that he felt the need to re-tell it.
Aside from its palpable influence on the story of Túrin Turambar, however, The Story of Kullervo is notable also for the ways in which it prefigures the narrative styles of Tolkien’s future corpus. It presages without precisely fitting a number of the genres or categories or forms – short story, tragedy, myth-retelling, verse, prose – in which he later wrote. It is at once a short story, a tragedy, a myth, a blend of prose and poetry, yet – hardly surprising in so early a work – all of these in embryo, none fully realized. Thus in all these areas it stands a little to one side of the rest of the canon. As a short story it invites comparison with his later short stories, Roverandom, Leaf By Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham, and Smith of Wootton Major; as a myth re-telling it belongs with his Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and The Fall of Arthur; in its mix of prose and poetry it recalls a similar mixture in Tolkien’s masterwork, The Lord of the Rings. Stylistically, too, there is ground for comparison, for the ‘chunks of poetry’ not infrequently segue into a rhythmic prose that evokes the poetry-prose mix of the speech of Tom Bombadil.
The comparisons end there, however, for in other aspects The Story of Kullervo has little in common with most of the above works. Only The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún conveys the pagan atmosphere that is the essence of Kullervo, and The Fall of Arthur its sense of ineluctable doom. Roverandom, although it has, as recently pointed out, distinct similarities to the mythic Irish imramma or voyage stories,* was in its genesis and essentially remains a tale for children. Leaf By Niggle, although it is set in vaguely modern times and in a place that, while never identified, is pretty clearly Tolkien’s own England, is a parable about the journey of the soul, and by far the most allegorical of all Tolkien’s works. Farmer Giles of Ham is a playfully satiric pseudo-folktale with a number of scholarly inside jokes and topical references to Tolkien’s Oxford. Smith of Wootton Major is pure fairy tale, the most artistically consistent of all his shorter works. In contrast to all of these, The Story of Kullervo – emphatically not for children, neither playful nor satiric, not allegorical, and with little of the faërie quality Tolkien found essential for fairy stories – is relentlessly dark, a foreboding and tragic tale of blood feud, murder, child abuse, revenge, incest and suicide, so different in tone and content from his other short fiction