Kalevala Day

The tale has profoundly shaped the Finnish national identity, influencing the country’s literature, music, and visual arts.

The Kalevala Society [fi], founded in 1919, has played a central role in organizing and promoting these celebrations, overseeing cultural programs and academic gatherings.

Kalevala is a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish and Karelian oral folklore and mythology.

[4][3] Kalevala Day has its origins in Finland's academic world, which played a significant role in fostering the nationalistic movement during the 19th century.

These events took on a distinctly patriotic tone, with the first celebration featuring speeches that honored Kalevala and its compiler, Elias Lönnrot, as well as paying tribute to the students' home regions of Savonia and Karelia, and to Finland as a whole.

Beside Lönnrot is the hero of Kalevala, Väinämöinen, and at the base of the monument's pedestal, the maiden Impi is selecting strands from her hair for a kantele.

While Johan Ludvig Runeberg wrote in Swedish, Kalevala was distinctly Finnish, highlighting the linguistic identity championed by the Fennoman movement.

[8] During the 1910s, the Finnish Alliance (Suomalaisuuden Liitto) and various youth associations [fi] organized Kalevala Day celebrations across the country.

Notably, both Swedish- and Finnish-speaking students participated in the procession to Lönnrot's statue, reflecting a period of reduced linguistic tension between the two language groups.

In Helsinki, the society began hosting an academic and cultural gathering, attended by distinguished guests, featuring a program of speeches, music, and performances.

However, by this time, the epic had become politicized, resulting in two separate events: one organized by the Kalevala Society and another by the left-wing Finnish People's Democratic League.

Earlier that year, Soviet-Finnish politician and literary historian Otto Wille Kuusinen had published a new edition of Kalevala, which included a Marxist introduction.

In it, Kuusinen rejected Lönnrot's bourgeois theories regarding the origin and age of the verses and emphasized that Kalevala was based on Karelian, rather than Finnish, poetry.