Fashioning Finnish Philology

From Scandinavia: A History, by Ewan Butler (New Word City, 2016), Kindle pp. 212-213:

In Finland, administrative ties with Sweden had been exchanged for ties with Russia, but literary life such as it was continued to develop in its own fashion. Despite the crosscurrents of Classicism, Romanticism, and Realism that were playing elsewhere in Europe, Finland’s chief concern in the nineteenth century was the development of a unified national language. Literature and theater could not emerge until a Finnish language had been developed and accepted among cultivated men, who up to that time had been conversant only in Swedish. Finland’s vast store of folklore offered the most promising area of exploration to the generation of writers who first tackled the language problem. Writing in 817 [1817?], a student argued: “No independent nation can exist without a fatherland, and no fatherland can exist without folk poetry [which is] nothing more than the crystal in which a nationality can mirror itself.” The key figure in this search for a national identity was Elias Lönnrot, who as a philologist-folklorist, collected materials from the Lapps, the Estonians, the Karelians, and other Finnish tribes, and assembled both the first dictionary of the Finnish language and its first extensive written literature. His legend, Kalevala (1835), a compilation of some 22,000 lines of oral history, tells in epic form the mythic history of the Finns from the Creation to the coming of Christianity, and it served as a rallying point for Finnish nationalist feeling, not only in subsequent literature, but in painting, sculpture, music, and political life, as the people moved toward independence.