Kalevala | A Foreward to the Kalevala

In the following excerpt, Magoun notes ways that the Kalevala is significantly different from most national epics, and proposes that first-time readers of this work abandon the usual approach of a straight-through reading and instead read different sections or story cycles almost at random. He identifies several sections that stand well on their own and repay such an approach.

Again and again the Kalevala has been described as the national heroic epic of the Finnish people, a description which, at least outside Finland, has tended to do the work a certain disservice by raising expectations that the reader is not likely to find fulfilled, regardless of what else he may find that is richly rewarding at a poetical, folkloristic, or ethnographic level. Any talk about a national heroic epic is bound to evoke thoughts of the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, the Old French Chanson de Roland, or the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, all of which possess...

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