[In the following excerpt, Harbison comments on the absence of a clear scholarly, idealistic, or artistic focus in the Kalevala]

[Elias] Lönnrot was a doctor who began to collect fragments of Finnish oral poetry on vacations and tours of medical inspection in rural Finland, without at first the idea of forming them into a whole. After his first publication, The Harp (1829-31), two skilled singers in an eastern district gave him a new conception of the songs' homogeneity, though the possibility of putting together a Finnish Ossian had been broached much earlier in an ethnic newspaper.

As he went on Lönnrot not only collected but embodied the folk tradition, becoming a singer who like peasant ones could recite from memory and improvise links and elaborations as he sang. He differed from peasant singers in using transcription to learn the songs, which helped him build a larger repertoire than any of them, while his knowledge of literary models like Homer undoubtedly influenced the way he exercised the singer's right to arrange his material, to reassign actions to different of the stock characters who recur through the poems. But if he is a more radical social type than the Grimms, a case of deep mimicry, he feels correspondingly less ideological commitment to folk literature, casualness in his relation which makes him less important than they in the history of ideas.

Like Runge whose transcription of The Fisherman's Wife in the language of fisherfolk fired the Grimms at an early stage in their research, Lönnrot cultivated unscientific closeness to his sources, entering a twoway relation with the informants from which the Grimms kept aloof. His doctoral dissertation had been about magic medicine and he became a popular instructor through medical and agricultural manuals for simple readers, giving them something in return for what he got and even contracting their diseases like typhus. As he lacks, in spite of various linguistic compilations including a Finnish grammar and dictionary, the Grimms' scholarly rigor, so he does the crusading ideology of immersion in a lower class one might expect of a Russian, though he cultivated simplicity and retirement—peasant clothes, a pipe, work at an ingenious desk he had invented, exercise, singing.

The Grimms' materials remain detectably on the scale they naturally occur, though massed differently. Lönnrot while scrupulous in preserving the specificity of his fragments—charms for catching bears hold up the narrative for four hundred lines—imposes on them a principle of coherence borrowed from another culture. Trying to make an epic from these desultory pieces he forges an unachieved Ossian, flat and centerless because he refuses to falsify the indigenous attitude toward his actors into heroism, and preserves even the genre of the components, including recognizable bits from south Finland which are more balladic because in that region singers are women. After the addition of an equal amount of new material in 1849 the Kalevala became even more a treasure trove or national display case which contained every single bit of information about the life of the early Finns Lönnrot could turn up. He was at pains to safeguard it from obsolescence with the claim that no new material was likely to appear because he and his assistants had scoured Finland and the songs were dying anyway from exposure to the air of national publicity. He is also concerned to show that odd usages in the poems like impossible tasks set for a suitor, a familiar motif in fairy tales, correspond to customs among the early Finns. He finds ingenious rationalizations of mythic beliefs, like that churches in Finland were built by giants and wrecked at night by demons, rationalizations which depend on the Finns taking their history from the downtrodden Lapps and then overlaying it with bits of their own contrary perspective. Thus giants are Finns as seen by Lapps, and demons Lapps seen by Finns.

A certain lack of the grandeur which the imported notion of epic demands prompted bizarre mythic interpretations Lönnrot confutes by noting prosaic inconsistencies—the character who represents the spirit of fire is afraid of it and gets burned, the spirit of the air is as much at the mercy of contrary winds as others. To imagine a slanging match early in the poem as a contest between water and snow, a pivot between winter and summer, or the voyage to steal back a prized grain mill, simply because the geography is uncertain, as occurring in the blue seas of heaven with the lynchpin of the universe as its goal, are efforts to enlarge the poems to match the scale of one's own biggest feelings. The characters are so obviously petty in themselves that somewhat on the model of Ossian one turns to the circumambient environment for intimations of something larger.

Lönnrot was immune to this need for transcendence which converted the poem's evident responsiveness to nature into an embracing nature cult. He argued instead that early beliefs were close to his own, founded on a single unspecific god. And he was content to lack a transforming vision, to collect pieces of shattered pots and to form them into a pattern but not to see it as the world-tree when he had finished.

The metric form of the original materials is also relaxed and uncomplex, consisting of paired lines, the second of which varies the language but repeats closely the matter of the first. Although the singing depicted in the poem does not take this form, as collected by Lönnrot it was usually sung by two, a lead and a support, one of whom directed its course, leaving the alternate line to be completed by his partner while he prepared the one to follow. They sang clasping each other's hands and rocking back and forth. As it comes through translation the motion of the verse is powerfully physical, and the particular proportions of sound and thought would probably feel much the same in any language, like heaving and then resting on the oars, except that the repeat is not dead calm but an effortless exertion.

Thus the larger motion of the poem no matter how long it dwells on a simple action never becomes involute or intricate but a continuous grooming or polishing. Even the eyes sift the page like shaking a basket of stones, motion which acts as a filter keeping back some of the sense. In formal procedure it is an extreme example, but perhaps typical of anonymous products seeking out the kind of action which is rolled up then comes unrolled, and thus largely performs itself, like the house that Jack built or the hiding of successive kernels in each other and then in successive fish which are then chased and successively cut open to find fire at the end again. Admittedly Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, though rude in its way and peculiar for its author's claims of illiteracy, is an extreme example of an authored poem, of a certain intricacy going with inexperience like a literary equivalent of Scandinavian or Celtic interlaced ornament. The professions of ignorance may be ironic adoptions of local coloration from the naïve hero, or licenses for eccentricity, for it is a poem which allows language to become contorted in following grotesque actions, but perhaps it only proves that any action is susceptible of gnarling as each one in Lönnrot is of smoothing. The comparison with Wolfram shows that there are certain kinds of wit and obscurity deeply individual and literary, however much he may pretend to be an oral poet, which could not be passed on by a group product like Kalevala, though the thought may feel animistic or mythical, so Wolfram conceives a battle as the struggle between the heraldic emblems on knights' shields instead of the knights themselves, between griffins and ostriches, on whose side a troop of anchors intervenes just as the conceit has begun to feel comfortable. Once he even splits one of these tribal totems between two groups, an army marked with the front halves of griffins joining a detachment identified by the rear halves.

Surprises on such a scale, of which Wolfram prepares large quantities, are impossible in an orally transmitted work like Kalevala with its liking for self-perpetuating chains such as the progress of Vainamoinen's tears in thirteen stages over various parts of his body, clothes, and possessions, running on to reach the lake and settle at its bottom from which they must be retrieved. Even a less automated example like the inquiry into the origin of iron touched off by Vainamoinen's wounding himself with an ax and needing to know how iron came to be, and especially how it came to be "bitter," or able to hurt its maker, in order to staunch the flow of blood—even this historical investigation is self-completing, burgeoning irresponsibly at the expense of the narrative which is always losing its way because it is a purposefulness largely imposed by Lönnrot. Nothing reveals better the difference between the efficiency of the fairy tales and the exiguous spinning-out of the songs than the idle quality of magic in the Kalevala, which has become a reflex to be elaborated, whereas in the tale it escapes conscious inspection.

Home feeling not magic runs deepest in the Kalevala, local sentiment tied not to geography but to certain usages, mostly connected with the husbanding of things or with cleanliness. This unadventurous meaning of local is well expressed in Gallen-Kallela's peasant interiors of dark wood painted in the 1890s, and more abstractly by his Kalevala illustrations which look hewn from wood, a moderate heroism of work. Some of the most poignant moments of the poem are the most obviously interpolated and substitutable, general instructions to brides on how to clean stoves, spoons not forgetting the handles, tables not forgetting the legs, with none of the Homeric feeling that a ritual significance still graces the act.

A nearer example than Homer of a naively materialistic world, the Nibelungenlied, lays over bare possession and maintenance a powerful mythology of waste. Expenditure is heroism there, sign of a craving within the limited confines for largeness. The Kalevala is remarkable for its sober contentment with cleanliness as a measure of civilization and for concentrating on its dark corner without pretending to prefer it to sitting by the window. Though an example of the higher Romantic valuation of custom and usage as concrete history, the sort of thing the eighteenth century had tried to call prejudice, the Kalevala is truly extraordinary in how little it presses the claim of its own uniqueness.