JWC: Day Two (somewhere, out there, it's still Tuesday)
July 2nd: Read about a new topic and explore on it. Take any approach you'd like (serious and educational or funny and sarcastic) and educate your readers on it.
If you're a fan of Tolkien, then you may have read an excellent biography of his, written by Humphrey Carpenter. If you've read said biography, you probably noticed numerous references to one of Tolkien's literary inspirations: a Finnish epic called the Kalevala. That, dear readers, is what you're about to learn about, because to put it professionally, ancient epics are my jam, and the Kalevala is no exception.
Like most epics, the Kalevala is a gigantic poem (seriously, it's huge. One published version of it was over 12,000 lines.), one that was sung to music built on a pentachord. The poem was usually performed by a duo, with each performer alternating verses or groups of verses. Although performances varied greatly, as the poem was a popular one with a thousand different variations, all performances were done in trochaic tetrameter, which is...a little too complicated for me to explain at 1 am, so here's an example of it from Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream':
Puck:
Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand;
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Anyways, back to the Kalevala. It contained a bunch of themes you find in virtually all epics; betrayal, revenge, old gods, heroes, lovers that turn out to be your sister, that kind of stuff. The Sampo, which was a magical talisman, plays a role in the stories (aka it's a plot device), and there's a big theme of the protagonists trying to accomplish impossible talks. The protagonists fail, and their failure leads to "tragedy and humiliation", because if there's one thing you should know about epics, it's that happy things don't usually happen, and when they do it's because the gods were in a good mood.. (One day I shall write about Heroic Ages and the fairly recent phenomenon of the masses feeling cheated by unhappy endings, but that's not too relevant to the topic at hand).
Now the thing about epic poems that aren't written down because they're an oral tradition, is that the language they were spoken in will start to die out, and that's exactly what was happening to Finnish. Swedish and Latin kinda took over in the 1100's (don't quote me on that) and people just...stopped speaking Finnish. In 1835 a man named Elias Lonnrot published the first compilation of all of the poems that make up the Kalevala, and it was a huge contribution to the Fennomanic movement (in a nutshell, Finnish pride movement) and the Finnish national identity. Lonnrot published several versions of it, adding and changing things until he died, and all of those versions have been translated numerous times into over 60 different languages. Of course it's virtually impossible to be certain how much he tinkered with, and how much is just 'Lonnrot wrote down what the village I just visited said was their version of Poem 145', but that doesn't change the fact that the Kalevala is a fascinating story that everyone should take a look at. Because ancient epics? They're the coolest.
If you're a fan of Tolkien, then you may have read an excellent biography of his, written by Humphrey Carpenter. If you've read said biography, you probably noticed numerous references to one of Tolkien's literary inspirations: a Finnish epic called the Kalevala. That, dear readers, is what you're about to learn about, because to put it professionally, ancient epics are my jam, and the Kalevala is no exception.
Like most epics, the Kalevala is a gigantic poem (seriously, it's huge. One published version of it was over 12,000 lines.), one that was sung to music built on a pentachord. The poem was usually performed by a duo, with each performer alternating verses or groups of verses. Although performances varied greatly, as the poem was a popular one with a thousand different variations, all performances were done in trochaic tetrameter, which is...a little too complicated for me to explain at 1 am, so here's an example of it from Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream':
Puck:
Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand;
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Anyways, back to the Kalevala. It contained a bunch of themes you find in virtually all epics; betrayal, revenge, old gods, heroes, lovers that turn out to be your sister, that kind of stuff. The Sampo, which was a magical talisman, plays a role in the stories (aka it's a plot device), and there's a big theme of the protagonists trying to accomplish impossible talks. The protagonists fail, and their failure leads to "tragedy and humiliation", because if there's one thing you should know about epics, it's that happy things don't usually happen, and when they do it's because the gods were in a good mood.. (One day I shall write about Heroic Ages and the fairly recent phenomenon of the masses feeling cheated by unhappy endings, but that's not too relevant to the topic at hand).
Now the thing about epic poems that aren't written down because they're an oral tradition, is that the language they were spoken in will start to die out, and that's exactly what was happening to Finnish. Swedish and Latin kinda took over in the 1100's (don't quote me on that) and people just...stopped speaking Finnish. In 1835 a man named Elias Lonnrot published the first compilation of all of the poems that make up the Kalevala, and it was a huge contribution to the Fennomanic movement (in a nutshell, Finnish pride movement) and the Finnish national identity. Lonnrot published several versions of it, adding and changing things until he died, and all of those versions have been translated numerous times into over 60 different languages. Of course it's virtually impossible to be certain how much he tinkered with, and how much is just 'Lonnrot wrote down what the village I just visited said was their version of Poem 145', but that doesn't change the fact that the Kalevala is a fascinating story that everyone should take a look at. Because ancient epics? They're the coolest.