Paper short abstract:

In my paper, I will discuss how nostalgia and longing for the past were included in the Kalevala and how Elias Lönnrot operated on these elements to represent the Kalevala as true and authentic.

Paper long abstract:

In my presentation, I discourse Elias Lönnrot's textual strategies to represent the Kalevala as true and authentic. A detailed research analysis of selected authentic folk lyric poems, Lönnrot's writings on folk lyric and the Kalevala provide for examples and evidence on these strategies.

Elias Lönnrot used the Finnish folk lyric poems and the poetics of folk singers for the Kalevala in order to obtain traditional content for the epic. The intellectual audience of the Kalevala, which was neither familiar with folk poetry, nor with common people or their lifes, admired and glamorized the folk poetry of the Kalevala by considering it as a representation of old, sensitive poetry of the Finnish people. This referred especially to the lyrical poems. 

For Lönnrot and his collegues folk poems represented a collective endeavour. The collective was synonymous to a quest to present something universal, something which existed and could be shared and experienced by everybody. Lönnrot was quoted to claim that "lyric songs are not made [by someone] but songs are made by themselves; there is no author behind them. If we call a specific author for them, songs will lose their value as folk poems. This is said especially about lyric songs---."

For Lönnrot the lyric songs especially did not only express emotion, they were the emotion. By emphasizing the shared collective nature of the lyric and by applying the selected textual strategies, Lönnrot aspired to present the Kalevala as the shared emotions of the Finnish people.