Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses ideals of dwelling in the national narrative. It examines how sense of home was utilized, poetically and ideologically, inside the Kalevala in order to reduce the distance between the rural culture from which the oral poetry in the Kalevala derived and the modern readership.

Paper long abstract:

As an editor of the oral tradition for the production of folk-poetry publications, Elias Lönnrot amended and removed traditional language, contents and contexts of oral poetry in order to make oral poems comprehended and suitable for his bourgeois readers. One of the narrative strategies by Lönnrot was an idea of home; home as a concrete place where to return and to get comfort, but also, as a place of belonging and unifying, and as the case might be, of segregating. In Finnish-Karelian oral poetry home is a safe place surrounded by the outwarding forest. Also there are at least two opposite homes: childhood home and mother-in-law's home. The border between home hut and the other, strange landscape is associated by diverse dangers waiting for the one who crosses the line. Lönnrot utilized different meanings of dwelling appeared in the oral poetry, but modified the idea of home toward a moral-nuanced boundary between we and the others, the family unit and the public space.

This paper examines editorial strategies of dwelling in the national epic by illustrating how sense of home and of family was utilized, poetically and ideologically, in order to address the modern readership as well as to narrow the distance between the rural culture from which the oral poetry in the Kalevala derived and the modern bourgeois culture.