the ballad, the song of the people; the epic, the song of
the chiefs of the people, of the ruling race--are distinct in kind, it
does not follow that they have no connection, that the nobler may not
have been developed out of the materials of the lower form of expression.
And the value of the 'Kalevala' is partly this, that it combines the
continuity and unison of the epic with the simplicity and popularity of
the ballad, and so forms a kind of link in the history of the development
of poetry. This may become clearer as we proceed to explain the literary
history of the Finnish national poem.

Sixty years ago, it may be said, no one was aware that Finland possessed
a national poem at all. Her people--who claim affinity with the Magyars
of Hungary, but are possibly a back-wave of an earlier tide of
population--had remained untouched by foreign influences since their
conquest by Sweden, and their somewhat lax and wholesale conversion to
Christianity: events which took place gradually between the middle of the
twelfth and the end of the thirteenth centuries. Under the rule of
Sweden, the Finns were left to their quiet life and undisturbed
imaginings, among the forests and lakes of the region which they aptly
called Pohja, 'the end of things'; while their educated classes took no
very keen interest in the native poetry and mythology of their race. At
length the annexation of Finland by Russia, in 1809, awakened national
feeling, and stimulated research into the songs and customs which were
the heirlooms of the people.

It was the policy of Russia to encourage, rather than to check, this
return on a distant past; and from the north of Norway to the slopes of
the Altai, ardent explorers sought out the fragments of unwritten early
poetry. These runes, or Runots, were chiefly sung by old men called
Runoias, to beguile the weariness of the long dark winters. The custom
was for two champions to engage in a contest of memory, clasping each
other's hands, and reciting in turn till he whose memory first gave in
slackened his hold. The 'Kalevala' contains an instance of this
practice, where it is said that no one was so hardy as to clasp hands
with Wainamoinen, who is at once the Orpheus and the Prometheus of
Finnish mythology. These Runoias, or rhapsodists, complain, of course,
of the degeneracy of human memory; they notice how any foreign influence,
in religion or politics, is destructive to the native songs of a race.
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