} 'As for the lays of old time, a thousand have been scattered to
the wind, a thousand buried in the snow; . . . as for those which the
Munks (the Teutonic knights) swept away, and the prayer of the priest
overwhelmed, a thousand tongues were not able to recount them.' In spite
of the losses thus caused, and in spite of the suspicious character of
the Finns, which often made the task of collection a dangerous one,
enough materials remained to furnish Dr. Lonnrot, the most noted
explorer, with thirty-five Runots, or cantos. These were published in
1835, but later research produced the fifteen cantos which make up the
symmetrical fifty of the 'Kalevala.' In the task of arranging and
uniting these, Dr. Lonnrot played the part traditionally ascribed to the
commission of Pisistratus in relation to the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.' Dr.
Lonnrot is said to have handled with singular fidelity the materials
which now come before us as one poem, not absolutely without a certain
unity and continuous thread of narrative. It is this unity (so faint
compared with that of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey') which gives the
'Kalevala' a claim to the title of epic.

It cannot be doubted that, at whatever period the Homeric poems took
shape in Greece, they were believed to record the feats of the supposed
ancestors of existing families. Thus, for example, Pisistratus, as a
descendant of the Nelidae, had an interest in securing certain parts, at
least, of the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' from oblivion. The same family
pride embellished and preserved the epic poetry of early France. There
were in France but three heroic houses, or gestes; and three
corresponding cycles of epopees. Now, in the 'Kalevala,' there is no
trace of the influence of family feeling; it was no one's peculiar care
and pride to watch over the records of the fame of this or that hero. The
poem begins with a cosmogony as wild as any Indian dream of creation; and
the human characters who move in the story are shadowy inhabitants of no
very definite lands, whom no family claim as their forefathers. The very
want of this idea of family and aristocratic pride gives the 'Kalevala' a
unique place among epics. It is emphatically an epic of the people, of
that class whose life contains no element of progress, no break in
continuity; which from age to age preserves, in solitude and close
communion with nature, the earliest beliefs of grey antiquity. The Greek
epic, on the other hand, h