ia, under Peter the Great and his
successors, much Finnish territory was wrested from Sweden, and St.
Petersburg itself stands on what was formerly Finnish territory. When
what was left of Finland was finally absorbed by Russia in 1809, special
privileges were granted by Alexander I. to the Finns, which his
successors confirmed, and which are highly valued by the people.

The upper classes speak Swedish and Finnish; and the lower classes
chiefly Finnish. Finnish is upheld by many Finns from patriotic motives,
and there is a considerable modern literature in both languages.
Translations of most standard works by English and other authors are
published in Finnish.

The Finns call their country _Suomi_ or Marshland; and it is often
spoken of as the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. The language they speak
belongs to a group called Finnish-Ugrian, or Altaic, and is allied to
Lappish and Esthonian, and more distantly to Turkish and Hungarian,
There are only twenty-one letters in the alphabet; the letter J is
pronounced like Y (as a consonant), and Y almost as a short I. The first
syllable of every word is accented. This renders it difficult to
accommodate such words as _K[=a]l[)e]v[)a]l[=a]_ to the metre; but I
have tried to do my best.

The Finlanders are very fond of old ballads, of which a great number
have been collected, especially by Elias Lonnrot, to whom it occurred to
arrange a selection into a connected poem, to which he gave the name of
_Kalevala_. This he first published in 1835, in two small volumes
containing twenty-five Runos or Cantos, but afterwards rearranged and
expanded it to fifty Runos; in which form it was published in 1849; and
this was speedily translated into other languages. Perhaps the best
translations are Schiefner's German version (1852) and Collan's Swedish
version (1864). Several volumes of selections and abridgments have also
appeared in America and England; and an English translation by John
Martin Crawford (in two volumes) was published in New York and London in
1889.

Schiefner used a flexible metre for his translation, which resembles the
original as closely as the different character of Finnish and German
would permit, a metre which had previously, though rarely, been used in
English. His work attracted the attention of Longfellow, whose "Song of
Hiawatha" is only a rather poor imitation of Schiefner's version of the
_Kalevala_, some of the lines being almost identical, and several of the