The Kalevala: The Epic Poem Of Finland

This is the earliest translation of The Kalevala into English, in 1888 by John Martin Crawford. Rather than being a direct translation from Finnish, it's an English translation of Schiefner's 1852 German translation, the same work that inspired Longfellow's 1855 "The Song of Hiawatha." The Kalevala was assembled by Elias Lonnrot, who in the early 1800s recorded many folk-stories that were part of the bardic oral tradition of Finnish folklore, and wove a number of them into an epic tale, doing for Finnish oral tradition what Homer did for the Greeks. The text is available online from multiple sources, but I prefer to read something this long from a printed page. This is a well-bound paperback, so it was well worth the price for me. At first I was puzzled by the nature of the very occasional odd typographical errors, but I finally decided they were the result of optical character recognition (OCR) software. The fact that so few survived is a tribute to someone's persistence in spell-checking, as the story has plenty of Finnish personal and place names that would befuddle most spell-checkers. The surviving typos are usually single-character substitutions in small words, as in "be" for "he" in line 5 of Rune 2, leaving plausible words a spell-checker would miss; they're not likely to hinder most readers more than momentarily. The particular typos show that this printing comes from the Gutenberg Project source; if the publishing house updates the book, they might consider switching to the Sacred-Texts source, which has fixed many of the typos.I do have one complaint. Both major online sources of this text contain the translator's preface, which this printing omits. Granted, it was written in 1888, and some of its comments about the Finnish people haven't aged well, which may be the reason for its omission. But something is needed; I hope that in the next printing, the publishers will not only include the author's preface, but also a more up-to-date introduction. The Kalevala is not widely read in English, and many readers will benefit from an introduction to the Finnish people. Many English speakers assume they are Norse, but they speak a non-Indo-European language of the Uralic language family that includes Hungarian and Estonian. Many of us would also benefit from a discussion of Lonnrot's work, and his choices in compiling The Kalevala, as well as a discussion of the choice Crawford faced in how to represent the poetry of one language in a different language in which the original poetry style doesn't function. (The original depends on tonic accent; Schiefner and Crawford chose to render their translations in trochaic tetrameter, the meter of "Hiawatha".) I had the good fortune to first read The Kalevala in the recent Oxford World's Classics translation by Keith Bosley, whose extensive introduction made it much easier for me to appreciate this translation by Crawford.All-in-all, I would suggest this book to anyone interested in the Kalevala, anyone who loves trochaic tetrameter (Haiwatha fans interested in the folk-tales of other cultures), and to any fans of J.R.R. Tolkien. (It was in reading The Kalevala that Tolkien fell in love with the Finnish language, and was inspired by it to create his elvish languages of Sindarin and Quenya.)

Great book, however this is the poem version in prose, not the tale

Not as user-friendly as I expected it to be.

The first chapter is hard to get into, but after that it gets really awesome. I actually finished reading this the night before I recieved the new Korpiklaani album "Manala". Now I have a deeper understanding of the subject matters of the songs. I also bought the "Kalevala" in Finnish by Elias Lonnrot, and am hoping to understand more once I learn Finnish. Excellent Book!!!

Way to many typing errors in the book. It isn't worth spending money on. Although it is a great story

A complete write of the Finnish Epic. You have to be in love with the genre to appreciate this.

Reading it dispels the [phony] claims by some that J.R.R. Tolkein borrowed from the Kalevala for The Lord of the Rings. Yet it shows the cultural heritage of the people of Finland.

Don't get me wrong; I love the Kalevala and I'm a big fan of Crawford's translation. But this particular printing has been very poorly executed. (I should've been suspicious when I saw Lonnrot's name misspelled on the cover.) The text is full of careless spelling and punctuation errors, and it's not formatted in lines as the poetry was originally. It'll do fine for reading, but it makes a poor addition to one's library.

This is a fascinating account of the Finnish poem which is easy to read and a great accompaniment to Sibelius's Kullervo symphony.

Great epic poems ruined by poor, slapdash formatting!

I didb't like that it is all text with no graphics or illustrations to break it up.

As described

Bought as a gift