A Land of Heroes: First impressions of the Kalevala

The Myth:  The Mythic History of Finland. Gods! Goddesses! Culture heroes who are not exactly gods but are certainly impressive and sing very well indeed! Magic duels! Magic fish! Magic ... whatever the Sampo is!
The Book: Kalevala, The Land of Heroes (technically, volume 1 of 2)
The Author: Elias Lönnrot (1835)
This text: etext of a 1907 translation by W. F. Kirby.
Price: nothin' (Kindle Free Library)


I am loving the Kalevala.


Normally, it takes a bit of a run-up to get into a mythic read, as you adjust your expectations to the text, but this is readable from the get-go. It probably helps that I was reading it out loud - there's a constant, flowing, beating rhythm that makes it absolutely lovely to read.


Best thing I've found for settling my infant daughter, too.


The language is sumptuous, and conveys a vastness of the universe, a land of lakes and and oceans and forests and islands and stars. And this made all the more vast with an individual focus on the heroes - this isn't kings-and-empires stuff. The largest social unit is the household, and most of the heroes are loners. They live in wooden buildings and make their own boats. Their feuds are personal.

"Mum, I'm gunna go challenge Väinämöinen to a magic duel!"
"Don't be silly, dear. Väinämöinen is a nice old man. Also, a master wizard. Go milk the cows."
"Aw, mum!"

It's no less epic for that, though - wizard-hero Väinämöinen sings up the deepest powers of creation. His mate Ilmarinen made the sky. When Väinämöinen's axe turns on him while building a boat, the treating medic needs to be taught the mythic history of iron so that the axe can be properly chastised and shamed. Only then can the wound be coaxed into closing. 

"You sure are bleeding a lot, mister. It's filled up seven boats and eight tubs. What are you, some sort of hero?" 

 This is good stuff.

Next: There's one in every myth cycle.

The Mort

The Myth:  King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Camelot! Jousting! Allegory! Romance! Adventure!
The Book: Le Morte d'Arthur
The Author: Sir Thomas Malory
This text: etext of a 1903 edition, edited by A. W. Pollard from Caxton (1485) by way of Wynkyn de Worde.
Price: nothin' (Kindle Free Library)

I started reading Le Morte d'Arthur (or, the Mort, as I took to calling it) shortly after my daughter was born, thinking that it would be nice and comfortable and familiar. It's King Arthur, right? It's like our second-most well-known culture hero. Besides, I'd read it as a kid.

It turned out that I'd not read far as a kid; I hadn't read much past King Pellinore and the Questing Beast, which is half way through book one of eight. There were dozens of knights I'd never even heard of, starting with Sir Balin of the Two Swords. Sir Balin, who we first meet in Camelot's dungeon, is named the best knight of Arthur's court, just before he steals a sword and decapitates the Lady of the Lake.  Of course, the person doing the naming is the Sword Damosel, whose motives and nature are highly suspect, since she's in Camelot with a magical kinslaying sword trying to find someone to murder her brother. If there's one thing that's true in the Mort, it's that damosels is trouble.

"Only a just and true knight can pull this sword from my scabbard, if you know what I mean."
"Lo, I, Sir Balin, have drawn the sword."
"Nice going, champ. Now give it back before you hurt someone."
"What? Perfectly good sword like this? Pff."
"That was a prophecy, you dick. Give it back or you'll regret it."
"Who's going to make me?"
"I should have gone to France."

So, yeah, there's a lot of the Arthurian mythos that was new to me, like the bit where Arthur goes off and conquers Rome before returning to Camelot which is, after all, where the action is.

And I didn't really know much about Sir Tristram, the second greatest knight in Christendom, whose adventures make up a good chunk of the narrative. Sir Tristram, I have to say, brings his troubles on himself.

"Farewell, La Beale Isoud, love you forever! Why, Sir Segwarides' wife, hello!"

Sir Tristram is a Cornish knight, the nephew of King Mark. King Mark's life sucks. His nephew's in love with his wife, and is also the second greatest knight in Christendom, and hence completely insufferable. Most of his knights are crap, and the ones that aren't are more loyal to Tristram than to himself. And every time he goes about incognito, he comes across a knight from Camelot who'll say something like:

 "You sound Cornish! Man, I wouldn't be Cornish for anything. You guys have the crappest king! Everyone knows how crap King Mark is. And your knights are pretty crap too. Except Tristram. He's awesome! Say, why are you stomping and snarling? Man, Cornish knights are  weird."

There's other differences, stuff that doesn't make the modern iterations of the Arthurian cycle.  You don't, for example, hear a lot of Sir Lamorak, son of King Pellinore, lover of Morgawse of Orkney. Come to that, you don't hear a lot of Sir Gareth, the white sheep of Morgawse's Orkney brood. Or how shifty Gawaine (also of Orkney) is in the Mort compared to, say, the Green Knight story.

And these days, Launcelot is often portrayed as a loner and outsider and a foreigner, when in the Mort he's related to half the Round Table. And he is very much the hero-and-champion of Camelot, in humility and courtesy as well as at arms.

So it sucks to be Launcelot on the grail quest. By the time the grail quest comes round, Launcelot has been set up as everyone's favourite knight, a real hero. But on the grail quest, suddenly he's being judged by a completely different set of standards - standards he knows he can't meet, because of his secret sin. And he's constantly reminded of it, getting absolutely pasted several times by allegorical knights, where he's used to wiping the floor with real ones.

"Questing was more fun when it was more jousting and less allegory."

Still, Launcelot does better than Gawaine.

"Monk! Advise me on my quest!"
"Mate, you just totally murdered three allegorical knights. You will not get the grail today."

Launcelot doesn't achieve the grail, but he makes it to the end of the quest and returns home chastened, in divinely-inspired humility. Which lasts about a day and a half once he gets back to court, and Guenever. Of all the knightly qualities displayed in abundance by Sir Launcelot, the most thunderously impressive is his chutzpah.

"I am innocent of all wrongdoing and so is the Queen! And I shall fight anyone who says otherwise!"
"Dude, you are right now naked in the Queen's chambers!"
"You can't prove a thing!"

Jokes aside, the Fall of Camelot sequence in the Mort is really very powerful. There's a pervasive sense of misery and heartbreak as everything just falls apart. Arthur's regret and Launcelot's sorrow and Guenever's heartbreak are palpable, and Gawaine's grief and rage at the death of his brothers just resonates off the page.

Gawaine's deathbed repentance brought a tear to my eye.

So, yeah, that's the Mort. There's violence, there's romance, there's adventure, there's allegory, there's death. It's a lot of fun. There's a surprising depth of human emotion, especially with Launcelot on the grail quest, and with everyone who's still around during the Fall sequence.

Tristram remains a bit of jerk throughout, though.

"Sir Kehydius, how could you try to seduce La Beale Isoud, my beloved? After all I've done for you! I saved your father's kingdom, I saved your life, I married your sister..."
"Dude."
"...who I swear is technically still a virgin..."

About the Reader

Hi. I'm Stu, nerd, reader, father of two.

I just wanted to say a couple of things about me and my project.

Firstly, I Am Not A Scholar. 

Well, you know, not of literature. I'm reading for fun, from a modern, Western perspective. People study these things for a living. They know more about them than I do. I'm liable to miss bits. I'm likely to miss nuances, and cues from cultural context. When I read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I got totally confused about which Cao was a nephew or a cousin or an uncle or an unrelated Cao, and it showed up. I make errors.

I'm generally relying on Project Gutenberg and similar out-of-copyright sources, which means I'm reading older translations for a popular audience. There are probably better sources out there, by now. If you're a scholar.

Secondly, I Have No Wish to Offend. 

I'm - obviously - not sticking to English literature, which means I'm commenting outside of my home culture. But I have no wish to belittle or mock anyone else's culture or history. I hope to have the distance of time to mute any offense, but if that doesn't work, let me know.

I adore this stuff. I can only adore it from my own perspective, but I hope that's a broad one.

Lastly, I Am Looking for the Fun. 

Some of this stuff is heavy going. Styles change. Social mores change a lot, and there's a lot of stuff that was normal to the ancients that we don't like at all. And a lot of books from the before-times are slow and ponderous, and that gets worse as you go back.

But in a lot of cases, if you perservere you hit a point where you grok the style and suddenly you're devouring it.

And then it's glorious.

So I write about the fun bits, not the slog.

Prologue to the Mythic Read

I possess a magic device that lets me read nearly any book ever written.

So I do.

I've been reading for a long time. This project probably started with The Water Margin, a classical Chinese novel about a band of outlaws, on the run from a corrupt government, who band together to fight tyranny. Like Robin Hood, you might say.

Only this is China, and the scale is immense. The band numbers nine dozen heroes, each with their own story sequence, who end up leading a vast army against their enemies. The book is collation of several threads of folk tales, and it's full of violence and nobility and bad behaviour and crude jokes and drunkenness and heroism and dueling and...

...and it's awesome.

From there I went naturally to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, another Chinese classic: a fourteenth century novelisation of a third century war.

This was the best book I've ever read.

From fairly modest beginnings of skirmishes and intrigue and adventure, it builds to a thundering centrepiece battle involving vast armadas and cunning strategems and desperate heroism, and moves into a series of struggles between master strategists and glorious heroes as they struggle to control the mightiest empire in the world.

It is glorious stuff.

As I read I started posting flippant little sketches to social media - exchanges between the heroes summarising tiny portions of the story through a modern, western eye:

"Tian Feng! Yuan Shao ignored your wise advice, and has been defeated by Cao Cao! Upon his return he will surely pay greater heed to your counsel!"
"You ... don't know many Chinese warlords, do you?"

They were well recieved. I had enormous fun. So I kept doing it.

Hence: The Mythic Read.

I'll pull out ancient classics as the whim takes me. I'll read them. I'll talk about them.

It shall be glorious!