In the Kalevala, Finland’s first stringed instrument is born from a dead fish. The sage Väinämöinen turns it into music, and everyone who hears it ends up weeping.

The poem and its compiler

The Kalevala is the Finnish national epic. It was assembled by the physician and philologist Elias Lönnrot, who travelled through Finland and Karelia in the 1820s and 1830s writing down poems sung by the people. He arranged them into a single narrative, published in 1835 and expanded in 1849. For that reason the text is not an ancient myth preserved in writing, but a 19th-century work made from much older oral material.

The old sage

Väinämöinen is the central hero: a singer and sage born already old, son of Ilmatar, the daughter of the air. His power lies in the sung word. He does not win by strength, but by knowing the right verses.

The first kantele

In one episode of the poem, Väinämöinen catches an enormous pike. From the fish’s jawbone he makes the first kantele. When he plays, the beasts of the forest, the birds and the fish come close to listen, and nature itself stands still. Men and women weep, and the hero does too. His tears fall into the sea and, according to the poem, become pearls.

Later the instrument is lost in the water, and Väinämöinen makes another, of birch. The poem treats song as power and the instrument as an extension of the voice.

The real instrument

The kantele really exists. It is a plucked zither, related to the Estonian kannel and the Latvian kokle, and the traditional model has five strings. Today there are concert versions with many more. It is usually tuned to a diatonic scale, and its soft sound suits runic singing, the style of repeated verses that Lönnrot heard from the singers.

Tuning is an attentive craft: each string must sit at the right pitch for the next one to sound.

A hero of the language

For Finns in the 19th century, the Kalevala helped give value to their own language and culture, at a time when the country was part of the Russian Empire. Väinämöinen remained a symbol of word and music. That explains why the kantele is still taught in the country’s music schools.

A poem that became music

The expanded 1849 version of the Kalevala has fifty cantos and about twenty-two thousand lines. Finland celebrates Kalevala Day on 28 February, a date linked to the publication of the first version. The poem inspired the composer Jean Sibelius, who wrote works such as the Lemminkäinen Suite, and also the writer J. R. R. Tolkien, who acknowledged the weight of the story of Kullervo in creating Túrin, a character in his Silmarillion.

To tune the strings of Väinämöinen’s kantele by ear, play Tune the kantele.

Sources.

• Elias Lönnrot, *Kalevala* (first edition 1835, expanded version 1849), compilation of Finnish and Karelian oral poetry
• Studies on the kantele and the Finnish runic singing tradition