Elias Lönnrot, the Finnish 19th century bourgeois polymath is one of the most widely celebrated historical figures in Finland. He’s regarded as one of the fathers of Finnish literature and Finnish nationalism. His best-known piece is the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic. It has a central symbolic role in the country as one of the cornerstones of its national culture, which the cultural field continues to celebrate and draw inspiration from to this day.
The Kalevala, like many products of the Finnish cultural elite of the time, was created with a purpose: to help forge an artificial ground for nationalism and a homogenous people in the Grand Duchy of Finland, which had always been a multicultural area.
The reality, which continues to be swept under the rug, is that the Kalevala consists mostly of Karelian poems which according to cultural tradition should not be written down at all, not to mention altered by Lönnrot to his liking. It is an innately disrespectful, diluted commodification of Karelian culture passed as Finnish, created on Finnish terms to serve Finnish interests, at the expense of Karelians. To put it simply it is cultural appropriation.
In Russian controlled Karelia, as well as in the recent years in Finland, the Kalevala has been spoken of as being based on Finnish-Karelian poetry. In Russia it is widely regarded as a Karelo-Finnish epic. But we feel the Kalevala cannot be treated as an even-handed piece of work. The Karelians whose ancestral knowledge was gathered by Lönnrot and his associates had no knowledge of how it was going to be used, and for what purposes. The outcome was wholly out of their hands. (Even still, many stories have survived within families of poem singers having been reluctant to share with the Finnish nobles.)
The harmful, yet to this day widely accepted notion that Karelians are but a Finnish “tribe” that existed in the past is rooted in part in the image that Lönnrot constructed, which the karelianist movement – consisting of Finnish intelligentsia inspired by Lönnrot’s work – later refined. The karelianists deemed Karelians to be less developed Finns, and our culture as a still frame of ancient Finnishness (which they were free to use and mold), instead of its own, living entity. Thus it was justifiable to document our oral culture on Finnish terms as if to create an archive removed from its cultural context instead of letting the tradition live on as a communal exchange.
The conceptions of Karelian culture and the perception of its subservience to Finns, created in part by the Kalevala and the karelianists were also adopted and escalated in the fascist movement(s) that swept through Finland in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Finland occupied Karelia for a brief period in the 20s, and created plans of how the “slow-witted” and “Russified” Karelians could be brought up to become proper Finns. Later in the Second World War Finland re-captured the Karelian Isthmus on the basis of a sense of ownership, with the belief that they were “liberating their tribal brothers”. As a result of this, tens of thousands of Karelians were forcefully displaced from their lands, never to return. In Finland, most faced discrimination leaving their lineages with intergenerational trauma.
The framework built by Lönnrot, the works painted within it by the karelianists along with Finnish historians’ interpretations of them affect Karelians and the conversation around us to this day. We’re still seen as objects of the past, and still denied existence in the current moment. Our being here, today, simply doesn’t fit the constructed historical narrative, where a.) Karelian culture has been claimed as belonging to Finns and b.) Finland is presented as a righteous nation, having no colonial history.
To this day Lönnrot and his work – work that has proved extremely harmful to our community – continues to be celebrated upon a pedestal of Finnishness, with statues venerating his legacy standing proud and the Kalevala continuously “reimagined” in modern works while never questioning why it exists in the first place. This is especially grotesque when this nations colonial past continues to be denied and Karelians still lack legal recognition. But this is exactly how Finnish colonialism operates: behind closed doors, in complete silence and denial.
Finns should not get to celebrate this piece as their own when it consists of oral folklore taken from us at all, let alone when hardships faced by our ancestors in the hands of the Finnish state continue to get ignored and our community still lacks the rights that are supposedly guaranteed to all by Finnish law. At colonial hands, living traditions are to be mangled and regurgitated into statues frozen in time, but with concrete action it is possible to fight back.
Down with colonialism! – Alah kolonializmu!