The Karelians

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A man stands against a log wall at Ladvozero, in the parish of Vuokkiniemi, deep in the forests above Lake Ladoga where the land slips from Finland into Russia. The photograph was taken in 1894 by I. K. Inha, who had come north with a camera to record what was already understood to be vanishing. The man is Miihkali Perttunen, a rune-singer; his father, Arhippa Perttunen, had sung to Elias Lönnrot sixty years before. In that face, and in the songs it carried, lies the whole of what the world now means when it speaks of the Karelians: a people of the eastern forest who held in living memory, for longer than anyone else, the oldest sung poetry of the Finnic north.

Miihkali Perttunen, rune-singer of Archangel Karelia and son of Arhippa Perttunen, at Ladvozero, 1894. I. K. Inha, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A people of the border-forest

The Karelians are a Baltic-Finnic people, kin to the Finns, who have lived for many centuries in Karelia — the great borderland of lakes and forest that runs between Finland and northwestern Russia, gathered around Lake Ladoga, the Karelian Isthmus, and the watersheds that drain toward the White Sea. They speak Karelian, a language of the Baltic-Finnic branch of the Uralic family, close enough to Finnish that the line between dialect and separate tongue has long been a matter of politics as much as of grammar. Within Karelian itself the speech divides — North Karelian, South Karelian, Olonets (Livvi) to the southeast, and the Tver Karelian carried by communities who migrated eastward in the seventeenth century — so that the people are less a single bloc than a chain of related communities strung along the forest from the Gulf of Finland to the Arkhangelsk taiga. The facts of language, region, and number are matters of ordinary record, and they are sobering.

Karelia is, and has long been, a divided land. It lies along the seam between two empires and two churches: the Swedish and then Finnish west, Lutheran since the Reformation, and the Russian east, Orthodox since the missions that came out of Novgorod in the medieval centuries. The majority of the Karelians who remained on the Russian side are Eastern Orthodox Christians, and the western Karelians, under long Swedish rule, became Lutheran. This split of faith is not incidental detail. It runs to the heart of why the Karelians matter to the history of the Finnic sacred world, and it must be kept in view.

The demographic story of the twentieth century is one of collapse. The Soviet census of 1926 counted some hundred thousand Karelians in the Karelian republic alone, and, with the Tver Karelians and other groups added, a total in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million — roughly 248,000 by the older reckoning, against perhaps 241,000 in the census tally. Today the figure stands at something like 43,000: on the order of 32,000 in Russia by the 2021 count, and an estimated 10,000 in Finland, where most Karelian-speakers were long since absorbed into the broader Finnish identity. The causes are concrete and grim — the Winter War and Continuation War, the cession of Finnish Karelia to the Soviet Union and the evacuation of more than four hundred thousand people from the ceded territory, the pressures of Russification, and the slow attrition of a small language under a large one. The people endure, on both sides of the border, and the language is taught and written; but the great oral world that the Karelians once carried has thinned almost to silence within a single century.

The keepers of the runo-song

What the Karelians preserved, and what made them the source of a national literature, was the runo-song — the runo-laulu, the old Finnic oral poetry sung in the ancient meter that the world now calls the Kalevala meter. It is an unrhymed line of trochaic tetrameter, four falling beats, bound not by rhyme but by alliteration and by the constant pairing of a statement with its restatement, so that almost every line is answered by a second that says the same thing in other words. It was sung, often to a narrow melody within the range of a kantele, and in Karelia frequently by two singers seated facing one another, hands clasped, one leading and the other taking up the line — a call-and-response that let a long poem move forward across an evening.

This was a vast and various body of song. It held the mythic poems: the deeds of the eternal sage Väinämöinen, whose sung word orders the world; the work of the sky-smith Ilmarinen, who hammered out the dome of heaven and forged the mysterious mill of plenty, the Sampo; the long, dangerous journeys north to the dark Northland of Pohjola and the struggle over the Sampo with its mistress Louhi. It held the wedding-songs and the laments sung over the dead. And it held the charms — the loitsu, the sung incantation, the verse by which the practitioner bent the hidden powers of the world.

The singers were the laulajat. They were not, for the most part, professionals or priests; they were farmers and fishers and their wives and elders, who carried in memory a quantity of verse that astonishes the modern reader, and who handed it down within families. The Perttunen of Archangel Karelia became the most famous of these singing lineages: Arhippa Perttunen, whom Lönnrot judged perhaps the finest of all the singers he met, gave him over three hundred stanzas in a few days in 1834, including the central episodes of the forging of the Sampo; and his son Miihkali, the man in Inha’s photograph, sang on into the 1890s. The blind Ingrian singer Larin Paraske, who could hold tens of thousands of lines, belongs to the same world a little to the south. These were people of prodigious memory and art, and the songs were theirs.

The tietäjä and the power of the word

Behind the mythic poems stood a living practice of sung power, and at its center stood the tietäjä — literally the “knower,” the wise-man and seer. It is worth being exact here, because the figure is easy to misname: the tietäjä is the practitioner, not the magic itself. His authority arose from knowledge — from his command of memorized incantations and rituals, the loitsut, and above all from the synty, the origin-words. The governing idea was that to master a thing one must know how it came to be: a wound, a disease, iron, fire, a serpent each had its synty, its account of birth, and to recite that origin aloud was to gain command over the thing itself. To heal a burn, the knower sang the birth of fire; to stanch blood, the birth of iron. The word was not a description laid over the world but a force that acted within it.

This is the same conviction that the mythic poems dramatize at the largest scale. When Väinämöinen sings his rival into a swamp, or sings a boat into being, the runo-song is showing in story what the tietäjä did in the croft and the sauna: it is the world made and unmade by the right words in the right meter. The kantele, the box-zither whose invention the poems credit to Väinämöinen, belongs to this world as the instrument of the singer; the bowed jouhikko, a horsehair-strung lyre of the same northern regions, is a related but distinct instrument and should not be confused with it. The rite of the tietäjä is described here at the distance of the record and in the worshipers’ own understanding; it was never a public liturgy but a practice of knowledge, guarded and particular.

Why the song survived in the east

The runo-song faded across most of the Finnic world as the early-modern centuries wore on, pressed by the Reformation, by literacy, by the hymnbook and the school. That it survived longest, and most fully, in the eastern and northern districts of Karelia owed much to two things, and here the scholarly account and the people’s own faith meet.

The first was isolation. Archangel (White) Karelia and the Olonets country lay far from roads, towns, and presses, in a forest economy of small villages where the evening song kept its place. The second was the Orthodox faith of the eastern Karelians — and this is the very reason Lönnrot prized them. The Lutheran reformation to the west had set itself directly against the old layer of song and charm, naming it idolatry and driving it out of the open; the Orthodox church of the east, with its own deep ritual life and its more distant clergy, lay more lightly over that old layer and left it more room to persist alongside the calendar of saints. It is not that the eastern Karelians were less Christian — they were, and are, devoutly Orthodox — but that their Christianity and the runo-song had reached a long accommodation that the western reformers had refused. Lönnrot understood this, and it sent him east.

The Kalevala and the gathering of the songs

Between roughly 1828 and the early 1840s, the physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot made a series of long collecting journeys — eleven trips in all, on foot, by ski, by boat — through Finnish North Karelia and across the border into Russian Archangel Karelia, gathering thousands of runo-texts from the singers he found. His great expedition of 1834 brought him to Arhippa Perttunen. From this gathered material he composed the Kalevala: the first version, now called the Old Kalevala, in 1835 — thirty-two poems and some twelve thousand lines, the preface signed at the end of February — and a much larger New Kalevala in 1849, fifty poems and nearly twenty-three thousand lines, drawing in further material collected by his associates.

Here a distinction has to be held firmly, for it is the single most important thing to understand about the relation between the Karelians and their most famous monument. The Kalevala is not an ancient Finnic scripture, and it is not a single inherited epic that lay waiting to be written down. It is Lönnrot’s nineteenth-century selection and arrangement of genuinely old oral song — a compilation and editorial synthesis in which he chose among variants, stitched separate poems into continuous narrative, smoothed transitions, and in places supplied connective lines of his own in the inherited meter. The materials are old and are the singers’; the Kalevala as a continuous poem is Lönnrot’s. Scholars have debated, ever since, how large his editorial share was — where the old tradition ends and the editor begins — and the more recent consensus has tended to credit him with a more active, shaping hand than the early national reception wished to see. To read the printed epic’s storyline as a fixed ancient “mythology,” recovered intact, is to mistake what it is. The truer picture is of a living, plural, variant-rich tradition of song, of which the Kalevala is one nineteenth-century crystallization.

This matters most for the figures the epic made famous. Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen, the Sampo and Pohjola, are old and are the Karelian singers’; but the particular order of their deeds, the joining of episode to episode, often belongs to Lönnrot’s composition rather than to any one singer’s song. The honest account keeps both truths: a deep oral tradition of real antiquity, and a famous book that is a made thing of the 1830s and 1840s.

Reception and afterlife

The afterlife of the Karelian song has run along three channels, and they are easy to tell apart.

The first is scholarly. Lönnrot’s work stood at the head of a vast labor of collection carried on by the Finnish Literature Society and its collectors through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — a labor that produced, eventually, the enormous archive of Finnish, Ingrian, and Karelian runic song, the Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot, in which tens of thousands of recorded texts preserve the variants behind and beyond the Kalevala. The comparative folklorists Julius and Kaarle Krohn built upon this material the “Finnish method” of folklore study. Through this archive the Karelian singers became, in effect, the documented foundation of an entire field, and the songs survive in a fullness that the printed epic alone could never convey.

The second is national and artistic, and it must be named as reception rather than adopted as fact. The Kalevala became the national epic of Finland — published in 1835, it gave a people then under Russian rule a literature of its own and a sense of ancient depth, and it fed the whole movement of Finnish national awakening. The painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela rendered its scenes in the great canvases that fixed the epic in the national eye; Jean Sibelius set its world to music; the very script in which it was first printed became a cultural emblem. There is an irony in this national use that should not be passed over in silence: the songs that became the Finnish national epic were gathered most fully from Orthodox Karelians living across the border in Russia, a people whose own land and language the new nation did not, in the end, encompass, and whose modern fortunes have been hard.

The Defense of the Sampo (Sammon puolustus), 1896 — Väinämöinen and his companions battling Louhi for the Sampo, from songs gathered among the Karelians. Akseli Gallen-Kallela, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The third channel is the Karelians themselves. They are a living people, not a closed chapter. The runo-song as a daily practice is effectively gone — the fragmentation of Karelia after Finnish independence weakened it, and the wars and Russification of the mid-century all but ended it as a living art — but Karelian identity, language, and Orthodox faith continue on both sides of the border, and the song-tradition is the object of revival, study, and performance. The homeland, much of it now within the Russian Federation, remains for many a place of memory: the parishes whose names cluster in the song-archives, the forest villages where Inha pointed his camera, the grave of Miihkali Perttunen photographed in 1917 and again in 1942 as the front moved over it.

The Karelians are kin to the other Finnic and Uralic peoples treated in this work, and distinct among them. They are not the Sami of the Arctic, with their drum and their noaidi and their reindeer; nor the Mari of the Volga, with their living sacred groves and their priests. The Karelians are the people of the runo-song — the ones who held the oldest sung word of the Finnic world the longest, in the Orthodox forest of the eastern border, and from whom the rest of the world received the songs of Väinämöinen.

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