Lönnrot, Elias

Elias Lönnrot, (born April 9, 1802, Sammatti, Swedish Finland—died March 19, 1884, Sammatti, Russian Finland), folklorist and philologist who created the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala (1835, enlarged 1849), from short ballads and lyric poems collected from oral tradition. He also published Kanteletar (1840–41; “Old Songs and Ballads of the Finnish People”) and collections of proverbs, riddles, and incantations.

Lönnrot received a medical degree from the University of Helsinki (1832). In 1833 he became a district medical officer at Kajaani, in a remote part of eastern Finland, near Russian Karelia, where he remained for 20 years. During this time he made field trips among the Sami, the Estonians, and the Finnish tribes of northwestern Russia and collected evidence of the relationship of the Baltic branches of the Finno-Ugric languages as well as folk poetry. Believing that the short poems he collected were fragments of a continuous epic of which no full version survived, he joined a number of them together with connective material of his own and imposed upon this a unifying plot. Though his method is frowned upon by many scholars, the influence of the Kalevala (q.v.) on Finnish national consciousness, art, and culture has been immense.

Lönnrot was professor of Finnish language and literature at the University of Helsinki (1853–62). As a leader of the national revival movement, he promoted Finnish as a national language (Swedish had previously been predominant) and paved the way for the birth of modern Finnish literature.