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STUDIA FENNICA EDITORIAL BOARD

Pasi Ihalainen, Professor, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Timo Kaartinen, Title of Docent, Lecturer, University of Helsinki, Finland

Taru Nordlund, Title of Docent, Lecturer, University of Helsinki, Finland

Riikka Rossi, Title of Docent, Researcher, University of Helsinki, Finland

Katriina Siivonen, University Teacher, University of Helsinki, Finland

Lotte Tarkka, Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland

Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen, Secretary General, Dr. Phil., Finnish Literature Society, Finland

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Kati Romppanen, Secretary of the Board, Finnish Literature Society, Finland

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CORNELIUS HASSELBLATT

Kalevipoeg Studies

The Creation and Reception of an Epic

Finnish Literature Society • SKS • Helsinki

Studia Fennica Folkloristica 21

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© 2016 Cornelius Hasselblatt and SKS

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Contents

Preface

Bibliographical note

1. Introduction

The objectives of this book

The contents of the Kalevipoeg (a summary of the twenty tales)

2. The Significance of the Kalevipoeg for the National Emancipation Movement of Estonia in the Nineteenth Century

The emergence of the text

The question of the authenticity of the material

The effect and reception of the epic

3. The Emergence, Cultivation and Dissemination of the Kalevipoeg

Kreutzwald’s attitude

Quotations, adaptations and intertextual connections

(More or less) complete adaptations

Parts, motifs, ideas, elements

Poetry

Drama

Prose

Continuation

Conclusion

4. Latin, German and Estonian. Language and Decency Exemplified through an Episode from the Fifteenth Tale

The problem

The background

The first solution

The second solution

The third solution

The consequences

5. The German Reception of the Kalevipoeg

First reviews

Wilhelm Schott’s treatise

Other reviews, minor studies and marginal notes

A new German translation

The twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century

A new German edition

6. German Rewritings of the Kalevipoeg

The advantage of the disadvantage

Israël’s book from 1873

Grosse’s book from 1875

A shortened prose version for children, 1894

Another anthroposophical voice

7. From Folklore to Literature. Folkloristic Metamorphosis in the Foreign Reception of the Kalevipoeg

Translations into other languages

The principle of self-correction

The transfer to literary reception

The case of Lou Goble

The case of Lou Goble, once more

8. Conclusion

Bibliography

Abstract

Preface

It was more than thirty years ago that I first heard of the existence of an ancient hero called Kalevipoeg. I was a third-year student of Finno-Ugric philology spending a year in Helsinki, where I was attending a course on the history of Estonian literature. I had read Elias Lönnrot’s famous Kalevala at least once, and I may have seen some references to Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg in the comments of my German edition of the Finnish epic, but it was not until I heard the lectures of my Estonian teacher in Helsinki that Kalevipoeg really entered my consciousness. He never left it again.

One year later, in March 1984, I discovered in an East Berlin antique bookshop the famous German translation of the epic by Ferdinand Löwe – the first edition from 1900! In those times, it was strictly forbidden to export antique books from the socialist countries, but my eagerness to obtain the book was stronger than my fear of East German frontier soldiers. I put it under my sweater and boldly walked through the gates. No-one bothered me and I was the lucky owner of the complete Estonian epic translated into my mother tongue.

From that moment on, I began working continuously with Kreutzwald’s epic, eventually re-reading it, giving lectures and publishing articles about it. As all of the articles have been published in German, in diverse venues and spread over two decades, I deemed it appropriate to have them published once more – this time as an English-language monograph and equipped with an introduction in order to create more coherence. For this new English edition, however, I have not simply translated my earlier contributions on the topic but have in fact rewritten and reorganised them, excising the places where they overlapped and filling some gaps that had remained owing to a lack of time, inaccessibility of sources or simply my own ignorance. If anything has taught me that we never stop learning, it has been my involvement with Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s epic.

It is a pleasure to thank Marin Laak, Pille-Riin Larm, Liina Lukas, Ave Mattheus, Kristi Metste, Ylo M. Pärnik and especially Frog and Lotte Tarkka for valuable information that has helped enhance this work. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees whose constructive criticism was very much appreciated. In addition, I would like to thank the Finnish Literature Society for accepting this book into its prestigious series, and, finally, I am extremely grateful to Frog and Clive Tolley for polishing the English of this text.

Zuidhorn, 1 November 2015

Cornelius Hasselblatt

Bibliographical Note

The following original articles, all written by Cornelius Hasselblatt, form the basis of the chapters of the book:

Die Bedeutung des Nationalepos Kalevipoeg für das nationale Erwachen der Esten. Finnisch-Ugrische Mitteilungen 20 (1996): 51–61. (second chapter)

Geburt und Pflege des estnischen Epos. Zur Funktionalisierung von Kreutzwalds Kalevipoeg. Nordost-Archiv. Zeitschrift für Regionalgeschichte. Neue Folge Band 16/2007. Lüneburg: Nordost-Institut: 103–26. (third chapter)

Latein, Deutsch und Estnisch. Sprache und Sittlichkeit am Beispiel einer Episode aus dem estnischen Nationalepos. In Northern Voices. Essays on Old Germanic and Related Topics, Offered to Professor Tette Hofstra. Ed. Kees Dekker et al.. Leuven etc.: Peeters 2008. Pp. 279–94. (fourth chapter)

Estnische Literatur in deutscher Übersetzung. Eine Rezeptionsgeschichte vom 19. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2011. Pp. 56–77. (fifth & sixth chapter)

Von Folklore zu Literatur. Folkloristische Metamorphose bei der ausländischen Kalevipoeg-Rezeption. In Finno-Ugric Folklore, Myth and Cultural Identity. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Finno-Ugric Languages in Groningen, June 7–9, 2011. Ed. Cornelius Hasselblatt, Adriaan van der Hoeven. Studia Fenno-Ugrica Groningana 7. Maastricht: Shaker 2012. Pp. 63–72. (seventh chapter)

The work of Kreutzwald and especially the Kalevipoeg are well represented bibliographically but the multitude of publications can easily become confusing. A basic bibliography was compiled by Herbert Laidvee and published in 1964: “Kalevipoja” bibliograafia 1836–1961. Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus 1964. 119 pp. (Personaalbibliograafiad I, 2). This is actually an offprint from the second volume of the critical edition of the epic published the previous year: Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald: Kalevipoeg. Tekstikriitiline väljaanne ühes kommentaaride ja muude lisadega II. Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus. Pages 408–512 of this edition are identical with pages 13–118 of the 1964 bibliography, with one inserted empty page (90).

Laidvee continued his work and published a comprehensive bibliography on the author as well: Fr. R. Kreutzwaldi bibliograafia 1833–1969. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat 1978. 420 pp. (Personaalbibliograafiad I, 1). This volume has an appendix with a bibliography on the Kalevipoeg (pp. 339–421), in which only supplements are listed for the period 1860–1961 whilst the years 1962–9 are covered completely.

The next publication came in 1982 and was compiled by Vaime Kabur: Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald 1803–1882. Personaalnimestik. Tallinn: Eesti NSV Kultuuriministeerium, Fr. R. Kreutzwaldi nimeline Eesti NSV Riiklik Raamatukogu 1982. 95 pp. Although this book repeats all of the monographs from the earlier period already found in earlier bibliographies, it is important for the period 1970–81.

The next bibliography followed in 2004: Fr. R. Kreutzwaldi bibliograafia 1982–2003. Tallinn: Eesti Rahvusraamatukogu 2004. 164 pp. More recent publications can be found on the homepage of the Estonian Literature Museum: http://kreutzwald.kirmus.ee. The complete text of the epic is available on this site.

Kreutzwald’s ample correspondence was published in six volumes between 1953 and 1979 (see KKV in the bibliography) and provides an extremely valuable source for Estonian cultural development in the nineteenth century. Most of the texts in this Estonian edition, however, are translations from German. The original versions are only partly published; most recently for instance the correspondence with Anton Schiefner, a member of the Academy in St Petersburg, was published in an edition by Horst Walravens (2013). Walravens also published the Berlin academic Wilhelm Schott’s original letters to Kreutzwald (Walravens 2010/2011), which likewise had previously been published in Estonian (see Lepik 1961). Unfortunately, the letters from Kreutzwald to Schott have been lost. Other originals had partly been published in earlier editions, as Kreutzwald and Koidula (= KKV V) in the two-volume edition from 1910–11 (KKK), and Kreutzwald and Faehlmann (part of KKV I) in the 1936 edition by Mart Lepik.

In Estonian, there is no phonetic difference between <v> and <w>, the latter being the normal grapheme for the sound until the early twentieth century. Therefore the first edition of the epic was titled Kalewipoeg. In the alphabetical order of Estonian, <v> and <w> are treated as one letter.

All works quoted in this volume are listed in the bibliography (pp. 121–138).

Translations of quotations have been provided by the author of this book unless otherwise indicated.

1. Introduction

The objectives of this book

As a “core text of Estonian culture” (see Laak 2008, and in Kartus 2011: 9), Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s epic Kalevipoeg has been investigated thoroughly – what more can be said about it? The answer is that precisely owing to the enormous significance of the text within Estonian culture, the Kalevipoeg is constantly being reread, reshaped and reinterpreted by every new generation of Estonian readers, but also by every new generation of Estonian and international scholars. Therefore new treatments and reassessments are still to come. They will remain necessary, because new aspects of this first extensive text of modern Estonian literature will regularly be found and pushed to the fore. In this sense, the position of the Kalevipoeg within Estonian letters is comparable to the position of the Kalevala in Finnish literature, Shakespeare in English literature or Goethe in German literature.

However, the cultural situation of Estonia1 in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was something quite different from Shakespearean England or the Germany of Goethe’s times. In the period in question, the Estonian population stood at a crossroads. How was it to continue: be absorbed among the Germans or develop into its own nation? This situation is well known to those familiar with Estonian cultural history, but nevertheless some key aspects of Estonian history should be mentioned here. (See Raun 2001 for an excellent English overview of Estonian history.)

The area we call Estonia today was conquered by Danes and Germans in the thirteenth century and from this time on was dominated by a linguistically different upper class. This top echelon, however, never formed more than roughly 5 per cent of the entire population (Miljan 2004: 121; Hasselblatt 2012a: 51). As a consequence, initially Estonian as a (peasant) language was not threatened. The same holds for the southern neighbour of the Estonians, the Latvians, and in some respects a similar situation was to be found in neighbouring Finland to the north, which was conquered by the Swedes around the same time. (Kasekamp 2010: 11–16) For the Finns, the Swedish of the conquerors was linguistically just as distant as was German for the Estonians. But the situation in Finland differed in two crucial points from that in Estonia. First, the Swedish settlement was limited to the coastal areas and hardly reached the hinterland. And second, in the Swedish political system serfdom was unknown. (Zetterberg 2007: 16) The Estonian rural population, however, was dependent on its German landlords, and in part was downright repressed. This, again, was the same in the Latvian area, where, on the other hand, the linguistic border between Latvian and German, both Indo-European languages, was less sharp, though still substantial.

When, in the seventeenth century, Swedish rule reached the Estonian areas, some attempts were made to change the situation, but the Russian takeover at the beginning of the eighteenth century strengthened the grip of the German nobility again. The only difference from their fellow Russian peasants in the tsarist empire was that a high percentage of Estonians was able to read. And this reading took place in their mother tongue – fostered also by the Lutheran church, which had been dominant since the sixteenth century. All this created a specific situation in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, which was crucial for the national emancipation movement.

Although a vast majority of the population had reading skills, no literary infrastructure let alone an Estonian field of literature existed. Reading was mostly restricted to religious literature, calendars and the emerging press, which made its debut with the successful foundation of the Perno Postimees (“The Pärnu Postilion”) in 1857. Ten years later, in 1867, the first bookshop for Estonian books was opened in Tartu. It was within this decade that Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg was written and published, and these cultural circumstances have to be taken into account when investigating the effect and impacts of the text. This holds for any literary text in any literary culture, but the Estonian case offers some specific circumstances which make it sensible to take a closer look at Kreutzwald’s epic poem, the Kalevipoeg.

To begin with the title: if one says “Kalevipoeg”, one always immediately has to specify whether one has in mind the mythic hero from Estonian folklore or the literary figure and the long poem created by Kreutzwald. Or both. This is one of the more specific features of Kreutzwald’s work, which only received the label “the Estonian epic” belatedly. And this is also one main difference from the Finnish epic. The word “Kalevala” almost always denotes Lönnrot’s work only, because it was he who introduced the combination of the personal name Kaleva and the suffix –la, which denotes locality in Finnic, in his work and as a title of his work (cf. Tarkka 1996: 77–79; Anttonen/Kuusi 1999: 76). When the place name Kalevala as the homeland of the heroes or of a giant called Kaleva appears in Finnish folklore records, as it does sporadically, it was probably Lönnrot himself who was responsible for placing the name there, rather than the rune-singers (see SKVR I.2.1158, where “Kalevala” is mentioned three times). The Estonian “Kalevipoeg”, on the other hand, is a personal name meaning “son of Kalev”, and this name is considerably older than the text of Kreutzwald. It occurs widely in Estonian folklore, as is well documented (see Laugaste & Normann 1959). Moreover, the name is also known from Finnish folklore, where it occurs in the form “Kalevanpoika” or “Kalevan poika” (see the same record mentioned above, SKVR I.2.1158, where it occurs four times), or more often in the plural form “Kalevanpojat” or “Kalevinpojat”. This is a regularly mentioned name of a (group of) giant(s). When Kreutzwald chose the name “Kalevipoeg” as a title for his work of art, he directly created a certain ambiguity which is not unimportant for the further perception and reception of the epic.

It is not the goal of this book to investigate whether Kreutzwald did this deliberately or not, although some aspects of the emergence of the epic will be illuminated (see chapters 2 and 3). The goal is, more generally, to contribute to our understanding of the Estonian epic by investigating various questions concerning Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg more precisely than has been done hitherto. Hence the title of the book, Kalevipoeg Studies. This means that in the following six chapters (2–7) varied problems are considered, which nevertheless interweave and form a unit. The two most important connecting elements are that Kalevipoeg as it is treated here mostly denotes the literary text written by Kreutzwald – it is this work of art that is at the centre of this book; and, secondly, that the reception of the Kalevipoeg is a central issue.

Therefore a short note on reception and my use of the term seems appropriate. Throughout this book, reception is perceived as the act of receiving a work of art – among the broad public, in a certain country or certain language. Receiving can mean different things, and can include more than one of them: reading, buying, commenting, translating, writing criticism and eventually embedding the work of art into new structures. These new structures may be new texts, new literary fields, other media or any other kind of cultural manifestation. Looking at the reception of a work of art thus means following its life after its release. What are people, societies, nations, literati or anyone else doing with the text? In this broad sense, reception means following the further life of a work of art in different contexts. Although any act of reception starts on the individual level, here the term is mostly not confined to reader-response criticism or the horizon of expectations of the solitary reader. It rather corresponds to the German Wirkungsgeschichte, i.e. “history of effects”. (cf. Grimm 1977: 28–31) One good example for this kind of research is the monograph on the cultural history of the Finnish epic Kalevala (Piela et al. 2008). Here, the research on the effects of a work of art shows points of contact with the poststructural concept of intertextuality (cf. Nünning 2008: 624; cf. also below). Another approach which concentrates on single authors is representend by Hans- Peter Bayerdörfer et al. (1983; on August Strindberg), Karin Carsten Montén (1981; on Fredrika Bremer) or Manfred Peter Hein (1984; on Aleksis Kivi).

When it comes to analysing a work of art and its effects and impacts, three different approaches, it seems to me, are possible. Firstly, one could have a closer look at the (circumstances of) the emergence of the text, the historical and cultural context as well as the personal circumstances of its creator, the author. Secondly, one could confine oneself to the (close) reading of the text only, i.e. try to find out more about the contents, find out what is “really” in it. And thirdly, one could concentrate on what happened with the text after its release and scrutinise the reactions, reviews and repercussions, i.e. the reception.

All three mentioned strategies have their own restrictions. The first approach, focusing on the genesis of the text and the author, seems after the “death of the author” (Roland Barthes, 1967, though the notion can in fact already be found in Wimsatt & Beardsley 1946, cf. Jannidis et al. 1999: 11) completely outdated. Do we not all believe that the biography of the creator of a text does not tell much about the text itself? It is at least a common opinion that there is something beyond historical and biographical facts. On the other hand, maybe the author is not dead at all but has returned or at least not vanished completely (see Jannidis et al. 1999; Burke 2008, see also Merilai 2015). Be that as it may, I am convinced that it is not “wrong” or “useless” to have a closer look at the emergence of the text which could also include some information on the author; in fact, it may help us to better understand at least some details and aspects of the epic, if not the epic in its entirety.

The second approach, which could be related to the Close Reading of the New Criticism (and thus linked to Barthes, who was influenced by this, cf. Wimsatt & Beardsley 1946: 470 who state that “[t]he poem … is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”), seems to rule out the rest of the cosmos and only look at sentences, words, letters, commas, hyphens and colons. This is, of course, an exaggeration, and probably most scholars agree that without concentrated, exact and devoted reading no treatment of literature is possible at all. Therefore we must never forget that the text is the starting point and that we must never move too far away from it. But on the other hand, it should be clear that there definitely are factors beyond the level of the text that determine the position of a work of art within the canon: the position of the publisher, the manner of distribution, the reputation of the critic et cetera – all these factors can best be described with the notion of the ‘literary field’ promulgated by Pierre Bourdieu (1983, 1985). Therefore simple close reading cannot suffice as a sole method for our purpose.

The third strategy would only concentrate on the afterlife of a text following its release. This simply seems to be the consequence of the – alleged – death of the author. But one-sided focusing on reception only would detract from our attention to the text. As I pointed out, any reception starts on the individual level. There is nothing wrong with it and it is true that the individual act of reading and perceiving a work of art is always a fact which cannot be labelled right or wrong or misleading. But individual reception can overlook things; different readers see different things, in other words: one could possibly miss some aspects of the historical, social and intellecutal context. In order to gain a more complete picture of a work of art, one therefore cannot rely on individual or broader reception analysis only. One should still have, nevertheless, a (closer) look at the text.

As a consequence of these seemingly contradictory observations, I would argue here that these three different approaches should not rule out each other. On the contrary, by combining them I will try to shed more light on Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg as a whole. Much of the previous research has only stressed one aspect or another of the epic – Annist (2005) focused on the origin of the epic and the folkloric material, Järv (1957) looked at the different text versions for school children, Laak (2013) stressed the proliferation of the epic material by later generations, to name but a few – not to mention that most of the research has been conducted in Estonian and is inaccessible to those not reading this language. The second important research language has been German, which nowadays is also far from being generally read and understood. Moreover, many of the German essays, treatments and reviews from the nineteenth century are completely forgotten today. But they can tell us, in my opinion, much about the early reception of the epic. Hence I have brought them together in this English monograph, which should help to enhance the knowledge of the Estonian epic among international literary scholars.

In chapters 2 and 3, the emergence of the text will first be discussed. Both chapters also deal with what happened with the epic in Estonia, i.e. within the Estonian literary field, after its publication. These chapters rely heavily on existing (mostly Estonian) research, but in weighing and assessing previous research I hope to provide some new insights.

The second chapter (based on Hasselblatt 1997, revised and enlarged) also deals with the historical and cultural background of the epic and its author, which seems to be necessary for a better understanding of the Kalevipoeg. In this chapter I will also briefly touch upon the question of the authenticity of the folkloric material of the epic, although this is a disputed issue (see Bendix 1997) and in general not the topic of this book. But as authenticity played a role within the process of reception, some comments and references need to be given. Finally, the slow and almost troublesome reception of the first editions of the epic is described. Although the early (non-)reception of the epic in Estonia is well known, the fact that the foreign reception was more vivid than the Estonian is often disregarded.

At the beginning of the third chapter (based on Hasselblatt 2009, revised and enlarged, with some passages of the original publication deleted or integrated into other chapters), the emergence of the text is once more scrutinised, this time with an emphasis on the attitude of the author and the consequences of his decisions. Then, I try to follow the life of the text after its release. This starts with Kreutzwald’s own comments, but gathers pace in the years after his death, leading to widespread dissemination and proliferation of elements from the epic. This use and reuse of the Kalevipoeg material I venture to call intertextuality here, knowing that the term has many different meanings and definitions and “is in danger of meaning nothing more than whatever each particular critic wishes it to mean” (Allen 2000: 2). I apply it here in the most literal, i.e. verbatim or concrete, meaning as relationship(s) between different texts, not in the strict sense Julia Kristeva originally coined it. Her coinage is based on her reception of Bakhtin, who sought “an alternative to the Saussurean theory of language” by stressing “that language is utilized by individuals in specific social contexts” (Allen 2000: 16–17). For Bakhtin, the “word becomes one’s own through an act of ‘appropriation’, which means that it is never wholly one’s own, is always already permeated with traces of other words, other users”, as Graham Allen (2000: 28) rephrases the Russian thinker. “This vision of language”, Graham continues, “is what Kristeva highlights in her new term, intertextuality” (ibid.). In this more philosophical sense, intertextuality can be restricted to one text. But in my use, I keep in mind the mutual influence and repeated reuse of different texts.

The fourth chapter (based on Hasselblatt 2008a, some passages of the original publication have been enlarged, deleted or integrated into other chapters) is the only one where a detailed study of some text passages is conducted. Again, however, this cannot be separated from reception studies, which reveal the different treatment of the same original in various texts. The chapter focuses on a seemingly minor decency problem of the nineteenth century with a great impact. I try to show that the consequences of this problem are far-reaching and can still be felt today. By “cleansing” the text from indecent passages – which were definitely present in the first version and which also belong to the underlying folk poetry – the author, later editors and even translators are involved in a “fabrication” of the text, which may even lead to misunderstandings and mistakes. Close reading here partly means also going back to the sources, manuscripts and first records. This is nothing new; Estonian philologists have always done this, but owing to the multiplicity of the material and the scope of the epic, many questions have not been treated in such detail. The episode from the fifteenth tale of the epic that I deal with here is one such example.

While the third and in part the second chapter mostly focused on the reception of the epic within an Estonian context, the fifth and sixth chapter take a closer look at what happened in Germany regarding the reception of the Kalevipoeg. As is well known from Estonian cultural history, Germany and the German language were not just one of Europe’s major cultures: the local nobility and upper class made it the dominant culture for Estonians, and it therefore held a special role. This situation had lasted for centuries, but the nineteenth century was particularly crucial for the Estonians in terms of their potential to emerge and survive as a nation or not. Therefore it was of the utmost importance how foreign nations looked upon Estonians and their culture. If in such a situation the German reception of the Estonian epic was quite remarkable, this must also have had consequences for the Estonians themselves.

In the fifth chapter (based on Hasselblatt 2011: 56–66, 72–7, and passages from other publications, slightly revised and enlarged), the early German reviews and translations are presented, showing that in the nineteenth century, there was a real and honest interest in other, smaller and distant cultures. From an Estonian point of view, the most important point, however, seems to be that this real interest came from Berlin, not from the local upper class. In Estonia and Livonia, there were, of course, several local Germans who did show an interest in matters Estonian, and they were involved in the Learned Estonian Society. But the majority still had no positive attitude towards what they contemptuously labelled “peasant culture”. In such a situation it mattered for the Estonians that far away, in Germany, someone was interested in their ancient songs. At the same time, the reception in Estonia itself still had to come, as has been shown in the third and partly in the second chapter. The goal of this fifth chapter is to give an impression of the rich material provided by various German scholars and reviewers. This material is not restricted to the nineteenth century, although the stress lies on this century. But as can be shown, the reception continued during the following centuries too.

The sixth chapter (based on Hasselblatt 2011: 67–72, revised and augmented) introduces a new level of reception which I called “rewriting”. Not long after the appearance of the Kalevipoeg in Germany, some German intellectuals did not rest with reviews, essays, articles and smaller research pieces on the Kalevipoeg, but wanted to make more of the material. They created their own works of art on the basis of Kreutzwald’s text. This was only possible because the first edition was published in a bilingual version with the Estonian original accompanied by a German translation. This well-known fact has already been discussed in the second chapter, because it played an important, possibly decisive, role in the emergence of the final printed version. Here I ventured to call it an “advantage of disadvantage”, because the immediate accessibility of the Estonian epic to a German reading public created the opportunity for German intellectuals to receive the text (which was not the case with the monolingual Kalevala editions from 1835 and 1849). And some of these early multipliers “did something” with the text, i.e. rewrote it. The results might have a comical effect when looked at from the distance of more than a century, but in the nineteenth century, they were of some significance and clearly formed a part of the reception.

Finally, in the seventh chapter (based on Hasselblatt 2012b, revised and enlarged), I will turn back to the beginning, at least in some respects, i.e. if we call folklore the beginning of the Kalevipoeg. This chapter is partly also a direct continuation of the sixth chapter, where I dealt with the German rewritings. As a rewriting can come to be labelled a translation (because the author simply did not see the text and relied on bibliographical data) I found myself confronted with the old problem of what a translation actually is. Moreover, in dealing with the material, I found adaptations based on other adaptations, translated adaptations and adapted translations. This “fuzzy” material made me think of folkloric material – not because the material is unclear, indistinct and fuzzy, but because it often displays a multitude of sources and is put together from different pieces. Consequently, I had to think of Walter Anderson’s Law of self-correction (1923), which was designed to explain some principles of oral transmission. Feeling and knowing that written transmission, which is what took place with the various adaptations of the Kalevipoeg, is something different from oral transmission, I nevertheless felt obliged to test Anderson’s law and extend it to written transmission. The result can be seen in chapter seven: the law is not completely transferable to written texts, but I think I succeed in showing some conspicuous or even astonishing parallels.

As Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg has to be regarded as the “core text of Estonian culture”, as initially stated, research on it has indeed been abundant. The leading expert was arguably August Annist, whose contributions from the 1930s have been reissued in one bulky volume (Annist 2005). Many of his findings are not outdated, though several new generations of scholars have dedicated themselves to the epic; to name but a few, Marin Laak, Eduard Laugaste, Felix Oinas, Jüri Talvet, Jaan Undusk and Ülo Valk have all made valuable contributions to our knowledge of the Kalevipoeg (see their works in the bibliography). My research relies heavily on previous research, which is to be expected, but my goal is, of course, to offer more than just an English-language summary of what readers of Estonian already knew. The importance of the foreign reception of the Estonian epic has never been disputed, but has perhaps been underestimated. In this field, detailed research has so far been missing. In presenting my results now I hope to shed more light of the Estonian epic without repeating too much of matters already well known.

The contents of the Kalevipoeg (a summary of the twenty tales)2

In order to ensure that comments, references and intertextual relations are understandable, a short overview of the whole text is offered here. The sources of the text, which were in prose circulating among the peasants, and the process of compiling will be discussed in the following chapter (2.1. and 2.2). The first English prose version of the epic was published by William Forsell Kirby more than a century ago (Kirby 1895: 1–143), but the English translations of the epic (Kurman 1982, Kartus 2011) do not contain a summary of the twenty tales. Neither did the German translation by Ferdinand Löwe (1900), but Ülo Valk produced a short summary of each of the twenty tales for the 2004 edition of this translation (Petersen 2004: 247–60).

One of the best Estonian prose summaries of the epic is the youth version published by Eno Raud in 1961. This edition has been translated into Latvian (1964), Ukrainian (1975), Russian (1978, 1989, 1998), Finnish (1981), German (1988) and Portuguese (2001) and gives access to the Estonian epic to adult readers of these languages as well. Moreover, the Estonian version by Eno Raud is probably the best known in Estonia itself as only a small number of Estonians have read the complete text as it was written by Kreutzwald. The version by Raud (reissued in 1970, 1976, 1986, 1998, 2004, 2009 and 2013) forms the basis of the collective Estonian knowledge of the Estonian national hero.

In the prologue of the Kalevipoeg, the singer Vanemuine is invoked for help and inspiration. Vanemuine is a direct loan from the Finnish Kalevala where the demigod Väinämöinen is one of the main characters of the epic, whilst no such figure is known in the Estonian tradition.

The prologue is followed by an introduction in which the audience is brought into the appropriate mood and prepared for the story. Then, some songsters from heaven are depicted while praising the deeds of Kalevipoeg. The audience’s attention is also directed to seven grave mounds in which are buried affliction, slavery, the horrors of war, hunger, misery, plague and illness. These graves call for attention, because they contain the memories of these hardships of the people.

The first tale tells the story of the origin of the hero Kalevipoeg (Son of Kalev) and describes the arrival of his father, Kalev, from the north. Kalev is one of three brothers; the other two go east (to Russia) and west (to Norway), respectively, but Kalev heads south and is brought to the shore of northern Estonia by an eagle. However, for a human being to be born, two people are needed, and so, without any kind of transition, the story of a young widow is told, who finds a chick, a young crow and the egg of a black grouse. She looks after them and raises three daughters from them. The chick turns into Salme, the black grouse egg into Linda, and the young crow into a girl who is not described in any more detail. Suitors soon appear on the scene: the sun, the moon, stars, water, wind, etc. and Salme chooses the son of a star. Suitors for Linda also come to their wedding; she rejects several of them, one after the other, and finally accepts Kalev. They soon get married.

The second tale briefly lists the numerous sons of Linda and Kalev, and then Kalev becomes ill and dies while Linda is pregnant with his last son, about whom Kalev already predicts all kinds of positive and heroic acts. After Kalev’s death, while gathering stones for his grave, Linda sheds enough tears to fill a lake close to Tallinn. The stones of Kalev’s grave later form the cathedral hill at the heart of Tallinn. That is why later Kolyvan, the old name of Tallinn from Russian chronicles, was etymologically connected to Kalev, but this is not the only etymology (see Heikkilä 2012). Linda then soon goes into labour, and, after a difficult birth, Linda and Kalev’s last child, Kalevipoeg, comes into the world. Like his father, Kalevipoeg possesses enormous powers and, already as a young baby, tears his nappies to shreds, uproots young trees while playing and grows quickly. In the meantime, Linda is approached by suitors again, including a Finnish sorcerer, but Kalevipoeg’s mother rejects them all.

In the third tale, Kalevipoeg goes on a hunt with his brothers, and they have a great deal of fun and sing exuberantly. The Finnish sorcerer could not get over the fact that Linda had rejected him and takes advantage of the sons’ absence. He comes back to Estonia and seizes Linda, intending to abduct her to Finland. Linda resists fiercely and calls loudly for help. Uku, the supreme god in heaven, also called the god of thunder, hears Linda’s pleas and sends a thunderstorm that causes the Finn to fall into a swoon. This does indeed save Linda, but the strain is too much for her and she dies and turns into stone. When the Finn regains consciousness, he cannot find his victim and has to go home without having accomplished his intentions. The brothers now return home from their hunt and find their home empty. They then spread out in all directions looking for their mother. When they fail to find her, Kalevipoeg thinks the Finnish sorcerer might have kidnapped her and goes to his father’s grave to ask him for advice.

In the fourth tale, Kalevipoeg swims to Finland, where he thinks he will find his mother and his mother’s kidnapper. On the way there, he stops on an island and becomes infatuated by the song that a young maiden is singing. He responds to the song, meets the girl, and soon both are overcome by a passionate and carnal longing for each other to which they succumb. The girl’s cries arouse her parents, and her father hurries to make sure everything is in order. In response, Kalevipoeg declares honestly who he is, at which the girl turns pale and, seized by despair, slips from the edge of a cliff and plunges (casts herself?) into the depths. Kalevipoeg’s attempt to save her fails, and, after a short farewell, he continues on his journey. The girl’s father now fetches his wife, who was searching the bottom of the sea for her daughter. Instead of finding her daughter, however, she finds an eagle’s egg, a hat of iron, the remains of a tree, and other things. Then, a long and mysterious song by the daughter is heard from the bottom of the sea that attempts to explain her death to her parents. We can guess that her affair with Kalevipoeg was incestuous, even though this is not made explicit until the seventh tale.

In the fifth tale, Kalevipoeg arrives in Finland and, after a sleep to restore his strength, goes in search of the sorcerer. It takes some time before he finds the sorcerer’s home. When he arrives, he defeats, one after the other, all the demons and warriors the sorcerer has summoned. The sorcerer begs for mercy and tells precisely what happened with his unsuccessful kidnapping. But Kalevipoeg does not believe a word and kills him. Kalevipoeg then searches in vain for his mother in the sorcerer’s house. Now he regrets having killed the sorcerer so quickly without having forced him to reveal where his mother was being kept. The battle was so exhausting that the hero had to get some sleep afterwards and it is only in the ensuing dream that Kalevipoeg learns that his mother is dead. The opening part of the saga of the great oak is also inserted here: the parents of the island maiden plant the oak that they fished out of the sea, and it grows so large that it reaches the sky.

The sixth tale continues in Finland. The hero wants to buy a sword before returning to Estonia and thus goes in search of the famous Finnish smith. When he finds him, he tries out different swords that the smith shows him but each one breaks with the first blow. Finally, the smith brings him a special and extremely expensive sword. This sword turns out to have been ordered by Kalevipoeg’s father (Kalev) and has been there ever since because of Kalev’s death. This sword passes every test, so Kalevipoeg is satisfied and wants to seal the purchase. A banquet is organised to celebrate the sale, during which the alcohol flows freely. Kalevipoeg brags about his amorous adventure on the island and a serious quarrel arises between him and the smith’s son, who was the island maiden’s bridegroom-to-be. In the fight that ensues, Kalevipoeg draws his sword and kills the smith’s son. The horrified smith then curses the sword: may you one day be the death of Kalevipoeg. The tale continues with the story of the oak that began in the fifth tale. This oak, which has become so large that it hides the sun and the moon, must be felled, and the old man of the island desperately seeks a skilled woodcutter for this. He finds one only in the form of a Tom Thumb figure who is trapped under the wing of a young eagle. After this figure is liberated, he shoots up into a giant who succeeds in chopping down the oak within three days. Many useful things are made from the wood of the oak tree, and the trunk forms a bridge between Finland and Estonia.

In the seventh tale, Kalevipoeg returns to Estonia. During his crossing, he hears his sister singing a song from the bottom of the sea in which she reveals who she is and makes the incest that occurred in the fourth tale explicit. However, she also laments the misdeed that her brother committed in Finland, and Kalevipoeg is then seized by grief. Arriving on land, he hears an elfin song on his way home; he recognises his mother behind this song and understands that she is dead. When he arrives home, his brothers tell him of their adventures during their unsuccessful search for their mother. Kalevipoeg in his turn tells them of his experiences but deliberately omits the negative elements such as the seduction of the island maiden and his killing of the smith’s son. The brothers then decide to choose a king the next day, and thereupon Kalevipoeg goes to his father’s grave once more in search of comfort and strength.

In the eighth tale, the brothers set out to look for a place to hold their contest to help them decide who is to be king. Along the way, they pass a garden where parents offer their daughters to young men travelling through the country who are thought to be looking for wives. However, Kalevipoeg and his brothers have other things on their minds and are not ready for marriage. They soon find a suitable spot for their contest by a lake where they look for three stones and decide that the one who can throw his stone the farthest will be king and both losers will leave the country without any ill-feeling. The eldest brother throws his stone into the lake, the second to the edge of the lake’s opposite shore. But Kalevipoeg throws his stone far beyond the lake. He thus becomes king and gets to work, which consists first of all of cultivating the land. After three days, exhausted from this work, he sinks into a deep sleep. His exhausted horse, whose legs Kalevipoeg had bound together to keep him from wandering off, also wants to rest but is attacked by wolves and bears and torn to pieces.

When Kalevipoeg awakes, in the ninth tale, and has to face the loss of his horse, he takes his revenge out furiously on the animals of the forest. Then, exhausted, he lies down again. Before he can sleep, however, he is startled by a messenger bringing him news of the threat of war: an enemy force has been sighted on the sea. Kalevipoeg gives advice on how the country should be defended. This is where the famous sentence occurs that only those who keep to the middle will return home from the war. Then he wants to go back to sleep but is disturbed by a new messenger whom he attempts to put off until the next day by mentioning the work he has done. However, the new messenger insists. It turns out to be old Taara himself, the highest god, who wants to look at the work Kalevipoeg has done on the earth, to give him friendly tips and, finally, to prophesy. After finally being able to enjoy some sleep, Kalevipoeg sends the war messenger back to the coast and promises to come himself if the war continues. This tale concludes with a monologue by the war messenger, who, on his way back, encounters all kinds of animals that guess his ominous message of war and immediately spread the news, or who – thanks to his message – only appear because they catch a whiff of easy prey; finally, hunger and plague also enter onto the scene. The messenger is so disheartened by this that he stops and destroys the message because he does not want to disturb the peace of the people in this way.

In the tenth tale, Kalevipoeg looks for a new horse and passes by the swamp of Kikerpära, where two of Satan’s sons are unable to agree on the boundary between their domains and ask Kalevipoeg to mediate in the conflict. He has his assistant, Alevipoeg, survey the swamp and establish a border while he himself moves on. While Alevipoeg is working, a water demon comes up from the depths out of curiosity and promises to reward him richly if he does not cut off the supply of water to his swamp, which Alevipoeg seemingly had resolved to do. Thereupon Alevipoeg requests a felt hat full of gold. During the night, he then digs a hole in which he places a hat that has been punctured in several places so that the water demon’s attempts to fill it the next morning will be in vain, and the demon will thus lose all his treasure. The water demon uses a cunning ruse to draw Alevipoeg down to him, but Alevipoeg sends Kalevipoeg’s servant instead. This boy soon becomes afraid, however, and manages to escape from the hole through guile and deceit. The water demon pursues him and starts to wrestle with him, at which point Kalevipoeg and Alevipoeg arrive, having in the meantime removed the treasure that will be used, among other things, to pay for the Finnish sword. Kalevipoeg takes the place of the servant in a test of strength with the water demon, which he effortlessly wins. Afterwards, he rests and then decides that he wants to build cities for the defence of his people. He needs timber for this, so he travels east to fetch planks. An episode is added at the end of this tale in which the weather maiden loses her ring in a water well and Kalevipoeg climbs down to fetch it. His adversaries then try to destroy him by throwing in a millstone after him. But Kalevipoeg comes back up again with the millstone around his finger.

In the eleventh tale, Kalevipoeg returns via Lake Peipus with a load of planks, despite a storm sent by a sorcerer of the lake. He is so tired afterwards that he lies down to sleep. While he is sleeping, the sorcerer steals his sword with a great effort and the help of magic, but he cannot carry it far. It slips out of his hands in the Kääpa River and cannot be removed from the bottom of the stream. When Kalevipoeg wakes up and notices that his sword is gone, he begins searching for it and finds it. He talks to the sword for a long time but cannot get it to move, to rise from the bottom of the river and allow him to take it with him: the sword is angry with Kalevipoeg for committing a rash act of manslaughter. Out of resentment, Kalevipoeg now puts his own curse on the sword: may whoever carried you – and here he is thinking of the thief – one day also be killed by you. He then continues with his load of planks and meets a small frightened man in the woods, who has become lost and ended up in the company of two giants. These giants had eaten peas (hence the episode is called “barrage of peas”) and suffer in the following night from flatulence – to the great annoyance of the visitor, who is lying between them and constantly being catapulted from one to the other. He had finally managed to escape. Now Kalevipoeg puts the man into his pouch.

In the twelfth tale, Kalevipoeg is still travelling with the planks and is attacked by the sons of the water demon that was overcome in the tenth tale. During their battle, he smashes one plank after another until someone whispers to him from the undergrowth that he should strike his adversaries with the side of the plank. He then fights off his adversaries and rewards the one who gave the good advice – a naked hedgehog – with a piece of his fur coat. The little man whom he put into his pouch in the eleventh tale does not survive the battle, and Kalevipoeg buries him. Completely exhausted, Kalevipoeg then falls into a sleep that lasts seven weeks. This sleep is magically filled with nightmares by the sorcerer from the previous tale. When he awakens, Kalevipoeg decides to return to Lake Peipus to fetch a new load of planks, now that the load he had been carrying has been destroyed. On his way there, he kills a wolf that had been carrying a sheep in its mouth. When he arrives at Lake Peipus, he begins to build a bridge so that he can avoid the trouble he had had last time. This attempt fails because the bridge is blown away by a storm. He thus wanders through the lake anyway and catches crabs. Finally, another episode is added that tells how a downtrodden orphan boy is given a sheep from a lark’s egg.

In the thirteenth tale, Kalevipoeg heads home with the new load of planks. He also listens to the song of a magpie, which informs him about his duties as king. He also learns words for charming snakes from an old woman. After a pause, he wanders on and comes across three men, who are cooking for the devil at the entrance to hell. They show Kalevipoeg the road to the underworld. There he hears the sad song of the maiden of hell, which also informs him immediately about the mysteries of hell and teaches him some tricks by which he obtains special powers. The maiden also gives him a fingernail hat that can magically transport someone to another place or change one’s outward appearance. Then the old woman of hell is locked up in the kitchen. The maiden of hell calls her sisters and they celebrate with Kalevipoeg exuberantly.

In the fourteenth tale, Kalevipoeg goes on a tour with the maidens through the underworld, where there are various suites of iron, copper, silver and gold but also of silk, velvet and lace. The maidens show him everything and reveal to him that they are of noble lineage but have been held captive here by the devil. Kalevipoeg then waits for the devil, fights and defeats him with the help of a trick performed by the captive maidens. Kalevipoeg leaves the underworld after his victory with a great deal of plunder and, together with the liberated maidens, returns to his planks at the entrance to the cave. To the horror of the maidens, he burns the fingernail hat in front of the cave, whereby he indicates the dawn of a golden era, and then continues on his journey accompanied by the maidens.

Kalevipoeg’s persecutors emerge from the underworld in the fifteenth tale, but he manages to elude them, again with the help of the maidens, and then calmly tells the old one (a synonym for the devil) in the underworld what he took with him from hell. Afterwards, during his much-needed sleep, Kalevipoeg is almost drowned by the bodily fluids of one of the witch maidens but manages to escape this fate by hitting the source with a well-aimed throw of a stone. Then Olevipoeg appears and carries out Kalevipoeg’s plan of building cities. The further destinies of the maidens, who marry Alevipoeg, Sulevipoeg and Olevipoeg are described in detail.

The sixteenth tale presents a completely new theme: Kalevipoeg now wants to continue on the road to wisdom and to travel to the end of the earth. He builds a ship and embarks on his journey. While under way, he meets the sage of Lapland named Varrak and takes him on board after promising him rich payment for his services as a guide. Although he overcomes all kinds of obstacles and defeats various adversaries, Kalevipoeg must accept that he cannot reach the end of the world. He turns back home, the richer for his experiences.

In the seventeenth tale, the city has been completed by Olevipoeg and Kalevipoeg gives it the name Lindanisa (one of the older names of Tallinn). War breaks out again. Kalevipoeg puts the enemy to flight at the Battle of Assamalla but loses his horse in the swamp when he pursues the enemy there. Then he travels through the country with Alevipoeg, Olevipoeg and Sulevipoeg and they come across the entrance to a cave, in front of which an old woman is cooking soup. They relieve her of her work and take turns guarding the pot of soup. They are, however, each outwitted one after the other by a small man with a bell around his neck, who manages to wangle permission from them again and again to try a spoonful, at which point he scoops the pan empty each time. Kalevipoeg then succeeds in taking the bell from the man, through which he is able to ward off his supernatural powers. They then eat the soup, lie down, and are lulled to sleep by the dance of grass maidens.

In the eighteenth tale, Kalevipoeg goes to visit the underworld a second time, using the magic bell to overcome many obstacles. He runs into the devil’s assistants, all of whom he gradually defeats. Finally, he encounters the lord of the underworld himself, who accuses him of theft during his previous visit to the underworld, and Kalevipoeg challenges him to a duel.

This duel is fought in the nineteenth tale and lasts seven days and seven nights. In the end, Kalevipoeg decisively defeats the lord of the underworld and ties him up. He leaves the underworld with a great deal of plunder and the curses of the devil’s mother, and throws a large party. A period of prosperity and happiness dawns in the land that ends only when reports of war are brought once again. The sage of Lapland also appears and demands his payment for the advice he had previously given. This payment includes a book of wisdom that Kalevipoeg had ceded to him against the advice of Sulevipoeg and Olevipoeg. Finally, Kalevipoeg cannot sleep and goes to his father’s grave without, however, receiving a message from it of any kind.

In the twentieth and last tale, we find hasty preparations for the war. The treasure is buried, and the troops are summoned from everywhere in the land. An intense battle ensues against knights in armour. Kalevipoeg once again loses his horse, Sulevipoeg dies fighting, and when Alevipoeg seeks to refresh himself at a lake, he drowns in exhaustion. Kalevipoeg hands power over to Olevipoeg and withdraws to a hermitage. There he is visited by three emissaries of the invading forces. They make an offer of peace but in fact want to murder him when his back is turned. Kalevipoeg sees through all this and makes short work of his enemies in an intense fury. Jeeringly, he sends another emissary back. In a bad mood, Kalevipoeg then continues on and manages to reach the Kääpa River without remembering that his doubly cursed sword is lying at its bottom. When he enters the water, the sword cuts off both his legs and Kalevipoeg dies. His death cries reach heaven, where a new task for the hero is imagined. From that point on, Kalevipoeg will guard the gate of hell, sitting on a horse so that the devil can never again wreak havoc on earth.

From this brief summary, the reader will easily observe that some elements sound familiar from other epic literature whilst others are genuinely Estonian, or at least Finnic or Finno-Ugric. To put it loosely, one can ask which parts are “Estonian” and which are of a common European folklore heritage or are otherwise international elements also known from other mythologies.

To start ab ovo, the myth of the creation of the world from an egg (cf. Alho 1987: 272) – here adapted to the birth of Linda and Salme but prominently present in the Kalevala – is well known throughout the Finnic area and probably has archaic roots in this part of the world. Although attempts to connect this cosmogonic myth to Indo-Europeans can be found (see Siikala 2013: 152, 475), one has to confess that it is hardly known in any other European mythology and occurs only in the Eastern Mediterranean, and some areas in Asia and Oceania (see Valk 2000).

A peculiarity of the Kalevipoeg is the missing opposition between king and hero known from many other European epics, where the social structures of the medieval European feudal societies are reflected. But Kalevipoeg is hero and king in one person, not the counterpart of either. He also exhibits astonishingly human qualities in addition to his heroic attributes. His supernatural strength, seen in the ability to visit the underworld and to defeat the ruler of this realm, is balanced by a pronounced, very human need for sleep. If we skip the first three tales where Linda is more at the centre of the action, almost all other tales contain quite detailed scenes of sleeping. The sleep of our hero can last days and even as long as seven weeks. His sleeping leads to numerous problems: he loses his horse while sleeping, is deprived of his sword, and almost drowns. Sleeping scenes are only absent from tale fourteen, about the hero’s first visit to the underworld, and from tale sixteen, about the voyage to the end of the world. For some early critics the constant sleeping of the hero was annoying (e.g. Weski 1918–19: 248). Another very human characteristic is Kalevipoeg’s lack of superiority or at least lack of calmness or any kind of wisdom. He commits manslaughter while drunk; when he finds the Finnish sorcerer, he immediately kills him instead of first asking where his mother could be; he also clumsily destroys scores of planks in a fight before a hedgehog tells him how to handle his weapon. These humanising characteristics set Kalevipoeg apart from the heroes of other European epics. Also the heroes of the Kalevala partly display crucial differences with respect to other European epics (cf. Lord 1987), though not exactly in the same way as Kalevipoeg.

One interesting aspect of the epic is the conspicuous presence of the underworld. The hero not only visits it twice, but it plays an important role in a number of other episodes as well: the underworld or its inhabitants are involved in eight of the twenty tales (10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20; see Pormeister 2011: 267).

These details show that there are certainly enough elements that make the epic “Estonian” and extraordinary in this sense. The language is of course also an important and even emblematic feature in this respect: language is always an important factor in any literary work of art and is, in this case, genuinely Estonian. Also marked is the explicit reference to the thirteenth-century conquest, which is a fact from Estonian political history with traces in the collective memory. The abundant references to concrete topographical objects constitute one of the characteristics of the epic and its connection to its basis in folklore (see Valk 2002). The stupid – and not too dangerous but rather simple-minded (see Laugaste & Liiv 1970: 17) – devil seems to be characteristically Estonian, although most of the more recent manifestations of the devil in Estonian folk religion point to strong Christian influence (see Valk 2001a). Finally, the prominent role of women points to a tradition different from the patriarchal Indo-European mainstream: women threaten the hero (see chapter 4), help him (in the underworld) or motivate the action, as is the case with the hero’s mother. As Jüri Talvet (2009: 100) puts it: “Kalevipoeg’s grandmother was a bird, a black grouse. Thus the magic of nature and its female germ are hidden deep in the essence of Kalevipoeg.” Indeed, one could say that Kalevipoeg is more Lindapoeg, the son of Linda.

Nevertheless, there are also more international elements that connect the Estonian epic to other European texts. In the mythological context, frequently used numbers such as “three” and “seven” are also prominent in this epic, though not seldom exceeded by four, five, eight or nine. Encounters with higher powers are likewise a standard element in epics. In the case of Kalevipoeg, it is perhaps astonishing that he has so many adversaries: not only the ruler of the underworld (who causes no real problems for him), but also the Finnish sorcerer (who is defeated because he is old), the water demon with his sons (who are more troublesome), the witch maidens (who are also dangerous) and finally the Finnish blacksmith, who has no real supernatural power but whose curse is ultimately fatal to the hero. The episode with the witch maiden in particular shows an interesting international parallel that reconnects the Estonian epic to the European context (see chapter 4).

The Kalevipoeg is a unique text that enriches the literary heritage of our world. And, like all core texts of literary cultures, its influence and impact can be felt everywhere in this culture, not least in the language itself: where quotations from Shakespeare are found in everyday English, the figure of Kalevipoeg appears throughout present-day Estonian.

1  Wherever Estonia is mentioned in this book, it denotes the area where Estonian is spoken, so before 1918, for example, the correct terms would be Estonia and Northern Livonia.

2  Based on the respective chapter in my history of Estonian literature (Hasselblatt 2006a: 230–9), partly also on Hasselblatt 2004.

2. The Significance of the Kalevipoeg for the National Emancipation Movement of Estonia in the Nineteenth Century

One of the most fascinating aspects of Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s long epic is the fact that, from the very beginning, its importance was not in the text itself but in its potential. In this point, a parallel can be detected with the Finnish Kalevala, which is, according to Lauri Honko (1990: 181), “approached from three levels: as a folk epic, as Lönnrot’s epic and as a national epic”. Also the Estonian epic has not just been read – or perhaps it was not read at all – but it has been functionalised and exploited, beginning from before it was even completed. In 1839, Georg Schultz-Bertram, a German Estophile, addressed the members of the Learned Estonian Society (Gelehrte Estnische Gesellschaft) with the following words:

Just think about how positively it would affect an oppressed people if they received knowledge of a historical existence and former strength. [. . .] Would they not feel like a beggar who is suddenly told: You are the son of a king! – What more can prove the historical significance of a people than the fact of having their own epic? [. . .] What is our [the Estophiles’] goal? [. . .] Do we believe in the future of the people or do we not? Is it more probable that they will eventually merge with one of their two mighty neighbours? But why then support a building which already bears in itself the germ of decay? No – I believe in the original strength of the people. [. . .] How, then, can our society foster the enlightenment and the spiritual rebirth of a nation that has been freed from serfdom and declared of age but that nevertheless suffers from its own sheepishness and despondency? I believe through two things. Let us give the people an epic and a history and everything is won! (Quoted from Laugaste & Normann 1959: 97, original emphasis).

This often quoted passage (see Löwe 1900: XI–XII; Reiman 1903a: 7; Kreutzwald 1963: 131–3; Webermann 1968: 19–20; Scholz 1990: 268; Oinas 1994: 33; Undusk 1994: 147; Arukask 2012: 138) seems to give an answer to the question of the significance of the epic, as we can state nearly two centuries later that the Estonians have not been absorbed into the Germans or the Russians but maintain a vivid existence and stand as a full member nation of the European Union. And they have an epic, Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg, which appeared for the first time between 1857 and 1861. So Schultz-Bertram was right – “Give them an epic and a history and everything is won!” Was it that easy?

In order to find an answer to this question I will try to shed more light on the following three problems:

1. The emergence of the text, i.e. the question how it has been created, how it came into existence, how it was formed;

2. The question of the authenticity of the material;

3. The effect and reception of the epic.

The emergence of the text

In October 1839, Schultz-Bertram was not the first to make mention of the possibility of an Estonian epic. In a lecture delivered in the January session of the Learned Estonian Society of the same year, Friedrich Robert Faehlmann, an Estonian physician and one of the founding fathers of the Society, talked about old Estonian tales dealing with an ancient hero named Kalevipoeg. The text of this lecture was – partly – published only seven years later in a monograph on the history of the Estonians (Kruse 1846: 175–82) but more important was the fact that the members of the Learned Estonian Society had listened to it. (The complete text was later published in Laugaste & Normann 1959: 77–87 with an Estonian translation pp. 88–94, and again in Faehlmann 1999: 55–68 with a new Estonian translation on pp. 69–80.)

There had been even earlier fragmentary publications such as the article ascribed to Schüdlöffel (1836) in the German language newspaper Das Inland and several mentions of an ancient hero named Kalev or Kaleva in sources from the previous centuries. The very first mention of the hero – or, to be more precise, of this hero’s sons – was made by the Finnish Reformer Mikael Agricola in his translation of the Psalms of David from 1551 (Agricola 1551: 212). Roughly a century later, the creator of literary Estonian, Henricus Stahell (or Stahl, see Raag 2002), mentioned an Estonian giant called Kalliweh in one of his handbooks (Stahell 1641: 476, facsimile in Laugaste & Normann 1959: 49). Later, various authors reported the name sporadically – e.g. Faehlmann in 1833 in a letter to Kreutzwald (KKV I: 14) and also Kreutzwald himself in an unpublished German ballad from 1836 (Anni 1926: 633–4; Laugaste & Normann 1959: 69–70). It is important to note in this context that the “early” Kalevipoeg from Kreutzwald’s 1836 poem is considerably nearer to folklore tradition and rather different from the “later” one we know from the written epic, which is the topic of this book. This is a well-known fact (see Laugaste & Normann 1959 for more details, generally Oinas 1969, and Oinas 1976 for interesting South Slavic parallels). Ülo Valk (2002: 408) characterised this in the following way: “This early poem characterizes Kalevipoeg as a dangerous robber and a savage giant who is punished for his crimes – an opposite figure to the hero of the later epic.”

The two lectures from 1839 by Schultz-Bertram and Faehlmann had the consequence that the material which eventually led to the publication of the epic we know today began to be dealt with seriously. Thus, one could say that the initiative was taken by the Learned Estonian Society and not by a particular individual.

The Learned Estonian Society was founded in 1838 and had as its main purpose the collection of everything – material or immaterial – connected with the country and its inhabitants, i.e. Estonia (including Northern Livonia) and the Estonians. Comparable societies had been founded earlier in the region but hardly any of them gained the same importance for the emerging national movement and the national emancipation of the Estonians. This kind of learned society dedicated to the research into the local vernacular culture was a widespread phenomenon at that time. The longing for an ancient epic was also not something unique to Estonians. The enormous popularity of James Macpherson’s tales of Ossian and their impact on nineteenth-century Romantics is well known (see Moore 2003).

For the Estonian context, neighbouring Finland was the most important factor. Finland had also been part of the Russian Empire since 1809, which made contacts between the kindred nations easier than in earlier times. (Cf. Zetterberg 2015) In Finland, the Finnish Literature Society was founded in 1831, and one of the founders, the physician Elias Lönnrot, had published his first version of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, in 1835. Without this publication, the Estonian Kalevipoeg is practically unthinkable. The Finnish epic was received slowly though positively, particularly after Matthias Alexander Castrén’s Swedish translation had been published in 1841, which made it accessible to intellectuals elsewhere in Europe (see Alhoniemi 1985; Alhoniemi 1990) and for the Swedish speaking upper class in Finland itself. In Germany, Jacob Grimm delivered his enthusiastic speech on the Kalevala to the Academy in Berlin as early as 1845 (Grimm 1845/1865) and soon the Berlin scholar Wilhelm Schott wrote several articles about the Kalevala (Schott 1848, 1852, 1853; cf. Hasselblatt 2014: 131–8).

In Estonia, too, the Kalevala was noticed but its direct reception, i.e. reading it, was hardly possible: although Estonian and Finnish are closely related a speaker of Estonian could not easily read a Finnish text, certainly not the archaic Finnish of the Kalevala, which was challenging even for speakers of Finnish. In 1855, Kreutzwald confessed that Finnish was for him like Spanish, i.e. completely incomprehensible (KKV II: 383), and even twelve years later he complained to the Finnish scholar Otto Donner about his poor knowledge of Finnish (KKV IV: 358). Nevertheless, when Schultz-Bertram was in Helsinki in 1839, he bought an edition of the Kalevala and proudly brought it to Tartu – the first copy for the university town, as Webermann (1981: 204) reports, and as Schultz-Bertram himself later proudly recalled (Bertram 1860: 431). The Finnish epic was addressed several times in sessions of the Learned Estonian Society, and the first German translation sample in fact appeared in Estonia in the Proceedings (Verhandlungen der Gelehrten Estnischen Gesellschaft) of this very society (Holmberg 1840, Mühlberg 1840).

These facts and circumstances in a sense put the Finnish Kalevala into the position of an obstetrician towards the Estonian Kalevipoeg. However, there are some factors which relativise this impression. First of all, it must be stressed that tales of an ancient hero called Kalevipoeg were known in Estonia prior to the publication of the Kalevala and, secondly, Schultz-Bertram hardly took a look at his copy of the Finnish epic: it was passed on without even having the leaves cut open (Webermann 1981: 205 – a fact that was later even used in Estonian literature, cf. the play Faehlmann by Vaino Vahing and Madis Kõiv from 1984, quoted in Pärnik 2006: 124). It is even doubtful whether Schultz-Bertram was able to read Finnish at that time, because we know from his own notes that in 1833, during his first visit to Finland, he was not able to communicate in Finnish but used German instead (see Werner 1934: 19, 22). Later, he was probably able to read (and translate from) Finnish; at least this is an assumption made by Mart Lepik in his commentary to Kreutzwald’s letters (KKV II: 270, note 6, cf. also Pärnik 2006: 68). Schultz-Bertram’s German publication of Finnish fairy tales and proverbs also suggests this (Bertram 1854).

Although the lectures by Faehlmann and Schultz-Bertram and the enthusiastic proposal of the latter had been warmly received by the members of the society (Webermann 1968: 20), this did not result in concrete steps being taken. Faehlmann had no time to deal with the project, as he was also lecturer in Estonian at Tartu University from 1842 onwards and was in poor health. He died of tuberculosis in 1850 at the age of 51. With him, it was believed, all hope of an Estonian epic had faded away. Several contemporaries thought that Faehlmann had had large parts of the epic in his memory and thus took it with him to his grave. Lönnrot, who had travelled to Estonia in 1844 and met Faehlmann, expressed this very thought in a letter to the Learned Estonian Society (Suits 1931: 167; cf. also Reiman 1903a: 8).

However, this was not the case. Faehlmann simply did not have the time to produce such an epic. Moreover, we understand today that he would most likely have written such an epic in German, for the upper class in the country and abroad, not for the masses. He clearly would also have chosen to work in Macpherson’s Ossianic style and not in the trochaic tetrametre typical of Finnic folk poetry (Webermann 1968: 21).

After the death of Faehlmann, the Learned Estonian Society transferred the task of creating an Estonian epic to Kreutzwald. It was known that Kreutzwald had been a friend of the deceased and that he was familiar with the topic. He soon settled to work and planned – like Faehlmann – the text in prose, which is quite understandable as most of the tales about Kalevipoeg circulating among the peasants were in prose as well. Kreutzwald wanted – quite literally – to bring together the pieces of the epic that were scattered all over Estonia. That is what he initially believed and that is why he urged friends and colleagues to send him material and help him with the reconstruction of the lost epic. The response was, however, meagre in the eyes of Kreutzwald, although he did receive support from different directions (Karttunen 1905: 41–2).

Again a period of stagnation followed. But then, in 1853, Kreutzwald got hold of a German edition of the Kalevala (the Schiefner translation from 1852). Although he had the book in his house for only one week and would hardly have read the entire epic, it must have inspired him to move forward. In the beginning, however, he was not very impressed, as he wrote to his friend Emil Sachssendahl, the secretary of the Learned Estonian Society, on 23 March 18531 (von Schroeder 1891: 14; KKV II: 312). In Kreutzwald’s opinion, the Kalevala looked like the Ossian of Macpherson; in other words this was hardly a Homeric epic. Lönnrot had put together some fragments found in different places, nothing more. If this is what it was a question of, then it could not be too difficult to compile something of the like for the Estonian context too. And perhaps it was just his own rather severe criticism in his letter to Sachssendahl that made Kreutzwald hesitate and think it over. Yes, why not, we could do it for Estonia as well! From this it was a small step to the next decision, to use the metrical form for his epic instead of prose.

In the following months, Kreutzwald wrote feverishly and finished his first version in November 1853. This text consisted of an introduction, a preamble of four tales and a body of twelve main tales followed by an epilogue comprising altogether about 14,000 lines of verse. As this version was never published in one edition, let alone a critical edition, exact numbers in the literature are missing. Webermann (1968: 23) speaks of approximately 14,800 lines, the same number Kreutzwald mentioned in his letter to the Learned Estonian Society (Santo 1854: 89). On another occasion, however, Kreutzwald wrote of 14,180 verses (in a letter to Sachssendahl from 23 November 1853; KKV II: 327), Laugaste (1961a: 205) mentioned 14,152 lines, and Annist (2005: 511) speaks of 13,817 lines. The correct number, however, should be 14,161, which is based on my own manual page-for-page counting from a copy of the original manuscript kept in the Estonian Literary Museum.2

The four preamble parts which Kreutzwald soon omitted were published for the first time in 1911 in the journal Eesti Kirjandus (pp. 276–305) and are numbered up to a total of 3,272 lines. However, the correct number should be 3,278. The mistakes in numbering were not corrected, as Reiman remarked in his editorial note (p. 275), and also the second publication within the critical edition of the epic (Kreutzwald 1963: 17–46) repeated some mistakes of the 1911 edition, though some lines were added from the manuscript. Nevertheless this version is still incorrect with its total of 3,277 lines. The situation is confused by several layers of mistakes: first of all, Kreutzwald himself made some erroneous numberings; secondly, he had erased five lines in his manuscript (two on page 121, three on page 122) which are sometimes included in the calculation; and finally, the corrections made by later editors were incomplete and added in some cases some new mistakes. Be this as it may, the invocation (32 lines), the introduction (313 lines), the twelve main tales (10,499 lines) and the epilogue (39 lines) of this version that has later been called the Proto-Kalevipoeg comprise altogether 10,883 lines, which gives a total of 14,161 lines when the preamble parts are included.

Kreutzwald reported the completion of his work to Sachssendahl in a letter on 16 November 1853, and promised to send the manuscript after a final revision the following month (KKV II: 324–5; von Schroeder 1891: 18–19, here erroneously dated 16 October). He also added a letter to the Learned Estonian Society in which he explained the background of the epic. He wrote about his conviction that the whole story of Kalev must once have circulated among the peasants in previous centuries. His task was on the one hand to put the fragments together and on the other to eliminate those parts which did not fit into the narrative. He also expounded his choice in favour of the metrical form as opposed to prose, which he had first considered to be the appropriate form for the epic. However, as no literary tradition of Estonian prose existed, he did not feel like inventing or introducing it and therefore imitated the form of the oral tradition: this form was well-known and established, and he had numerous examples which could now be integrated into the text much better. Finally, he transferred the right to publish his work to the Learned Estonian Society but kept the copyright for future editions strictly to himself.3

The president of the Learned Estonian Society, Georg Moritz Santo, proudly reported the planned publication of the Kalevipoeg at the session of 9 December (Das Inland 1853, col. 1055) and published an announcement in the following edition of the proceedings (Santo 1854). There he quotes exhaustively from Kreutzwald’s letter to the Learned Society, elaborates on the general character of folk poetry and promises the publication of the epic in two instalments during the current year, i.e. in 1854 – but what did not follow was a speedy publication of the epic.

There are at least two reasons for the delay that followed. First and foremost Kreutzwald received new material and wanted to work on the text and partly rearrange it. Only three months after the delivery of the text to the Learned Estonian Society, he started to rewrite it, as he himself reports in his preface to the final edition (Kreutzwald 1857: XIV; 1963: 68–9). It took the whole of 1854 and a large part of 1855 before the definitive version was ready. The second and ultimately much larger obstacle was censorship – an ever-present factor in the history of Estonian letters (see generally Chroust 2001, Hasselblatt 2006b). The responsible censor for the publications of the Learned Estonian Society was Carl Ferdinand Mickwitz in Tartu, a “narrow-minded theologist with old-fashioned opinions who cringed in front of the tsarist regime and was a friend of the German barons” (Taev 1952: 113). This is, as the year (and place) of publication tells us, a characterisation from Stalinist times (which, by the way, itself suffered from strong censorship), but it nevertheless contains a core of truth. This can at least be concluded from the formulations a furious Kreutzwald himself used in his correspondence with Sachssendahl, where he did not spare offensive terms denoting the Tartu censor (28 December 1854, KKV II: 365). Mickwitz was actually only the right hand of the real censor, Alexander de la Croix, but as the latter did not know Estonian, Mickwitz, who was lecturer in Estonian at the university, was responsible for all Estonian materials. In November 1854, Mickwitz reviewed the first part of the epic and crossed out all passages where something was said about the social status of the peasants or archaic freedom in ancient times, which totalled 160 verses. Kreutzwald was desperate and did not see any possibility of having his work published under these circumstances. The only solution seemed to be to pass the manuscript to future generations, hoping that times would improve (KKV II: 365).

In this situation several possibilities were considered. The censor in Tallinn was known to be more liberal – could the epic be printed there? Was St Petersburg an option, where Kreutzwald had some acquaintances at the Academy? Why not have it printed in Helsinki? The Grand Duchy of Finland belonged to the same tsarist empire but the political circumstances were completely different there and censorship was less severe. In January 1855, Sachssendahl wrote to the Finnish scholar August Ahlqvist that printing in Finland was a serious option (Haltsonen 1962a: 136). Negotiations with a Finnish printer soon began, and they progressed quite far, even reaching the stage of proofreading of some pages, but finally failed, in part owing to the Crimean War (1853–6) (see Ariste 1963).

Then one simple idea rescued the whole project. Why not publish a bilingual version and disguise the epic as a scholarly edition of ancient folk poetry? Such an edition would only reach a small group of middle or upper-class intellectuals, and there would be no danger of stirring up the peasant population. No censor could be against it, as such an edition would be – as the censor Mickwitz himself set out in his report to de la Croix on 12 November 1856 – “a poetic monument of the earlier contemporary folk which nowadays hardly anyone understands, for scholarly interest and the educated reader . . . [and the] loyal and well-done German translation is a very commendable addition” (quoted according to Taev 1952: 117, where the German original is cited). And indeed, that is exactly what happened, and that is why the first edition of the Kalevipoeg was a bilingual version published between 1857 and 1861 in six instalments within the proceedings of the Learned Estonian Society.

However plausible this argumentation sounds, there is one caveat: the ingenious idea is older and it was not quite as monocausal as it sounds. Already in Santo’s above-mentioned announcement from 1854, a bilingual edition was mentioned, with separate monolingual offprints in German and Estonian (Santo 1854: 86). This is interesting, as Santo could have seen only the Estonian version as no German version yet existed. Moreover, Kreutzwald himself initially thought only of an Estonian version (see Karttunen 1906: 1) and was strictly against a parallel German translation, as he wrote to Anton Schiefner in St Petersburg in February 1854 (Walravens 2013: 52). Still at the beginning of September of the same year, 1854, Kreutzwald wrote to Sachssendahl in Tartu (von Schroeder 1891: 20; KKV II: 351) that he disliked the idea of a German translation. Obviously, however, the problems with the censorship authorities convinced Kreutzwald that a bilingual edition could provide a viable alternative for publication. In connection with the possible printing in Finland, Kreutzwald mentioned to Sachssendahl that part could be printed in a bilingual edition with parallel columns (letter from 27 June 1855, KKV II: 377). In December 1855, the final version of the epic was ready, with twenty tales and 19,087 lines of verse, and the decision about the bilingual edition was also obviously made. It was a fait accompli with no chance for the author to interfere, as he reported years later to Schiefner (29 October 1859, Walravens 2013: 132). The decision was made by the Learned Estonian Society, not by the author. Kreutzwald had to accept it and, in a letter to Sachssendahl (11 December 1855), speaks naturally about the translation and the fact that there is no hurry with the printing as the translation is far from being completed (KKV II: 383). Here the translator, Carl Reinthal, a German and one-time minister, is also mentioned for the first time.

This translator turned out to be a problematic case. Reinthal was a bank employee in Tartu, having been removed from his earlier office as a minister in 1844. The reason for this was that “his way of life was inappropriate for a priest” (Veersalu 1967: 30) – whatever this might refer to. In fact, Reinthal was one of the founders of the Learned Estonian Society and was even its president for a period. However, he had resigned from this function in 1852 owing to quarrels about orthography, as Kreutzwald reported on 6 February 1853 in a letter to Anders Johan Sjögren, the famous researcher of Finnic languages at the St Petersburg Academy (KKV II: 411). Reinthal can certainly be called an Estophile as he published much on matters Estonian (see Veersalu 1967: 30–6), but his knowledge of Estonian was strongly criticised several times by Kreutzwald – both in letters to Reinthal himself (KKV II: 469–563) and to other persons. In December 1855, Kreutzwald complained to Sachssendahl that Reinthal had asked Kreutzwald to supply him with a complete German translation (KKV II: 383), and in April 1856 he criticised the exaggerated poetic language of Reinthal, i.e. Kreutzwald suspected that the translation was too poetic, which meant too far from the original (KKV II: 389). A clash of opinions soon occurred between author and translator and Reinthal refused to continue after the fifteenth tale. The last five tales were translated by Kreutzwald himself and checked by Schultz-Bertram, to whom Kreutzwald had written in February 1860, suggesting that Reinthal be sent to Berlin for a year in order to learn Estonian properly (KKV IV: 68, see below 5.2 on Schott, who was a professor in Berlin). All this and the severe criticism the first instalments received caused another delay and it was the prestigious Demidov Prize, or more precisely the second category (720 roubles), from 1860 (Webermann 1968: 32, note 68) which finally pushed the edition forward. In 1861, the last instalment appeared, and one year later, a monolingual Estonian edition was printed in Kuopio, Finland.

The question of the authenticity of the material

From its inception, the authenticity of the folklore material in the epic written by Kreutzwald has been questioned and investigated – beginning even before the text appeared in print. The president of the Learned Estonian society, in his above-mentioned announcement of the epic in 1854, urged the author to explicitly mark in a footnote the original folklore passages, which Kreutzwald finally did. This issue was much discussed (see below, section 5.1, with respect to Jacob Grimm) but as far as folkloristics in general is concerned, I agree with Ülo Valk, who remarked that the “notion of authenticity that had haunted academic folkloristics for a long time has [. . .] faded, as all texts are now seen in interrelations and it would be difficult to imagine truly ‘pure’ folklore or authored creation” (Valk 2011: 514). From the perspective of the present chapter, namely the question of the significance of the Kalevipoeg for the national emancipation movement of Estonia in the nineteenth century, this is more than true. Even a so-called “falsified” or “fake” text can have an effect on political movements, whereas an “authentic” and “historical” text might correspondingly lack any significance. It is not only irrelevant how “authentic” or “fictional” the epic is, it is strictly speaking impossible to maintain this division (see also chapter 7 below). The whole notion of “authenticity” is highly problematic, as Regina Bendix has convincingly shown: the crucial questions to be answered are not “what is authenticity?” but “who needs authenticity and why?” and “how has authenticity been used?” (Bendix 1997: 21) Nevertheless, in postcolonial theory authenticity as opposed to hybrid culture plays an important role (cf. Hennoste 2003: 88–9). This notion, however, suggests a clear-cut difference between colonial and colonised cultures which does not hold true. Any coloniser culture has earlier been colonised by others and it is only a question how far one can go back into history (cf. Hasselblatt 2008c: 17–18). The so-called authenticity issue, however, warrants a brief comment here, because it had a prominent position in the history of discourse. Previous generations always asked questions about the age of the epic with respect to contents and form.

With regard to the form, the metre of verse rather than the global structure can be observed. The trochaic octosyllabic verse with four stressed syllables, and no rhyme but alliteration, was taken by Kreutzwald from the Kalevala, but is nevertheless widely attested in Estonian oral folk poetry. Although the specific features vary in different areas, this metre indeed belongs to a Finnic inheritance. Most Finnic languages display the same pattern; only in Livonian and Vepsian is this form not found, i.e. at the periphery of the Finnic language area. On the other hand, one cannot connect this form with that found in Mordvin folk poetry (which would suggest an even higher age were this the case). Also, supposed Baltic influence is not likely, as the prosody of Lithuanian is completely different whilst Latvian poetry, whose prosody resembles that of the Kalevipoeg, is obviously influenced by Finnic, not vice versa. All in all, the age of this form may be two or even three thousand years (see generally Korhonen 1987, also Leino 1985, Siikala 2013: 438–41, 476, and Sarv 2011). This would situate the genesis of the metre in the Bronze Age (Arukask 2011: 99), which in the Estonian area was between 1,800 and 500 BCE.

As regards the contents of the epic, the situation is more complicated. Although Lönnrot’s Kalevala served as an example for Kreutzwald, he did not have as much folk material at his disposal as Lönnrot, and poetry on heroic themes in particular was unavailable. The Finnish physician rambled around in Karelia and gathered thousands of samples of folk poetry, but Kreutzwald lacked this opportunity. He did obtain some texts from south-eastern Estonia but most of the Kalevipoeg was simply born in his mind and compiled at his desk in his Võru home. The eminent Estonian folklorist Oskar Loorits, writing in 1932, correctly concluded: “Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg rather belongs to cultural and literary history than to folk poetry” (Loorits 1932: 11). On the other hand, Lönnrot’s Kalevala also has to be regarded as a work of art based on the old runo songs, but which too for a great part was born in the mind of one person. The epic is, certainly in its second edition from 1849, “Lönnrot’s description of the Kalevala-like ancient world as he imagined it” (Kaukonen 1979: 188). Consequently, the treatment of the Kalevala in Finnish literary histories belongs to the period of Helsinki Romanticism, not to the chapter on folk poetry (Laitinen 1981: 186–96; Varpio & Huhtala 1999: 207–19).

In this sense, the difference between Lönnrot’s Kalevala and Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg is smaller than one might assume. It seems to be more on the technical level, which means that Lönnrot really put more collected verse into his epic. It is a difference of degree, not of principle. August Annist already stressed that the Kalevipoeg is a work mostly based on folklore, i.e. that all important motifs of the epic can be found in folk poetry (Annist 2005: 712–13). It is secondary that only 13.07 per cent of the Kalevipoeg (or 2,489 of the 19,0334 verses) of the final version consists of songs and texts taken directly from the Estonian oral tradition (Karttunen 1905: 65–99; Kreutzwald 1963: 240–3).

The richness of this oral poetry was in fact recognised only a generation later, following the initiative of Jakob Hurt, who, in 1888, placed several extensive articles and questionnaires for folklore collectors in the newspaper Olewik (“The Present”) that called upon the Estonians to collect folk material. This marked the beginning of massive collecting efforts that gradually created one of the world’s largest collections of folk poetry. However, Kreutzwald had already made notations from his few travels in the south-east and he had some correspondents who helped him with material. As noted above, Kreutzwald initially believed that he was reconstructing something that had existed in ancient times, but in the process of his work, he shifted subtly from the position of a collector into the role of the creator (see chapter 3.1. below on this matter).

Within this broader historical frame, the function of the Kalevipoeg within the literary milieu of the time is more important than the question of its authenticity. It was a text that was to prove that the Estonian nation – a notion hardly appropriate for the Estonians in the middle of the nineteenth century – also had a glorious past and therefore a right to exist in the present. Only after this achievement, after having established the Estonians as a nation, did it become possible to start to collect the folklore material of that very nation.

The effect and reception of the epic

The influence of the epic can be researched on different levels. One important bifurcation is, for instance, the difference between the reception in Estonia and abroad. The fact that the reception was completely different abroad is not at all astonishing; what stands out about it is the fact that, at the beginning, the reception abroad was more intensive than in Estonia (see chapter 5 on the German reception).

One reason for this becomes clear when we look at the general cultural situation or literary field in Estonia in the middle of the nineteenth century. Strictly speaking, a literary field did not exist at that time – at least not in the sense of one based on the Estonian language. What existed was a German-dominated literary field (see generally Lukas 2006), where an Estonian offspring was gradually emerging. The first bookshop to deal in Estonian books was opened in 1867 in Tartu (Liivaku 1995: 96), before which books printed in Estonian were sold by clergymen and teachers. Literary Estonian had existed since the sixteenth century, but the text production was mainly restricted to religious and edifying literature, primers and calendars.

Nevertheless, approximately 80 per cent of the Estonian peasant population was able to read at the time the Kalevipoeg appeared (Aarma 1990: 184–5), which in those days was a high figure in Europe, matched only in Finland, Sweden, Scotland and Germany. The most important medium in these years, however, was the newspaper, whose “real” history started in the same year as the Kalevipoeg, viz. in 1857.

Earlier attempts to found an Estonian newspaper had mostly collapsed after a few weeks, months or years (1766–7, 1806, 1821–3, 1825, cf. Hasselblatt 2006a: 159–61, 177–81). The greatest obstacle had been the censorship, which always found one reason or another to close down an Estonian periodical. But in 1857, the first issue of the Perno Postimees (“The Pärnu Postilion”) appeared – and continues to appear to the present day. There were, of course, some minor interruptions, and changes of names and owners, but nevertheless, the tradition of today’s Postimees goes back to this Perno Postimees founded more than one and a half centuries ago. The paper first appeared once a week and in 1863 it moved (together with its editor Johann Woldemar Jannsen) to Tartu, where it continued under the name Eesti Postimees (“The Estonian Postilion”). From 1887 onward, it came out three times a week; from 1891, it was the first daily paper to appear six times a week, leading up to a peak of seven editions a week during the period 1922–40. In Kreutzwald’s time, this newspaper contained some feuilletons and all kinds of valuable information but belles lettres in the strict sense did not yet exist in Estonian. Nevertheless, the press was – like journalism generally – important as a pathfinder and pioneer for what would later be called literature.5

With these opportunities, all the preconditions for a successful acceptance of the epic were in place – but the opposite happened. The first edition of the Kalevipoeg, disguised as a bilingual scholarly edition within the proceedings of the Learned Estonian Society, was printed in 500 copies and cost three and a half roubles (Annist 2005: 549). This was completely unaffordable for the people in the countryside, where 95 per cent of the population lived. Not much money circulated in the countryside, where, instead, people still relied more on a barter economy. But this was also not an everyday purchase for the upper class: transferred to 2015, these three and a half roubles would equal something between 400 and 500 euros – based on the average (gross) salary of a physician or a clergyman, which in those days was about 700 silver roubles a year (see the correspondence of Kreutzwald, KKV II: 268 or KKV IV: 235). The price of the first edition of the Kalevipoeg was thus around 0.5 per cent of a year’s gross salary, from which the reader can make his or her own calculation.

Alongside this first edition, a monolingual German version was printed, also in 500 copies. This German edition was, according to August Annist (2005: 549), still available at the beginning of the twentieth century and in the first days of Estonian independence (i.e. after 1918). However, a note in the Postimees from 18 January 1899 says that the translation of the Kalevipoeg by Reinthal and Schultz had been sold out for a long time and that it is therefore a pleasure to be able to announce the new translation by Löwe (which appeared in 1900, see section 5.4). Perhaps Annist had, as a young student, seen a copy in a provincial bookshop and drawn a conclusion that is not really convincing.

The original bilingual edition was sold out “quite soon” (both Webermann 1968: 25 – “recht bald”, and Annist 2005: 549 – “õige ruttu”), but this does not mean that large portions of the population would have become acquainted with the text. On the contrary, it seems that the expensive book was something for foreigners and for the bookcases of the upper class. Therefore Kreutzwald urged the Learned Estonian Society to publish a cheap monolingual, i.e. Estonian, people’s edition, but had no success. The society either had no money or was afraid of censorship problems or generally not interested in boosting the Estonian national culture. The last suspicion is supported by the fact that after the death of the secretary, Sachssendahl, and the president, Santo, both in 1856, a new period of the society started. The rapidly changing new leaders did not show much affinity with matters Estonian. Kreutzwald’s mocking comments about the new leader of the society, Baron Carl von Bruiningk, in a letter to Schultz-Bertram of 27 May 1858, are typical: “One baron ‘by the grace of God’ and the Estonian language are like fire and water, i.e. a congenital feud, nothing pleasant can be expected from this abnormal union” (KKV II: 453; generally on the history of the Learned Estonian Society see Taal 2006).

That is why Kreutzwald looked once more to Finland, where he hoped to manage the publication of an affordable people’s edition. And this time he was successful: in 1862, the monolingual edition appeared in Kuopio and was available for a seventh of the original price – 50 kopeks. This edition was financed by 60 shares issued at 5 roubles, which were enough to cover the printing costs (Annist 2005: 550–6). As Kreutzwald himself was the organiser of this edition, it should, according to bibliographical standards and customs, be called “the Võru edition” – for normally the place of the publisher, not of the printing house, is indicated. Although Laidvee made this correct and reasonable remark in his bibliography on Kreutzwald (Laidvee 1978: 341), the practice has nevertheless been to consequently speak about “the Kuopio edition”. One reason for this is, of course, the fact that Kuopio is printed on the frontispiece and no mention of Võru is made.

The number of copies of this popular edition is reported as 1,000 (Webermann 1968: 25), which may not sound very large but which was sufficient for many years. The book was definitely no success story, at least not at this point. In a letter from 23 February 1863, Kreutzwald complained to Schiefner that the sales were proceeding slowly and that only eighteen shares could be paid off; for the rest, interest had to be paid (Walravens 2013: 230). This situation continued for several years and the sales improved only at the end of the 1860s, as Kreutzwald wrote to Schiefner in May 1869 (Walravens 2013: 336). This happened mostly in the richer south, as Kreutzwald reported to Schiefner on 25 July 1871, complaining in the same letter about the pious north, where no-one reads profane literature (Walravens 2013: 355). By then, however, approximately 20 per cent of this people’s edition had rotted or been eaten by mice where it was stored. 90 per cent of the people he had written his work for did not take any notice of it (Kreutzwald 1961: 59).

Interestingly, in the very same year as the people’s edition of the Kalevipoeg appeared, Jannsen urged support for it in his Postimees: “Although not written for the Estonians, this book is nevertheless a large collection of the richness of the Estonian language, which any sensible person should not leave unread” (Perno Postimees, 30 May 1862, p. 164). His criticism concerned the bilingual first edition, about which he was right, as we have seen.

With respect to the complete lack of a literary infrastructure, this is of course hardly surprising. For centuries, clergymen, sextons and schoolmasters had been the only persons to convey books, and what they brought to their readers was almost without exception religious and edifying. Where should the interest in an epic come from? Although Kreutzwald tried different strategies to stimulate the Estonian people, the response was meagre. All he got initially were minor reviews in Estonia. Perhaps some aspects of what he did even worked against him insofar as the potential explosive force of the work might prevent some people from spreading word of it. It was not before the middle of the 1870s that a new edition was necessary. This third edition, monolingual like the second and the last from Kreutzwald’s own hand, appeared in 1876.

This initial poor dissemination should not, however, be interpreted as showing that the epic had no effect on the national emancipation. Figures as such do not reveal everything. For instance, the first edition of the Kalevala in Finland was also clearly not a bestseller: the 500 printed copies sufficed for more than ten years (Sulkunen 2004: 62; cf. also Häggman 2012: 132-3). It is important to differentiate the dissemination of the publication among the broader masses and the possible effect of the text as a work on the national movement. Both of these and their relationship must be considered, especially in the context of the social circumstances in Estonia at that time. There was a small group of Estonian intellectuals which ran things in the arenas of national culture, politics and the economy, and it was this group that was relevant, not the large crowds. If one succeeded in convincing this group that the epic really mattered and complemented that with a few others in the international context, sooner or later the breakthrough would come. It may be that no-one thought of this in precisely that way, but this is what in fact happened.

At this point, the fact that the first edition was bilingual became important. One could call this the advantage of the disadvantage (see section 6.1 below). It turned out to be impossible to spread a monolingual edition among the people because there was simply no literary infrastructure – a disadvantage in comparison to Finland, for example, where a monolingual edition was feasible, as the existence of the Kalevala showed. The solution of disguising the text as a bilingual scholarly edition turned out to be an advantage, because everyone outside Estonia was granted access to the work on the basis of the parallel text in German, which was a widespread international language in that time. Numerous reviews appeared solely in German, and this was good for another kind of dissemination: that in the international field of literary and cultural studies (see chapter 5). In addition, the epic was also received in scholarly circles in Finland and France, where people wrote about it, and the above-mentioned Demidov Prize of the St Petersburg Academy also had a positive effect on the epic’s publicity.

It is a characteristic of the nation-building process to define oneself in contrast to the other (see Hasselblatt 1995). For the Estonian intellectuals, it was at that time more important that the epic was discussed in Berlin, Helsinki, Paris and St Petersburg than on the peasant fields in Estonia. The curious attention that the epic received abroad definitely had a positive effect on the national movement and could even be seen as an ingenious act of public relations – although initially this was surely not the strategy of the author.

However, the epic also slowly gained ground in Estonia itself. Most of the intellectuals responsible for the endeavour which would later be called Estonian literature made use of or were inspired by the epic. Beginning in 1866, there were discussion groups of young intellectuals (Kreutzwald 1961: 60) where the epic was the main topic. In the same year, an article by one of the leading figures of the national emancipation, Carl Robert Jakobson, appeared in the Eesti Postimees, offering an overview of the Uralic languages and of the Estonians and their identity, and in which Jakobson wrote the almost prophetic words: “If we had nothing else, we could be proud of our Kalevipoeg-song, with which we can appear before all people – even if indeed one or another of the Estonians put it down giggling. Who would expect a nightingale’s song from a beetle! But one thing we can foretell: once the Estonian people are what we hope and long for, then it will be a shame for every young Estonian who does not know her or his Kalevipoeg-song” (no. 26/1866, 29 June, p. 207).

In the following year, 1867, Jakobson’s first school books were published, with some selections of the Kalevipoeg included. As they were constantly being reprinted, the dissemination of the Kalevipoeg had really begun.

The Estonian Student’s Society decided at its first meeting on 26 March 1870 to all read the Kalevipoeg and discuss it (Grönberg 1971: 14). As August Annist put it, the epic provided a kind of ennobling which documented the equality of the Estonian people with other peoples (Kreutzwald 1961: 61).

In the following period, the epic was taken precisely as a proof of the nation’s right to exist, regardless of the contents of the work or whether the person wielding this proof had in fact read the whole text – to say nothing of having understood it. With regard to the language of the old folk poetry that formed the basis of the epic, even experts in the Estonian language confessed that there were odd forms which no-one understood. This can be seen in a remark by Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann, certainly an authority in the field of Estonian linguistics at that time: he noticed that one finds a lot “that is even opaque for the best expert of the living language and where no dictionary and no grammar can help” in the Estonian folk poetry (Wiedemann 1875: 65). But whether the text was comprehensible or the language appropriate was not the point any more. The important thing was the very existence of the epic, not its contents.

In sum, the investigation of the first reception of the Kalevipoeg reveals, again, that no text can be seen as standing alone but that the circumstances and its exploitation are of utmost importance. It does not matter what is in the text, it matters what we do with it. The decisive fact is that the epic was implemented within the national emancipation movement: Schultz-Bertram was right – his exclamation quoted at the beginning of this chapter was correct, though perhaps with only with a minor modification: “Let us make for the people an epic and a history and everything is won!”

1  Exact dates, unless otherwise indicated, are given according to the Julian (“old”) calendar, which in the nineteenth century lagged twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar of Western Europe.

2  Also published on the web: http://kreutzwald.kirmus.ee/et/kalevipoeg/tekstiversioon?book_id=17.

3  Part of this letter was published in Santo 1854: 86–9; the complete original German version is included in the published correspondence between Faehlmann and Kreutzwald (see Lepik 1936: 196–202); after that, the letter was published in full twice in the same year in two different Estonian translations, viz. in Kreutzwald 1953a: 316–22, and in Kreutzwald 1953b: 1468–72, and finally once more, but now together with the German original in the translation of Kreutzwald 1953a, in Kreutzwald 1963: 7–16.

4  The last edition arranged by Kreutzwald himself appeared in 1876 and had 19,033 lines owing to some minor changes (see below, chapter 4). This became the canonical number of verses in the epic.

5  All Estonian newspapers (up to 1944) are digitized and available on http://dea.nlib.ee.

3. The Emergence, Cultivation and Dissemination of the Kalevipoeg

Kreutzwald’s attitude

As we have seen in the second chapter, Kreutzwald was not the collector of submerged material but the creator of a literary text, and he was fully aware of the importance of his mission. Or should we say that he was the creator of a literary text because of his sense of the importance of the mission he had inherited? It is not easy to define his role exactly as he himself was hesitant and, it seems, his attitudes vacillated.

In his letter to the Learned Estonian Society from 16 November 1853 (Kreutzwald 1963: 7–16), Kreutzwald reports that he had previously believed that the epic had never existed in metrical form as an entirety because all oral traditions about the giant Kalevipoeg were in prose form. He continues that later, however, he got hold of material from south-eastern Estonia, on the basis of which he determined that there must nevertheless have been, perhaps centuries ago, a complete, versified epic. According to Kreutzwald, the fact that today we know only fragments of this ancient epic should not prevent us from publishing them together with texts connecting these fragments. On the contrary, he felt that the publication would stimulate all readers to find the lost parts, which could later be inserted into the tale.

And then, fully aware of his authorship, Kreutzwald adds: “If I have succeeded here and there in bringing true folk-song and my own fancy together in a way that one cannot clearly see the borders between the two [. . .]: then I would have achieved my highest goal” (Kreutzwald 1963: 15). From here it is a small step to his final conclusion, which one might even call his credo: “As this is the principal work of my life, which a thousand years from now will be found like Homer is today, in the libraries of people who do not understand one iota of the language, I have to make arrangements during my lifetime that my future family can everywhere unrestrictedly benefit from this achievement of their great ancestor” (Kreutzwald 1963: 15–16). This statement illuminates why he transferred the right to publish his work to the Learned Estonian Society but kept the copyright for future editions strictly for himself.

It is interesting to see how the author – almost explicitly and in his own words – moves from the role of compiler into the position of a creator with, in the end, no scruples against comparing himself even to Homer. This shift in the relationship to the material is no accident: it manifests Kreutzwald’s intention to put his epic into a certain position and to ascribe value to it. He obviously felt that the text could not achieve this by itself; it had to be propelled.

Kreutzwald was fully aware of the importance of his work and was not at all modest about it. This can be seen from the letter to Sachssendahl, written on the very same day, 16 November 1853:

You can easily imagine that the position of my nose has risen some inches since the completion of the Kalewi poeg, so that I simply do not recognise ordinary rank and file; for I feel in every limb the idea of a great poet, certainly not a nobody. You will, my brother! appreciate the great sacrifice I make to the Learned Estonian Society by permitting them to warm their frozen limbs in this glorious sunshine of mine. For all the academies in Europe would compete to obtain the manuscript from me – but they won’t get it!! (von Schroeder 1891: 18; KKV II 325)

Although there might be a deal of irony in this, one thing is obvious: Kreutzwald clearly indicates here that he and only he is the master and the creator of his work. On the other hand he knew that the world – or at least the members of the Learned Estonian Society – expected something “real” or “authentic”, something ancient and primeval in the sense of Herder, whose ideas were beginning to have their effect. Therefore, the epic had to be made more authentic than it really was. One had to distance oneself from “Macpherson’s pack of lies”, as Kreutzwald called it in his preface to the first edition in 1857 (Kreutzwald 1857: V; 1963: 58). In this preface, Kreutzwald is again the modest compiler who had brought fragments together, not the author who wrote a poem of more than 19,000 lines. The author of the Kalevipoeg was now, according to Kreutzwald, the entire Estonian nation, the “Kalevipoeg as he appears in this compilation is, with respect to form and contents, the marrow, bone, flesh and blood of the Estonian nation through and through” (Kreutzwald 1857: XV; 1963: 70). In this sense, it was not the kind of epic Schultz-Bertram had dreamt of. On the contrary, Kreutzwald stressed in his preface that his work is something completely different from “an Estonian national epic as Dr G. Schultz had conceptualised it [. . .] My Kalevipoeg at least does not make the least claim to such a pompous title and does not pretend to be a poetic work of art but rather a collection of tales truly living in the mouths of the folk, which I have tried to put into a certain order” (Kreutzwald 1857: XV–XVI; Kreutzwald 1963: 71).

This intention is underlined by the simple fact that the first edition was actually published anonymously. Also the term “epic” (see Merilai 2004) was avoided; it was simply called an “Estonian tale” – “Kalewipoeg, eine Estnische Sage, verdeutscht von Carl Reinthal”. The translator could be mentioned, but not the author. Kreutzwald’s name appeared only at the end of the introductory preface, and that was all. What is also characteristic and meaningful with respect to the intended target group is the fact that the title was given in German only: there was no Estonian heading, although the text was bilingual and Estonian was the first language, printed on the left-hand pages with even page numbers.

Subsequent instalments also did not mention the name of the author and even omitted the translator’s name. In the fifth instalment, with tales 14–16 (1860), Kreutzwald’s name suddenly appears as the author of comments on the text, but that is all. In the last instalment, double-numbered as “sixth and seventh”, the (new) translator Dr Bertram is mentioned. But this would refer only to tales 17–20, though we know that Reinthal had stopped at tale 16. Concerning this sixteenth tale, we can only read Kreutzwald’s short notice in Das Inland (no. 41/1860, col. 758) that the translation was not made by him but by another, unnamed individual.

This short notice in the newspaper is worth mentioning as it shows once more the intention of Kreutzwald. It appears in a report about the meeting of the Learned Estonian Society on 5 October 1860. Kreutzwald had sent a letter to the Society with the notification that Reinthal had stopped with the translation. He further reported – as the newspaper states – that he would make the translation himself. The text then continues:

His [i.e. Kreutzwald’s, CH] guiding idea would be to strongly keep to the Estonian imagination and to leave it only in cases in which a literal translation would have been completely incomprehensible. Dr K. would rather render a clumsy German than a fluent one which would retreat from the original or distort the idea; for his task was not to gain something for German literature but to make visible the independent feelings of an almost unknown folk poetry for ethnographers, linguists and scholars in general; that is why nearly literal faithfulness was essential. (Das Inland, no 41, 10 October 1860, col. 758.)

In other words and to sum up: once more authenticity and folk poetry were pushed to the fore; there was no intention of producing a work of art. In this light it appears logical that the first popular edition, the monolingual Estonian version printed in Kuopio, is similarly anonymous, even the preface having no name under it. The same holds for the third edition from 1876, the last edition by Kreutzwald himself, which, according to international practice, served as the basis for all subsequent editions. This was all part of the programme, but Kreutzwald could hardly have foreseen the far-reaching consequences of this act. Many of the subsequent foreign editions or adaptations were presented as original folklore and consequently also published anonymously. A Danish shortened prose version from 1878 has the simple title Kalevi Poëg. Estlands Nationalhelt (“The National Hero of Estonia”, Rasmussen 1878); a Russian prose version, published in two instalments in 1886 and 1889, had the subtitle Kalevich. Drevnjaya èstonskaya saga v dvadcati pesnjakh (“An Ancient Estonian Tale in Twenty Songs”), the English version from 1895 is called The Hero of Esthonia (Kirby 1895) and, still in 1985, a new Hungarian translation mentioned the author only in the epilogue whilst the book is subtitled as Észt hősének (“An Estonian Heroic Song”). Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, an anonymous edition could be published, in this case a German translation, which a reviewer considered deliberately misleading (Petersen 2004, see section 5.6).

After the death of Kreutzwald (in 1882) and a quarter of a century after the last publication of his lifetime, the fourth edition of the epic was launched in 1901. This was the first time the name of the author was added, albeit only as the compiler. The next edition appeared another generation later, in 1935, in independent Estonia. By then, the text had been firmly canonised, but nevertheless it was only then that, for the first time, Kreutzwald was mentioned as the author, so that the bibliographical entry is to be found under Kr and not Ka. This has remained the practice to date, although – as mentioned earlier – anonymous editions can still be found.

The canonisation process of the Kalevipoeg took time, as was shown in the previous chapter. It was actually accompanied by a paradox: Kreutzwald himself was not completely convinced that Estonian literature would have a future. This was observed in his preface to the first instalment, quoted above, where he explained that he had decided to write his epic in verse “because we have [. . .] up to now no genuine Estonian prose and, as things stand, neither will we have in the future” (Kreutzwald 1857: XIV; 1963: 69). In other words, this was erecting a monument to something heading for disaster, an “absurd” action as Jaan Undusk put it (Undusk 2003; 2004: 140). Indeed, Kreutzwald’s words make the epic seem rather more the tombstone than the foundation-stone of Estonian literature, a final monument. One generation after Kreutzwald, however, Estonian letters started to develop rapidly and then one could easily use the Kalevipoeg as the foundation of the canon. This literary canon stabilised quite quickly and could not be demolished when a generation of “angry young men” at the beginning of the twentieth century tried to smash it. Their critical writings on the Kalevipoeg (e.g. Mihkelson 1908, Suits 1911; cf. Undusk 1990) are long forgotten, but the epic is still unshakably on the school curricula. With such a highly canonised text, anything becomes possible with respect to literature, as I will try to show in the following sections (leaving the other arts like music or painting aside). This multifunctionality of the epic is the best proof of the high position it obtained – comparable in the Estonian context to the frequency and the universal character of quotations from the Bible or from Shakespeare.

Quotations, adaptations and intertextual connections

The canonised position of the Kalevipoeg has the consequence that the text functions not only as a starting point for new works utilising the material and the plot of the tale, but also that it serves rather as basic cultural equipment from which anyone can take what she or he needs. This intertextuality (see the introduction for a definition) has been thoroughly investigated in Estonian letters, beginning with one of the pioneers of Estonian literary history, Mihkel Kampmann (later Kampmaa), with his essay on the effect of the Kalevipoeg on Estonian belles lettres (Kampmann 1911). Later on, the most important contributions on this topic came from Marin Laak and Piret Viires (see Laak 2003, Laak & Viires 2004, Laak 2006a, Laak & Viires 2011, and Laak 2013). Their findings will not be repeated exhaustively here. Nevertheless, a short overview of the key points will be offered.

In principle, two kinds of texts can be distinguished: those which have a reference to the epic already in the title, and those works which mention a motif or an element from the epic somewhere within the text. Works of the first group can be detected easily, although one must also carefully check whether the reference in the title is also paralleled by references in the text itself. It is possible that the name Kalev is only used to show that the text has something to do with matters Estonian, as it is the case with Elin Toona’s novel Kaleviküla viimne tütar (“The Last Daughter of Kaleviküla”, 1988) where the place name Kaleviküla (= Kalev village) only functions as a symbol for the Estonian exile community in the United States and where, except for the title, no further reference to Kreutzwald’s epic is made. The second group is, of course, much more challenging to survey and will most probably remain restricted to items observed as accidental discoveries: no-one can reasonably manage to offer a full account of Estonian text production across the last 150 years. However, one can at least try to bring together as many examples as possible in order to give the reader an impression of the proliferation of the topic. Another – and for the present discussion more important – division concerns how much of the epic has been used as source material or engaged referentially: the whole story or just some elements or motifs? This division will be used to structure the present discussion.

(More or less) complete adaptations

(MORE OR LESS) COMPLETE ADAPTATIONS

The Kalevipoeg was soon regarded as important for (the emergence of) Estonian literature generally. For that reason, it both became part of school curricula and was also simply regularly reproduced in one way or another (see Järv 1957 for a first overview).

The very first summary of the content of the epic was given by the author himself. Kreutzwald knew that many potential readers would not have the time, inclination or even the ability to read over 19,000 lines. He therefore decided to publish short accounts of the content in the annual almanacs. These almanacs were indeed very popular reading and reached a lot of people, but their space was limited and they appeared only once a year. People would have forgotten the contents of the previous almanac when the new one appeared. Kreutzwald thus decided to produce a small booklet with summaries of all twenty tales in one edition (Kreutzwald 1869b).

The next prose account of the epic was published only three years after Kreutzwald’s death, in 1885, when Juhan Kunder’s Kalevipoeg appeared. This version was reviewed positively, though very briefly in Olevik (16.09.1885, no. 38, p. 3) and Postimees (no. 1/1886, p. 3). After the death of Kunder, his Kalevipoeg was praised as his “most beautiful work” (Reiman 1888; cf. also Järv 1957: 117–18). The next prose account was published by Juhan Kurrik in 1886, when he wrote a comparison between the Kalevipoeg, the German Nibelungenlied and Kreutzwald’s posthumously published Lembitu (1885). Forty-seven pages of the book contained a prose version of the contents of the Kalevipoeg (Reiman 1903b).

At the beginning of the new century, in 1902, the children’s version of the Kalevipoeg by Toomas Uustalu was published. Although Villem Reiman complained about the fact that there were no pictures and that the author omitted some aspects and added others, the general comment was positive; Uustalu’s language was called “beautiful and figurative”, and the whole book was finally called “beautiful and good” (Reiman 1903b). A more comprehensive version, but also mainly adapted for school purposes, was the abridged version by Peeter Org (1904). Org omitted about 2070 verses (Järv 1957: 120) and added a valuable appendix including a dictionary and information on Kreutzwald. This version was popular and three new editions of it appeared (in 1910, 1918 and 1921); it was used in schools for “nearly 30 years” (Järv 1957: 121). Villem Reiman was also positive in his obituary of the author: the Kalevipoeg is “the most important of Org’s works which will make us remember his name when everything else has fallen into oblivion” (Reiman 1908: 342).

The next work which in its entirety was dedicated to the epic was a play by Karl Ferdinand Karlson, who is generally forgotten today. His Kalevipoeg ja Sarvik (“Kalevipoeg and Horny”) received strong criticism as “unplayable” due to the technical insufficiency of any stage, but also on account of its flat and dull patriotism and finally because of its poor language and inadequate poetic style (see Hindrey 1913, Hubel 1913). Although some reviews were less severe and one could perhaps find something interesting in it, the main objection was that “the best patriotism is not yet sufficient for producing a work of art”, as the writer Hugo Raudsepp (1913) put it. Nevertheless, the play was staged at least once, in the Vanemuine in Tartu, in February 1923, without too much success, however, and again strongly criticised (see Tormis 1978: 98 and 429). Today the play – like its author – has completely fallen into oblivion. When it appeared in 1913, however, Estonia was still a province of the Russian Empire and patriotism was generally appreciated among Estonian intellectuals.

This changed in the following decades, when Estonia enjoyed her first independence and patriotism was no longer necessary. It seems that the national epic and the national “hero” were not a significant topic in the 1920s and 1930s (see also Annist 2005: 44–5). However, there are at least four exceptions: one prose adaptation and two shortened verse versions (all for the young), and one allegorical novel. Additionally, within textbooks for schools summaries of the Kalevipoeg were also regularly published (see Lias 2003: 7–8).

The prose version for schools was written by the poet and scholar Villem Grünthal (pen-name Ridala) and was published in 1921 (reprinted, however without the introduction, in 1998). Grünthal’s version is compared to Kunder’s prose version as being “more compact and homogeneous”, as Järv (1957: 128) puts it. It is indeed a sober, but surely not unpoetic retelling of the epic. It even has some short quotations of original verse from Kreutzwald in it. Grünthal, who lived in Finland from 1923 until his death in 1942, and who had translated parts of the Kalevala into Estonian, also planned in the early 1930s to write a complete new version of the Kalevipoeg. He did indeed write it, but it was never published and the text was delivered to the Estonian Literature Museum at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Mirov 2006; cf. also Kuutma 2008).

In the same year, 1921, a shortened verse version was published by Eduard Ludwig Wöhrmann, a little-known secondary poet who today is more or less forgotten. His version is called Wäike Kalewipoeg. Lühikene kokkuwôte ôndsa Laulu-isa Dr. Fr. R. Kreutzwald’i järele (“Small Kalevipoeg. A short summary according to the blessed father of songs Dr Fr. R. Kreutzwald”, 1921). But in fact it is not a summary: Wöhrmann simply took parts of the epic and rearranged them into twenty-one new chapters, using 3,762 lines of the original, i.e. almost a fifth of the entire text. Only three times does he intervene as author: once using a short piece of prose to bridge a longish passage of repititions (p. 6), then adding the abbreviation “etc.” (p. 11), and finally providing a footnote to explain a particular locality (p. 90). The rest is all simply Kreutzwald’s text. Wöhrmann only added new headings like “The story of Kalew and Linda”, “The childhood of Kalewipoeg” or “The robbery of the sword”. However, the adaptation is irregular, as long passages are missing, whereas other episodes are reported in great detail. The third tale, for instance, is spread over five chapters using 658 of the original 851 lines, i.e. over 77 per cent. Other tales are completely omitted, viz. tales 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13–16, 18 and 19. This means that we still have the carrying of planks and the hedgehog, the sword and its curses, the birth and the death of Kalevipoeg and even the so-called “barrage of peas” episode from the eleventh tale, much discussed because of its possibly indecent character. But what is striking is that some of the most crucial and typical passages are omitted: the stay on the island, the visits to the underworld, and the voyage to the end of the world – to name only a few. In this sense, one cannot call Wöhrmann’s work a summary. It is an eclectic selection, not a full account of the contents of the epic. This changes the character and the intention of the entire work. Through these omissions, some passages are even enigmatic. For example, the reason for the quarrel between Kalevipoeg and the Finnish smith’s son remains untold as the episode on the island was also skipped. Obviously it was this eclecticism which allowed Wöhrmann’s work to fall into oblivion.

The second shortened verse version was compiled by Madis Nurmik or Küla-Nurmik (1930), a friend of Villem Grünthal (see Mirov 2006: 570). Nurmik’s version resembled the one by Org (1904) in the sense that it was also written for school children and also had a rich appendix. However, Nurmik’s version of the epic is shorter than Org’s, consisting of 9,900 lines of verse or omitting roughly half of the text (Järv 1957: 129). The most striking fact about this version is that Nurmik also revised the language, partly following the criticism of Johannes Aavik (Teder 1990: 621). This might be one reason why Ants Järv believed that one could not use this text in school (Järv 1957: 130), but he is contradicted by August Annist (1958: 308), who maintains that the text is still very much that of Kreutzwald and that Nurmik’s revision of the text makes the epic more readable for the young. Be this as it may, an interesting fact is that precisely this version served as the basis for the first Finnish translation (Winter 1957).

The fourth important text in this period was an allegorical novel written by Leida Kibuvits. It appeared in 1936 under the title Manglus Sepapoeg, which is a personal name, but the family name can be read as a patronymic and translated as “son of the blacksmith”. In this novel, a rock formation in the sea called Kivikalev (“Stone or Rock Kalev”) by the local people “wakes up” on a Christmas night in the 1930s and starts to walk around on earth. In a certain way, this character awakes after having slept 700 years and comes back to his people – exactly as the final verses of the epic relate. But Kibuvits’s character awakes without memory and initially even does not remember his name. He slowly recalls it in a conversation with a fellow traveller he meets on the road, who also tells him that his father died before his birth. This Manglus Sepapoeg has a number of additional parallels with Kalevipoeg: he is tall and strong, and simple-minded, and needs a lot of sleep. His fellow traveller is a trader and speculator, typical of a certain kind of young entrepreneur in these years of the Estonian republic. However, this character is of course no-one else than the well-known devil from the epic, which is also indicated by his name Säunik which resembles the original Sarvik (“devil”). With several more details from the epic like a man called Siil (“hedgehog”) advising him how to fight with a chair and a neighbouring woman from Saaremaa, i.e. the island maiden, who becomes the girlfriend of Manglus, Kibuvits places the national hero in the 1930s and lets him find his way in modern society. Manglus Sepapoeg moves from the countryside to the town, where he works as a beer-coach driver, and even attends a political meeting, but finally ends up finding his luck as a farmer, back in the countryside again – together with his pregnant wife and two frustrated petty bourgeois from the city. The novel can be interpreted as a critical view of the nationalistic movement in the 1930s in Estonia and the “silenced period” after 1934, when the acting head of state, Konstantin Päts, closed down the parliament and ruled in a somewhat authoritarian way. Generally speaking, this work was criticised for a lack of consistency and other shortcomings (see Tuglas 1936, Urgart 1936). Nevertheless, this novel by Leida Kibuvits provides an impressive example of the continuous presence of the epic material.

As one might expect, the national hero was needed again in the period following the Second World War, when Estonia lost its independence and was occupied by the USSR. Besides some smaller booklets for younger children with only some episodes from the epic, two prose adaptations were published in the early 1960s: one by the experienced folklore scholar Eduard Laugaste (1960) and the very successful prose version by Eno Raud (1961). The book by Laugaste is interesting in the sense that it also displays short samples of the original epic, embedded in a narrative retelling. This is actually a quite sober and simply descriptive account of the contents of the epic which even refers to the respective verses of the original in brackets when mentioning a certain episode. At the end of Laugaste’s account, a short overview of previous summaries is also given (Laugaste 1960: 83–90). Laugaste’s book is certainly not written for the younger generation and is therefore classified in the Soviet Estonian bibliography under “Estonian literature” (NER 1955–65: 720). Raud’s version, in contrast, is put into the category “Estonian children’s literature” (NER 1955–65: 843).

In the early 1970s, one of the most famous texts appeared, Enn Vetemaa’s Kalevipoja mälestused (“The Memoires of Kalevipoeg”), first in the leading literary journal Looming (1971), then in his collection Väike romaaniraamat 2 (“A Small Book of Novels”, 1972), and later reissued several times (1985, 2001). In this travesty the author retells the epic from the perspective of the hero himself, i.e. Kalevipoeg, in the style of his memoires. The narrative includes several jibes at Soviet circumstances and deviates here and there from the original. For instance, in Vetemaa’s version, Linda followed the Finnish sorcerer voluntarily, the small man with a bell around his neck does not scoop the pan empty and is completely innocent, and the voyage to the end of the world from tale 16 is realised as a polar expedition. Vetemaa’s narrator generally thinks that Kreutzwald had forged too positive a hero, which is why he corrects some points and perspectives. Through this, Vetemaa contributes, with many comical effects, to a de-heroicisation of a national hero (see also Laak & Viires 2011: 306–8). Like any work of art, this book also comments on the contemporary situation of Estonia, which is the reason for the interference of censorship even one and a half decades later: when Udo Uibo (1986) wrote his essay on Kalevipoeg in general and on Vetemaa’s treatment in particular, Soviet censorship could not bear some passages and demanded one page of the essay be removed – or rather replaced by another, innocent one. As the issue of the journal had already been printed, this had to be done by hand – one page manually was torn out and replaced by another 3,300 times (as reported by Tamm (2008: 72–4) concerning pages 345–6 of the Keel ja Kirjandus-volume of 1986, so readers might be interested in checking their copy of this volume to see if they might observe the traces of Soviet censorship handiwork). This illustrates once again the multifunctionality of Kalevipoeg, as it could prompt a response from the Soviet authorities right up to their very demise.

Of course, Vetemaa’s text was much more than a mere criticism of Soviet circumstances, which may have been one of its side-effects. Vetemaa in fact achieved much more:

[He] freed Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg from the fetters of his official status and reinvented the dualism of the Kalevipoeg figure, giving new life to a myth that was in the process of drying up. Surely many teachers in school will confirm that they succeeded in getting their pupils to read Kreutzwald’s epic precisely under the influence of Vetemaa’s Kalevipoja mälestused. (Uibo 1986: 349)

Like the children’s version by Eno Raud, this was, in its way, a kind of prose version of the epic’s material which was widely read.

The years that followed the Soviet occupation brought with them an enormous flood of literature as a result of the regained freedoms of press and speech. Interestingly, the epic did not disappear from this scene. As mentioned above, Kalevipoeg was marginalised during Estonia’s first independence, which was partly due to the debunking activity of some angry young men (as mentioned above). In the new independence, by contrast, Kalevipoeg was on the agenda more than ever before.

One of the first new treatments was a children’s book, which, like Eno Raud’s work from 1961, was more or less a simple retelling of the contents. In the version by Juss Piho and Ene Kenkmaa (1995), however, the emphasis is placed on the illustrations, as it is a comic book or picture book rather than a narrative retelling. This was published under the title Kalevi kange poeg (“The Strong Son of Kalev”), breaking the familiar title that had become idiomatic with an adjective, though everyone capable of reading it immediately understood what the book was about. The cover illustration showed a muscular man with a stone in his hand and a sword at his waist – two of the most common attributes of Kalevipoeg. The book consists of over one hundred and thirty illustrations, all of them provided with a short text of several sentences. As a retelling of the epic primarily in pictures, the artist Juss Piho should therefore be regarded as the main author, whilst the writer of the texts, Ene Kenkmaa, seems to be secondary and is mentioned only as a “composer and editor” (“koostas ja toimetas”). However, the artist is also not prominently named on the cover, where only “on the basis of F. R. Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg” reads as a subtitle. This shows once more that the material was viewed as a kind of common property which anyone might use. As a consequence, the authors of the text did not present their names prominently on the book but had them printed in small letters somewhere inside. This is the same as Kreutzwald did in the first issues, when he only signed himself as author of an introductory preface. This proves again that the notion of authorship (cf. Merilai 2015) actually is irrelevant or at least secondary.s

The tradition of children’s books continued more than a decade later when Õnne Puhk (2008) published the next illustrated prose version of the epic. This was another retelling of the story, divided into eight chapters, but the emphasis here was on the text, which is accompanied by twenty-eight large, full-page illustrations. The target group of this book seems to be slightly older than that of Piho’s comic: the text passages are detailed and seem to be designed for self-reading. As in Piho’s version, only capitals are used, but some passages in the original metrical form are included – though these are not taken from the original text, but rather rewritten. A considerable number of archaic words or folkloric terms are also used and explained in an appendix. In this respect, the book has a didactic element that was lacking in Piho’s comic version. There are other differences, too. The cover illustration by Piho displays an ancient, primeval hero with a stone in his hand and leaning with his elbow on a rock which has an eye on it – thus expressing the mystical element of the tale and symbolising another world. In contrast, Puhk’s illustration displays, in a naïve style, the hero on horseback with a crown and blowing a horn. Although the interpretation of Kalevipoeg as king is certainly not wrong, it is less expected to find the hero depicted like this. This more conventional view aims at embedding Estonia – or at least the Estonian folkloric and literary tradition – in a European context where kings are “normal”. Moreover, this illustration seems to be an allusion to Akseli Gallén-Kallela’s famous painting depicting Kullervo in just this position (1899; for illustrations of Kullervo, see Van der Hoeven 2012). Kullervo is a character form the Finnish Kalevala to whom an entire cycle is dedicated (runos 31–6; see also Schott 1853), and Kullervo indeed exhibits a number of correspondences with Kalevipoeg which were quickly observed (see Elmgrén 1859, Schott 1860, 1862 and Büchner 1865). The reason for this lies, of course, in the fact that both characters are ultimately developed from the same Finnic folklore traditions. Finally, a central technical difference between the two books can be mentioned: the edition from 2008 is an expensively bound hard-cover book of large format (25 × 25 cm) whilst the comic is a soft-cover edition in the style of an exercise book (15 × 20 cm). But this also stemmed of course from the change in economic conditions between 1995 and 2008.

One of the most prominent treatments of the material was written by Kerttu Rakke (2000). In her story Kalevipoeg – sometimes also labelled a “novel” (Laak & Viires 2011: 312) – Rakke places the action in the present and describes a young Estonian woman and her adventurous and exiting life. As the title suggests, numerous motifs and episodes are taken from Kreutzwald’s epic and transferred to the end of the twentieth century. Right at the beginning, the narrator travels to Finland to search for her mother, who had disappeared for some reason. But she does not find her, only a flat where she might have been and where a Finnish drunkard lives. She then intoxicates the man, takes a lot of money from his home and buys a car which is, of course, a status symbol, and even a weapon, corresponding to a sword of times of yore. Having bought the car, an American Oldsmobile, a bout of drinking is arranged, of which a fight is a consequence. Finally, the car is cursed: may it one day be the death of the protagonist. Then she returns to Estonia, where the leader of a group of young women is chosen by urinating. Whoever can urinate the highest will be the leader. Another parallel with the epic is that the main person loves to sleep. She also visits the underworld (symbolised through a voyage to Saaremaa, Estonia’s largest island), dreams of being drowned by the body liquids of a magic woman (see chapter 4) and embarks on a journey to the end of the world (symbolised by experiencing hard drugs). Even the incestuous adventure and the great oak are mentioned, and so is the second visit to the underworld where “another evil” is faced (symbolised here as sexual contact with the same sex). In the meantime the car is robbed, found again and finally smashes both lower legs of the heroine in an accident. In the end, she lies in a hospital, both legs in casts, waiting for better times. The entire text is full of allusions, parallels and almost direct quotations from the epic. For Rakke, Kalevipoeg functions as a general emblem of Estonian identity. And at the same time it is a symbol of continuity even in times of internationalisation and globalisation.

Roughly the same holds for Sven Kivisildnik’s collection of poetry Rahvuseepos Kalevipoeg ehk armastus (“The National Epic Kalevipoeg or Love”), published in 2003 – the bicentenary of Kreutzwald’s birth, which was celebrated throughout the country. Kivisildnik, a poet often surrounded by scandal (see Hasselblatt 2006a: 769–72), wrote modern poetry not infrequently with contemporary political associations. In Rahvuseepos Kalevipoeg, for instance, Guantanamo is mentioned in one poem, Edgar Savisaar, a contemporary Estonian politician, is mentioned in others, and Brussels as well as other personal and place names appear. The form of the poems nevertheless displays the style of Estonian tales, leading into the comical, though this is deliberately done for effect – or more correctly for insight. The result is that there is hardly any difference between ancient times and contemporary society. In the same year, Kivisildnik published a longish poem Kalevipoeg omas mahlas (“Kalevipoeg in his Own Juice”), where a planned (but so far never realised) sculpture of Kalevipoeg in the Baltic Sea is also mentioned.

A play with the simple title Kalevipoeg was also published in 2003. The author was Andrus Kivirähk, who is not only the most popular Estonian writer at the beginning of the twenty-first century but also one of the most enthusiastic re-users of the epic (see below) and of all kinds of folkloristic material more generally. His novel Rehepapp (“Old Barny”, see Dickens 2002) was even called an “improved version of Kalevipoeg” (Kõiv 2003: 1857). Only characters known from Kreutzwald’s epic appear in Kivirähk’s play – including the hedgehog, which has a prominent role. The author has employed numerous absurd and grotesque elements in writing an allegory of present-day Estonia, where one often hears complaints about the alienation of politicians from the people. Kalevipoeg, as the king, is the embodiment of the new political elite who, according to some oppositional circles, loves travelling abroad and does nothing useful for its subjects. The people are symbolised by Alevipoeg, Olevipoeg and Sulevipoeg, who are quite naïve travelling companions who go along with everything and are easily manipulated. In fact – although this is not made explicit – they long to return to the Soviet era. This Soviet period is symbolised by the sorcerer, whose only interest lies in gambling and fun. The hedgehog, finally, personifies the economic and business circles that refrain from interfering in politics, negotiate all obstacles successfully and secretly make a lot of money. Kivirähk’s play shows the multifunctionality and multidimensionality of the material of the epic. Using it as an allegory of present-day circumstances creates a high recognition factor, which guarantees the effectiveness and the success of the play.

All rewritings that have been so far discussed have been in prose or dramatic form (and some single poems, as in Kivisildnik’s collection). In 2010, a modern metrical version of the epic was published – Kalevipoeg 2.0 – by the up-to-then unknown author Kristian Kirsfeldt (which is obviously a pseudonym). In this version, the hero has reached the cyber world, drives around in a fancy Jeep and is equipped with laser guns. The hero gives interviews on television, meets Russian submarines when searching the sea, pays the Finnish blacksmith with cocaine, enters the cosmos and flies beyond Mars, and the devil from the original has turned into a Swedish bank manager. The book is divided into twenty chapters and even has a prologue like its model (but no introduction) and the author also tried to use the trochaic tetrameter of the ancient Estonian folk poetry, with some exceptions (e.g. the TV interview is in prose, Kirsfeldt 2010: 361–3). As a whole, this version is only slightly shorter than the Proto-Kalevipoeg (see chapter 2 above), with tales consisting of between 300 and 900 lines each, resulting altogether in 11,322 lines of verse.

According to the author himself, his epic was “a snapshot of today’s Estonia and her people, looked at through the prism of popular culture” (quoted from Larm 2011). Indeed, the epic fulfilled the same purposes as earlier adaptations: on the one hand, it brought the material back to the potential readers, who felt that they were being addressed in their own language and, on the other hand, it commented on contemporary Estonian society, which was suffering from an economic crisis during those years. This theme comes to the fore in the last six lines of Kirsfeldt’s epic that intertextually engage the last (eight) lines of Kalevipoeg. Kreutzwald concluded his epic with the following lines (on the right the translation by Kartus 2011: 486):

Aga ükskord algab aega,

But one day there comes a time,

Kus kõik piirud kahel otsal

When all spills at both their ends will

Lausa lähvad lõkendama;

Start outright to flare up bright;

Lausa tuleleeki leikab

Flames of fire will cut outright

Käe kaljukammitsasta:

His hands from stone fetters loose –

Küll siis Kalev jõuab koju

Surely Kalev will then come home to

Oma lastel’ õnne tooma,

Bring his people fortune true,

Eesti põlve uueks looma.

Build Estonia anew.

These lines are famous and known to every Estonian, so Kirsfeldt’s referential engagement of this passage should be considered transparent:

Aga ükskord algab aega,

But one day there comes a time,

mil saab vabalt laenu võtta,

When free loans are available,

lausa tagasimaksmata;

Even without paying them back;

Küll siis Kalev jõuab koju

Surely Kalev will then come home to

oma lastel’ õnne tooma,

Bring his children fortune true,

Eesti asja edendama.

Help things Estonian flourish.

(Kirsfeldt 2010: 476)

This version by Kirsfeldt is certainly more than simply another in a series of parodies: it is a strong comment on present-day Estonia (see Laak & Viires 2011, and Larm 2011).

The different representations of the Kalevipoeg in the visual arts are not a topic of this book (see for a first account Solomõkova & Üprus 1962). Nevertheless, like the illustrated book of Piho and Kenkmaa (1995), the recent work of Jaan Kaljuvee must be mentioned here. Kaljuvee (2012) published a series of sixty-four paintings and added his own verse “to explain his paintings” (Hanson 2012). Each painting received between one and seven stanzas of four lines of verse. This is the only painted version depicting the entire epic. It is particularly relevant in the present context because the painter acted also as an author. The verses are rhymed (AABB), which sometimes produces an almost comical effect because this is just the opposite of the classical Estonian trochaic metre characterised instead by alliteration within individual lines. In total, Kaljuvee wrote 276 stanzas, i.e. 1,104 lines, which is considerably shorter than Kirsfeldt’s version. The main stress lies on the (somewhat naïve) paintings that, in combination with the doggerel verse and the soft cover, rather leave the impression of a children’s book.

And there is still more to come in the field of combining the epic with visual arts: in 2014, the first of approximately five or six issues (Alla 2015a) of a “picture epic” (Estonian pilteepos) was released (Tragel et al. 2014). The project was announced by the authors as a gift for the centenary of the Estonian Republic (which will be in 2018). The idea occurred to them independently of the already graphic rendering of the Kalevala (Huitula 1998/2000), although the latter, of course, had an inspiring effect when they learned of it and its success in Russian (2003) and English (2005) (see Sikk 2014). The exact number of issues can only be guessed from the fact that the first issue contains merely the prologue, the introduction and the first two tales. In other words, eighteen tales are still to come, which gives the project almost megalomaniac dimensions. But three other facts are remarkable concerning this publication: firstly, it is a bilingual edition as the text is for the first time translated into Southern Estonian, or more precisely the Võru language. Turning the book around and opening it from the back we see the epic Kalõvipoig, which is the name of the hero in this language. According to the editors’ preface this choice was made because Kreutzwald wrote his epic in Võru. But one other obvious reason was the funding of the project: in adding the Võru version “South Estonian money taps opened” (Alla 2015a). All sponsors are listed on the first pages – twice, i.e. both in the Estonian and the Võru section, in alphabetical order (of the given name).

The second remarkable feature of this edition is that the authors did not rephrase or modernise the text but simply reproduced large parts of the original verse. Their ambition is to bring the archaic verse back to the reader by illustrating it with truthful and realistic pictures. If they continue in this way, 70 per cent of Kreutzwald’s text will be reprinted (Alla 2015a). The third thing is linked to the ambition to the authors. In order to create convincing pictures, they conducted research in various archives and visited museums and even archaeological excavation sites (Alla 2015b). As a consequence, they fixed as the era of the Kalevipoeg the sixth and seventh centuries, the so called Pre-Viking Age in Estonian history (see Tvauri 2012). Such relatively exact datings have previously been avoided. Finally, the authors produced a useful map of 214 sites in Estonia (two even outside Estonia) which are connected to Kalevipoeg in one way or another. Four pages explain in great detail what can be seen at the sites and to which episodes they are connected.

It is too early to give a final assessment of this project as it has just started, but it cannot be wrong to see this as another proof of the ubiquity of the Kalevipoeg in Estonian contemporary culture.

Parts, motifs, ideas, elements

PARTS, MOTIFS, IDEAS, ELEMENTS

The adaptations of the complete epic reviewed in the preceding section represent only one of the two broad categories of texts using the epic as discussed here. The second group is characterised as texts in which only some passages or elements of the epic are used. This group displays abundant material, as one would expect. As noted above, it is impossible to find all such references. The present discussion is greatly supported by the fact that earlier research has already treated this topic extensively. The following review is organised according to the general categories of literature: poetry, drama and prose.

Poetry

POETRY

Beginning with Lydia Koidula and Friedrich Kuhlbars and continuing with Mihkel Veske and Ado Reinvald, early Estonian poetry showed numerous references to the epic. The cultural frame of reference formed by the epic also had a general effect on poetic forms or their perception, as suggested by Kampmann (1911: 465) who maintained that the (modern German-type) end rhyme gave way to the (more Estonian or generally Finnic) alliteration. Motifs from the Kalevipoeg also appear in the poems by Els Raudsepp, Jaan Bergmann, Ado Grenzstein (Piirikivi), Peeter Jakobson and Juhan Kunder. Aleksander Ferdinand Tombach (alias Kaljuvald) adapted more than a single element of the epic for the longer poem Kalev ja Linda (“Kalev and Linda”). This poem was written in 1894 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Estonia and used in an oratorio by Miina Hermann (see Kampmann 1911: 477; Aavik 1969: 160–1). To cut a long story short: Kalevipoeg entered Estonian poetry quite early and did not leave it thereafter.

Interestingly, even in Stalinist times the national hero found his way into Estonian poetry. In a poem by Paul Rummo called “The Fairy Tale that Came True” (Tõeks saanud muinasjutt, 1952), there is an allusion to the last lines of the epic (see Laak & Viires 2011: 304). This is actually no surprise as so-called socialism claimed to be (the path to) paradise on earth, and the frequently quoted last lines “But one day there comes a time . . .” of course could be interpreted (i.e. rewritten) as “This day has arrived!” From the same period too less political poems can be mentioned, for instance the ballad “Linda” by Minni Nurme (1947: 7–12), which is based on the epic. But criticism of Nurme was in part severe, as this poem was too pessimistic (cf. Viiding 1948). Nurme, by the way, also participated in the competition for writing a national anthem for Soviet Estonia (Andresen 1947: 39), but finally it was a version by Johannes Semper that was adopted. This new national anthem, written in 1944 by Johannes Semper in Leningrad shortly after the blockade had been broken (Siirak 1969: 205), also refers to the epic in its first line, calling the Estonians “the strong people of the Kalevides” (Kalevite kange rahvas). Music was, by the way, another realm where the national hero could be celebrated even in Soviet times, as illustrated by Eugen Kapp’s ballet from 1948. This remained the case throughout the Soviet period. The Kalevipoeg even found a place in the Singing Revolution, which began in the late 1980s, when the songs written by Alo Mattiisen took inspiration from the epic (Laak & Viires 2011: 304–5).

As one might expect, exile poetry also makes much use of the national heroes Vanemuine and Kalev. These uses could be quite diverse: in a poem called “A Bitter Thought”, written by Kalju Lepik in 1958, the heroes are used ironically or even pessimistically/sarcastically:

Lend me your zither, Vanemuine,

A bitter thought comes to my mind:

When Kalev one day comes home

to drink home-made beer from a piggin,

to hang his own children.

(Lepik 2002: 173; English translation quoted from Laak & Viires 2004: 305)

Another exile poet, Ilona Laaman, in contrast, uses the national hero of Estonia to illustrate the new situation of the exile community. In a poem from 1970, she tries to imagine the hero on (New York’s) Broadway bringing his children “chocolate, electronic computers and ball-point pens” (Sõnarine 4: 309, see also Laak 2013: 203–4). These political connotations, however, were not restricted to the exile situation. Even after the re-establishment of the Estonian republic, the national epic could serve as a source for poetic political comments, such as those by Toomas Liiv (2003), where Brussels – as a symbol for Europe and the “new” Estonia, as in the case of Kivisildnik (see above) – comes into the picture and quotations from the Kalevipoeg are used to parody the new situation.

The younger generation also makes use of the material, as can be seen from numerous poems by Kalev Kesküla – from his debut in 1986 (see Uibo 1986: 346) until his later collection Vabariigi laulud (“Songs of the Republic”, 1998; see Laak & Viires 2011: 311) – and for instance by the younger poets Contra or Olaf Ruitlane (Laak & Viires 2011: 310–11) or Jürgen Rooste (Laak 2008: 208–9).

In general, the epic material has been treated in Estonian poetry so abundantly that a detailed listing of all the authors and works is impossible here. There are, however, some authors who perhaps used the material more often than others, one of them being Mari Vallisoo, whose poems regularly show traces of folkloric or Kalevipoeg material. And it is significant, too, that one important literary group from the beginning of the twentieth century named itself after the mythological bird – Siuru – that is briefly mentioned in the fourteenth and nineteenth tale of the epic: Siuru was so important and influential in the spring of 1917 that this period is called the “Siuru spring” of Estonian letters.

Drama

DRAMA

Material from the Kalevipoeg made its way onto the stage quite early as well. Elements from the epic were used in drama for the first time in the play Juta (1886) by Anton Jürgenstein, who is primarily known as a critic and a journalist. A little later, the folklorist Matthias Johann Eisen wrote a play entitled Kalevi kannupoisid (“Kalev’s squires”, 1893) and he also used the epic hero in the titles of his temperance books (e.g. Eisen 1892).

In the 1970s, the poet Andres Ehin was contracted by a local theatre group to write a play called Kalevipoja lood (“Tales of Kalevipoeg”) which was based on the original folklore tradition rather than on Kreutzwald’s text. The author used the archives of the Estonian Literature Museum in Tartu and wanted to bring the lesser-known Estonian mythology to the people. As was usual in Soviet times, he also inserted some criticism of totalitarianism into the play, as he stated in an interview (quoted according to Lotman 2003). The play was successfully staged and ran for over ten years.

Sometimes only a few elements of a piece of art refer to the Kalevipoeg, possibly only some names, as is the case with the play Kalev ja Linda (“Kalev and Linda”) by Maimu Berg (1994). This is set in the pornographic industry, where Kalev and Linda are the lead actors for a film producer who also incidentally has some fantasies or imaginings about producing a pornographic work based on the epic itself (Laak & Viires 2011: 309–10).

Prose

PROSE

In prose, the material can be used as frequently and unrestrictedly as in poetry. Only a few decades after the first publication of the epic, its motifs and elements began to appear in Estonian prose. This could be seen for the first time in stories from 1871 by Jakob Pärn, one of the most important early prose writers (Kampmann 1911: 472). The next to use the epic in this way was Eduard Bornhöhe, whose Tasuja (“The Avenger”, 1880), a regularly reissued classic of Estonian literature, has clear traits of Kalevipoeg-like superman strength and the general ability to conduct almost supernatural acts. The story is set around an uprising in the fourteenth century, dealing with the conflict with the foreign conquerors. This theme made the text one of the most popular works during the time of the Estonian emancipation in the late nineteenth century.

Friedebert Tuglas, who was certainly not a great admirer of Kreutzwald’s epic (see Mihkelson 1908), used the material in at least one of his novellas, “At the End of the World” (Maailma lõpus, 1915, English translation in Undusk 2005: 13–63). Here, the protagonist finds himself on a fantasy island, where he encounters love in the guise of a desirable, enigmatic and finally disastrous female giant. In the end, he manages to escape the island by the skin of his teeth. The core of the novella has little to do with the epic but the motif of journeying to the end of the world and encountering giants on the way does, of course, originate from the Kalevipoeg.

Mati Unt is one of the most famous (post)modernist Estonian prose writers from the second half of the twentieth century. He wrote a short gloss “A Page from Estonian Cultural History” (Lehekülg eesti kultuuri ajaloost, 1974, first published in Unt 1985), where he describes the meeting between Koidula and Kreutzwald – which indeed took place in 1868 and which is well known. In Unt’s version, their meeting is interrupted by an impetuous Kalevipoeg, who breaks the furniture and approaches Koidula in a terrifying way that causes Kreutzwald to draw his ladies’ pistol and kill the giant (see Laak & Viires 2011: 309). Unt returned to the topic in 2000, when he wrote a sketch “for a play The Authors in a Hole. Here he once again repeats the motif of close relations between Koidula and Kreutzwald, the introduction of the figure of Kalevipoeg is again an extremely postmodernist feature” (Laak & Viires 2004: 299).

The surrealistic poet Andres Ehin used the final lines of the epic for the title of his collection of prose which is called “The pine spills of diversion start outright to flare up bright’ (Ajaviite peerud lähvad lausa lõkendama, 1980) – cf. the final lines of the epic “When all spills at both their ends will / Start outright to flare up bright . . .” (Kartus 2011: 486). The title of Ehin’s collection, by the way, is ambiguous but this is irrelevant here (see Grube 1996).

In 1978, Aarand Roos, a little-known Estonian writer in exile, published his Juutide kuningas Tallinnas (“The King of the Jews in Tallinn”), where, among other things, he draws a parallel between Jesus and Kalevipoeg. However, this is also generally a kind of satire; for instance, he calls Kalevipoeg the first Estonian tourist because he travelled a lot – to the end of the world, to Finland, to hell etc.

Two rather different and concise elaborations of – or rather comments on – the epic’s material were written by Helga Nõu. In a reader for school children (Nõu 1990: 127–73; partly republished as Nõu 2015), she partly retells the epic and has two children, in Sweden, find the hero under a pile of rocks. This was, in fact, the entrance to the underworld from which Kalevipoeg now returns. He slowly gets used to the modern world and tells the children about his earlier adventures. Finally, he flies with the children and their grandfather to Vienna. Once there, he rushes in his wheelchair to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe to demand the right to self-determination for the Estonian nation. Her second contribution was the short story Kalevi pojapoeg (“The Grandson of Kalev”, 1996). This is set in the Tallinn of the 1990s, where the narrator meets a giant returned from exile, who is surprised at the contemporary situation and conditions in his – or more precisely his father’s – country, and who is lost in this new environment.

The most extreme acknowledgment of the national hero was formulated by Andrus Kivirähk. In 1997, Kivirähk published a book of prose with some glosses and short stories and gave it the title Kalevipoeg, although no reference to or quotation from the epic can be found anywhere in the book. There simply is no connection at all with the Estonian hero. The author explains the choice of his title in the blurb as follows:

Dear reader! You certainly have in your mind the justified question – why this book is called “Kalevipoeg”? [. . .] I don’t know either. My God, I suddenly fell into a rage, I had a blackout – whoop – as if I had eaten rat poison and – chop – I gave it the title “Kalevipoeg”. Heaven be merciful! What a thoughtless act! Later I felt extremely ashamed but nothing could be done about it any more! (Kivirähk 1997, text on the back cover)

This post-modern exaggeration with a completely arbitrary choice of title shows once more how much the name of the epic functions as a symbol. Here it simply acts as a label which announces: there is something Estonian inside me – buy me!

The work of Kivirähk is, by the way, the most fruitful as concerns our epic material. Traces of Kalevipoeg can be found already in his 1995 debut: Ivan Orava mälestused ehk Minevik kui helesinised mäed (“The Memoires of Ivan Orav or A Past like Blue Mountains’, fourth edition 2013). The book presents itself as a collection of early published newspaper columns that represent the grotesque-fictive biography of an untiring brave Estonian freedom fighter. In a way, this is the first level of parallel to the epic: Kalevipoeg is also nothing other than a national freedom fighter. This Ivan Orav lived in the years of the first republic after the First World War, survived the entire Soviet period with all its evils and now enjoys his life in the newly independent Estonia. In the narrative, fun is made of almost all things holy for patriotic Estonian nationalists, thus deconstructing the national myth through exaggerated satire (see Hasselblatt 2008b). In one episode, for instance, the hero visits the underworld and gets along very well with the devil – a clear reference to the epic, even if the motif of visiting the underworld is very old and widespread in world literature (Frenzel 1999: 713–27). Also Kivirähk’s novel Mees, kes teadis ussisõnu (“The Man who Spoke Snakish”, 2007; English translation 2015) contains numerous allusions to the Kalevipoeg. The famous last verses are again used here: Kivirähk describes an old man whose legs are cut off and who lives on a lonely island, where he constructs a flying object on which, at the conclusion of the novel, he returns to Estonia and wreaks havoc among the foreign intruders.

Continuation

Finally, a text has to be mentioned that has been characterised as an “attempt at a continuation” (Veidemann 2003: 892; 2004: 264). This brought a new quality into the Kalevipoeg discourse: so far, no-one had pretended to write a continuation to the epic, but that is exactly how Lembit Heinrich Vimb presented his work. In the preface, he explained that

this story starts with the departure of Kalevipoeg, tells about the ruling period and the actions of Olevipoeg, the successor of Kalevipoeg, until the Paide tragedy [the murder of the four Estonian kings during the St George’s Night Uprising in 1343, CH]. [. . .] Further on, the century-long period of slavery, the most important events of the national awakening [. . .], the War of Independence, life in independent Estonia, the capitulation of the state leaders in the face of the brutal pressure by the Eastern neighbour, the occupation that follows – up to the restoration of independence. (Vimb 2002: 3)

This was an ambitious project, and hence it is not surprising that the author needed 10,210 lines to achieve his goal. As Vimb, who had worked as an architect, produced the text in his own handwriting using a technical pen, it took him fifteen years to write the whole story down (Paas 2003). When it was finally published in 2002, some reviews or presentations appeared (e.g. Paas 2003; Urmet 2002), but generally public response seems to have been quite weak. The work hardly attained any academic treatment (an exception is the short criticism by Mirov 2003).

The main reason for this is probably the strange form of the text – namely a 100 per cent alliteration in every single of the 10,210 lines, combined with end rhyme. Alliteration is certainly a characteristic feature of Estonian folk poetry but all lines in a text are never alliterated, approximately 8 to 15 per cent of the folklore texts being without alliteration (Laugaste 1986: 200; cf. also Laugaste 1962 and Mirov 2003: 770), and, more important, alliteration often comprises only two (of the three or four) words of a line, not necessarily all words. A short glance at Kreutzwald’s text will convince anyone. And, secondly, end rhyme has never been an element of Estonian folk poetry.

Owing to these restrictions Vimb’s text became extremely complicated and hard to read and understand. He was forced to use many dialect words, only a few of which were explained in an appendix (Vimb 2002: 127). A second obstacle to a positive reception must have been the messy structure of the book. It is divided into ten chapters (but has no table of contents) of very different lengths. The first three short chapters of three or five pages are followed by two giant chapters of fifty-four and thirty pages. Then the last five chapters are short again and contain between three and thirteen pages. Even more confusing than the varying quantity is the vacillating quality of the narrative. Whilst the first chapters might be seen as a more or less plausible follow-up to Kreutzwald’s narrative, featuring the departure of Kalevipoeg and the yielding of power to his successor, the long central chapters are hard to follow (cf. Mirov 2003). They even show grotesque traits when, for example, the narrative reaches the period of the national awakening and introduces Kreutzwald himself (named Taati, ‘Old Dad’, here, Vimb 2002: 72). This Taati starts to write an epic, and the following twenty pages contain a retelling of the first tales of Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg in Vimb’s own wording and odd rhyme scheme. Here, it seems, the author has the same attitude as some German writers of the nineteenth century (cf. chapter 6, below), who saw the need to improve Kreutzwald’s work by giving it another form. In a footnote, Vimb even confesses that “the following are excerpts from the Kalevipoeg, rhymed by the author” (Vimb 2002: 11) – in other words: in the view of the author Kreutzwald’s text could obviously be improved. And indeed, in an interview, Vimb said that he had rewritten Kreutzwald’s entire text in his own new form, with complete alliteration and end rhyme (Urmet 2002).

All in all, Vimb’s text remains a layman’s version that has rightly been labelled as only an attempt to write a continuation. It is much too inconsistent to obtain any significance in the field of literature, though it is in its form and extent certainly unique. Additionally, the thirteen illustrations by the author make it also a contribution to the realm of visual arts. But the strange shape and the partly opaque contents will put this publication into the cabinet of curiosities of Kalevipoeg reception.

Conclusion

These examples suffice to illustrate the widespread re-use and recycling of the epic material of the Kalevipoeg. The increase in use of this material independent of the epic is the most characteristic feature of what has happened with Kreutzwald’s text. This process can be briefly described as follows: among the peasants, tales about an ancient hero Kalevipoeg were circulating, but they only formed a fragment of the entire material of the oral tradition. Then, in the second third of the nineteenth century, the need for “great”, identity-forming texts was felt and these tales were taken as a fitting subject. A gifted author brought them into a readable coherent shape. This text was published anonymously and disguised as a scholarly edition, which created an impression of authenticity and primevalness. As such – rather than as a prose text by a given individual author – the text was received and gradually canonised, first in foreign countries and slightly later in Estonia. Through this canonisation, the anchoring of the material in the collective memory of all Estonians was achieved. Following this, the material was used in Estonian literature again and again. It was used not because of the ubiquity of folklore material among Estonians, but on account of the canonisation of the epic. In this way, Kreutzwald’s text passed deeper and deeper into the consciousness of the Estonians to form a major component of it today. Of the 1,000 years that Kreutzwald mentioned in his preface, 150 have passed and there is no sign that the epic will lose any of its universal appeal in the 850 years to come.

4. Latin, German and Estonian. Language and Decency Exemplified through an Episode from the Fifteenth Tale

The problem

The trigger for the following sketch was an oddity to which relatively little attention has been paid in Estonian literary history: fifty-five lines of Latin appear within the first German translation of the Kalevipoeg. The relevant passage can be found in the fifteenth tale, when Kalevipoeg returns from the underworld, fights his persecutors successfully and falls asleep. In a dream and immediately after having awoken, the relevant events take place. In the first edition, the fifteenth tale comprises 965 lines. The fifty-five Latin lines do not form a single unit within the German parallel text; they are twice interrupted by ten and once by eleven German lines. Before going into details, a sketch is needed of the passage where the relevant lines occur. The lines in question are lines 261 to 466 in the first edition. All of the following quotations and line numbering come from this first edition (Kalewipoeg 1860) unless otherwise indicated.

After an introduction and warning to youths not to listen to the following passage, the hero goes to sleep. He is tired from carrying the plunder from the underworld and his planks for building the town. In addition, he is depressed by the alarming news of the devastating war that has swept over the country while he has been in a bewitched sleep for seven weeks. Exhausted as he is, he throws himself to the ground, caring nothing for a comfortable resting place and taking a stone for a pillow. It takes time before he falls asleep because his worries are so enormous. Finally, he succeeds and then has an erotic dream about the maidens from the underworld. A warm liquid simultaneously rises at his side without waking him because the feeling suits his dream well. Only when the wet warmth reaches his throat does he wake up and grope for his member in order to check whether this is the source of the dampness. Having learned that this is not the case, he looks around in confusion. Then he catches sight of a witch maiden crouching on two hillocks with spread legs and delivering a brook which threatens to drown Kalevipoeg. In panic, he grasps for the stone which was his pillow and throws it as a plug into the source. This is closed and the witch maiden perishes in agony.

The background

Kreutzwald had formulated the episode following a circulating origin legend closely (with, however, possibly some influences from Old Norse mythology, see below 4.6., and Karttunen 1905: 94; also Annist 2005: 122 and 668–9). Moreover, the tale even belonged to the first legends Faehlmann presented in his lecture to the Learned Estonian Society in January 1839 (Faehlmann 1999: 63–4). In this legend, the source of the river or brook Raudoja is described. It is located approximately 35 km east of Tallinn, slightly south of the road from Tallinn to Rakvere, and can be visited even today (see Westermann 1994: 114, and Kas tunned maad 1965: 118–19). The legend or episode is well known and treated by a few Estonian scholars and writers – probably because of what will be explained below, namely its removal from the epic. Johannes Semper, for instance, mentioned the episode in his essay (1924) on the motifs of folklore (Semper 1969: 215; also 1997: 44) and Ain Kaalep recalls how Friedebert Tuglas dreamed of a fountain in Tartu inspired by the Raudoja episode (Kaalep 2005: 578). On the other hand, Soviet publications on popular places or sites connected with the Kalevipoeg make no mention of Raudoja (see Laugaste & Rõõm 1958 or Kalevipoja radadel 1961). This is probably not only due to the fact that the episode was erased from the canonical text, but also to Soviet prudery. Even Laugaste & Rõõm (1963), who give a detailed account of the changes between the versions, do not go into details when it comes to tale fifteen.

Prudery, in fact, is the keyword for the whole story. The lecture by Faehlmann had been delivered in German, which at the time was the normal means of communication for intellectual or scholarly matters. Sometimes even Estonians used German among themselves (see the correspondence between Koidula and Kreutzwald, KKK, or Faehlmann and Kreutzwald, Lepik 1936). The use of Estonian was restricted to peasant and perhaps church matters. To put it simply, one could say that above a certain intellectual level, everything took place in German; the social boundary was identical with the language boundary. Estonian was only beginning to reach the upper levels of society. However, the material that Faehlmann’s lecture was based on was definitely Estonian and probably all of his audience understood Estonian. The majority of the members of the Learned Estonian Society were German, but the majority of the Germans in Estonia spoke Estonian, at least up to a certain level. Active members of a society whose aim was to promote knowledge about the history and the contemporary situation of the Estonian people, their language and literature, and the country they inhabited certainly understood Estonian. Hence Faehlmann put some Estonian quotations into his text, which was not only to liven up his lecture and to give an impression of his material, but also to illustrate the coarseness characteristic of the folklore texts. This was, in a serious lecture, impossible to do in German. But in Estonian it was no problem, as the following passages illustrate: “They started to walk and went straight through the lake. Kallewi poeg was the shortest and had reason to shout: toho lombike, jubba kastab kella karwad [“Well, well, quite a puddle already wets the hairs of my scrotum”, my translation, CH]. When they reached the opposite shore . . .” (Faehlmann 1999: 60). And a little later: “He became larger and larger as he approached, and the load pressed him down and the waves got higher and higher; then he exclaimed: toho, toho Peipsi lomp, jubba tõuseb tilli [“Well, well, the Peipus puddle already reaches my wee-wee”, my translation, CH]. Happily they jumped ashore . . .” (Faehlmann 1999: 60). This makes clear that Estonian had a different position from German. In a foreign language, the inhibition level for using tabooed words is much lower than in one’s mother tongue. Hence it was possible to use these rude or coarse words in Estonian, when it was not acceptable in German. Although Estonian was not a foreign language for Faehlmann and Kreutzwald, but without doubt their mother tongue, German was indeed the mother tongue for most of the audience – both the audience of the lecture at the Learned Estonian Society and the intended international readership. Obviously, for the Estonians themselves, the same difference existed in scholarly discourse: for rude things one could use Estonian, but not German.

With this as a starting point, it seems interesting to have a closer look on what happened to this legend in the different versions of the epic. How did the author or translator handle the legend, which solutions did they find for the passages deemed rude or coarse? In general, we can recognise three different approaches.

The first solution

Kreutzwald’s wording of the legend in the first (printed) version of the fifteenth tale of his epic is in fact not really rude even according to the standards of that time. It has to be stressed that we are discussing the printed version here. There was an earlier version with a slightly different wording that will be turned to below. In the printed version of 1860, however, the only “dangerous” word was vitt, for the female genitalia – “cunt”. This word was reduced to “w–t” as was usual at that time and as occurs sometimes even today. This can be seen from the French translation, where several times “c. . .” is inserted (Chalvin 2004: 401). Some other tales display the word perse “arse”, which likewise is rendered by Kreutzwald with p–se. In a scholarly edition where peculiarities of folk speech should also be shown, such practice was normal and even conceded by the censor (see Annist 2005: 518).

But how about the German parallel text where such things were decidedly unacceptable? Actually, Kreutzwald himself was anxious about it and on 5 January 1860 sent the episode to Schultz-Bertram, asking him how much of it one should try to translate into German or whether one should leave it completely untranslated (KKV IV: 33–4). Unfortunately we do not have Schultz-Bertram’s letters to Kreutzwald, but he must have advised him to erase some delicate passages, as Kreutzwald thanks Schultz-Bertram in his next letter (18 January 1860, KKV IV: 38), promising to remove all that Schultz-Bertram had indicated. However, in the printed version from 1860, we find exactly the same text as in Kreutzwald’s letter,1 so one must conclude that the revisions concerned only the (possible) German translation. And indeed, a month later Kreutzwald wrote to Schultz-Bertram that the relevant passages should be presented in Latin (KKV IV: 54). This was obviously on advice from Schultz-Bertram, who wrote to one of his friends in the very same February of 1860: “I vehemently protest against all kinds of obscenity; they do not belong to a folk poem. If they belong to the character of the people and its education, then put them into the appendix in Latin” (published in Goeze 2005: 463). Although Schultz-Bertram was not yet involved in the translation process at that moment, his opinion was apparently important. It serves here as a good characterisation of the Zeitgeist: an erotic dream and urinating were simply a cause for annoyance.

Therefore Carl Gottlieb Reinthal, still the translator of this tale, which was his last, chose Latin for certain passages. The first passage he esteemed impossible to render in German were lines 381–5, where Kalevipoeg wakes up and gropes for his member:

Tema katsus titekesta:

Kas ehk weike kogemata

Ojakesta kaswatanud?

Sõbrakestel polnud süüda,

Weikel mingi wiletsusta

Instead of a possible German translation we find the Latin lines (on the right Kreutzwald’s German version provided in his letter to Schultz-Bertram):

Admovit manum mentulae,

Rasch begreift er gleich das Päppchen2

Num forte parvula inopinato

Ob der Kleine im Versehen

Amnem effudisset.

dieses Flüßchen hab geschaffen?

Sed amica innoxia,

Doch der Freund zeigt keinen Fehler,

Nec quidquam mali ei acciderat.

Schuldbewußtlos lag der Kleine

George Kurman (1982: 192; 2007: 202) is one of the few not completely following the (canonical, on which see below) last edition and adds in brackets the passages later deleted. His translation runs:

The hero checked his tiny tot

to see if it, by accident,

had created the creek;

but this friend was free from blame,

his tiny tot had wrought no harm.

The next ten lines were in German again, but when the hero catches sight of the witch maiden, Reinthal switches back to Latin (lines 396–404, in the right column Kurman’s translation):

Una de magicis virginibus,

One of those witches’ maids,

Filia magi ventorum,

a daughter of the wind-wizard,

Conquiniscebat in montibus

had created the warm wetness,

Gignebatque ex se undam calidam.

by squatting between hillocks:

Altero pede in hoc jugo,

the maiden’s foot stood on one mound,

Altero virgo stabat in illo

her other foot on a second hill

Cruribusque varicatis confornicabat,

and her broad legs were curved,

Angustas fauces.

in a vault above the narrow vale.

Amnis effundi ore crinito.

The river ran, with horsehair at its mouth:

The next ten lines describe the floods which threaten to drown the hero without telling anything about their origin. This can therefore be told in German. But when it comes to the cause of the liquid and Kalevipoeg’s idea of how to stop the floods, six lines in Latin are inserted (415–20, in the right column Kurman’s translation):

Quum puellae jocum advertisset,

Seeing the witch-maiden’s sport

Vir fortis secum ita:

the brave man thought:

Si fontem cunearo

what if I should wedge the spring shut,

Rimamque obturaro,

put a plug into its crack,

Aquarum radios morabor

bind its rivulets,

Effusionemque retardabo.

and lock the gates up fast?

The search for the right tool, i.e. the stone, to close the source could happen in German again before switching back to Latin when it comes to the final implementation of the device (lines 432–66, in the right column Kurman’s translation, which, however, does not exactly follow the original):

In ipsum os crinitum fertur

it stuck at the source’s center

Obseransque sic ostia

in the horsehair at the river’s mouth –

Tamquam obturamentum clausit canales,

a plug thumping into place –

Ne per aquarum portas

so that the water couldn’t spill,

Jam effunderetur amnis.

the ripples run forth from the gate.

Filia magi tenera

The wizard’s young daughter

Exclamavit dolore

screamed out in pain,

Opemque quaerens hanc vocem mittit:

she cried for help in her distress:

»Accelerate, sapientes,

“Come, o ye old sorcerers;

Obturamentum mihi extrahite,

medicine men, come to aid me,

Accelerate, medici, servate me!«

to draw out this plug!”

Sed hic nec medicorum auxilium,

But by now the aid of medicine men,

Nec magorum sapientia

or the wisdom of the wizards

Malo mederi potuit

couldn’t cure her injury,

Aut cuneum cunno emovere.

by wrenching the wedge from her womb.

Diuturnis cruciata miseriis

After long agonies

Puella obturamento interiit.

the maiden had to wither.

In flore aetatis marcescendum erat.

Virginis corpus mortuum,

The fangs of wolves nor raven’s beaks,

Quod nec lupo tangere dente,

wouldn’t tear at the dead girl;

Nec corvo libebat rostro tundere,

but slowly the sons of flies,

Sensim comedit pullities muscae carnariae,

bit her corpse to bits.

Donec in pulverem dilapsum est.

Sola pars media

Yet the source of the stream,

Corporis amnem gignentis

the middle part of her body,

Obturamento male mulcati

the painfully plugged floodgate

Exstat etiam hodie

stopped with its stone wedge,

Refertque rem.

bears witness to the deed today,

yields a commemorating monument.

E nigra saxi rima

From the murky crack behind the stone

Aquarum venae prodeunt,

rivulets of water still spring,

Quae olim cunni virginei laticem

spreading the soakage

In campo diffuderunt

from the dead maiden’s c_nt,

Rivumque efficiunt, cui a ferro nomen est.

the source of Raud Creek.

Ita, boni, ortus est

That is how, my friends, in olden times

Prisco tempore cunni rivulus.

C_nt Creek was born.

This is the end of the episode, but the beginning of the following briefly refers to the events (lines 467–8, in the right column Kurman’s translation):

Kalewide kallis poega,

Kalev’s dear son,

Kui sai w–tu wangistanud,

once he had locked the c_nt

. . .

Reinthal’s translation is here so free that the crucial word which above was three times Latinised as cunnus can be completely avoided:

Als der theure Sohn des Kalew

When the dear son of Kalev

Abgesperrt die Fluthenquelle

had locked the source of floods

. . .

Generally speaking, Reinthal’s Latin is classical without any frills. He adheres more or less truly to the Estonian text and does not try to poeticise it – other than in his German translation where, to the disapproval of Kreutzwald (see above, section 2.1), he tried to make the text poetic. Nevertheless, the attractiveness of this origin legend is destroyed. This might be one of the reasons why Kreutzwald himself sought another solution.

The second solution

Kreutzwald must have found the episode important, as he already mentioned it in his first letter to the Learned Estonian Society accompanying the manuscript (see Lepik 1936: 196–202), yet he was willing to make some changes to it. The reason for this was that the accessibility of the text for the average Estonian reader had priority. If certain passages could lead to annoyance among censors or priests, he would eschew them in order not to endanger the whole project, i.e. a monolingual popular edition. In his correspondence from the year 1861 with Schiefner, who was an important mediator between Kreutzwald and the Kuopio printing house, the problem was discussed several times. On 18 January, Schiefner asked whether Kreutzwald believed that one could print the Estonian edition in its current shape without receiving protest from the clergy. In his answer (24 January), Kreutzwald admits that this might be a problem and that they would certainly not protest if the questionable passages were suppressed. In February, Kreutzwald writes again about the strict moralists’ demands to avoid everything natural and rude, but on the other hand he states, giving some examples, that certain expressions are not at all offensive to Estonian ears. Finally, he asks Schiefner what to do: “I will erase as much as one demands but, on the other hand, I would not like to be reproached by the other side [i.e. the Estonians] that I have deprived the people of their property” (Walravens 2013: 171).

Schiefner’s answer on 27 February is clear: everything offending decency should be omitted, and he explicitly included the episode treated in this chapter, which he called “the closing of the source” (German Schließung der Quelle). When Kreutzwald sent the following tales to Schiefner on 20 May, he wrote that all offending subjects had been erased, including the closing of the source, which had been preserved but retold in a completely innocent manner (all letters in Walravens 2013: 166–81).

This new version was printed in the Kuopio edition and with it the complicated editorial history of the epic continues: during the lifetime of the author, three editions appeared that gave rise to discussions about what the canonical version of the epic was – the original version from 1857/1861 or the last version edited by Kreutzwald himself, i.e. the edition of 1876. Therefore, in the handbooks and encyclopaedias, the number of verses of the entire epic vacillates between 18,993 and 19,087 (see Karttunen 1906: 4), although the figure 19,033, which is the number of lines in the 1862 edition as well as in the 1876 edition (where actually five lines were missing, but obviously unintentionally, which is to be interpreted as a typographic error, as they are not reflected in the enumeration, see Annist 1959: 329), seems to be the canonical one. It serves as a basis for the critical edition (Kreutzwald 1961), the regularly printed new editions and most of the recent translations – e.g. those into Hungarian (Rab 1985), Swedish (Milits 1999) and Finnish (Kettunen 2005). Only the English version by Kurman, as already mentioned, and the French version by Antoine Chalvin (2004) add the deleted passages in brackets, and a new German edition of the Löwe translation from 1900 (Petersen 2004, see chapter 5.6., below) also partly restored the deleted passages.

The new edition displayed minor changes in the thirteenth and fourteenth tales, but the largest changes were exhibited in the fifteenth tale. The 965 lines of the first edition were reduced in the revised editions to 911 lines. This does not mean, however, that one sequence of fifty-four lines had been erased. Kreutzwald had had to change several parts of the text in order to tone it down. The first elision concerns lines 270 up to 290, i.e. the twenty-one lines with the warning to youths not to listen to the passage. This had become unnecessary when the passage in question was changed. As a consequence, line 270 of the 1862 edition is line 291 of the first edition.

The second omission is at the beginning of Kalevipoeg’s dream, where the origin legend of the creek is to be told. Originally there were eight lines (364–71) which illustrated the confusion of Kalevipoeg when he awakes, but in the new version these were reduced to five lines by omitting lines 365 to 367. This, however, made the text more complicated and even incomprehensible, owing in part also to the archaic and elliptic language. In order to consider what happened in this text, the original version has to be examined first (on the right my verbatim translation):

364

Kalewide kange poega

The brave son of the Kalevides

365

Unenäude naljatusel

In the playing of his dreams

366

Oli põrgu piigasida

had the maidens of hell

367

Omas kaisus ellitanud;

cherished in his embrace;

368

Sest ei mõistnud soea märga,

Therefore the warm wetness,

369

Kurakülle kastejada

the wetter of the left side

370

Mehe meel ei mõistaneda,

could not reach the man’s mind,

371

Unepaelust peastaneda.

free from slumber’s band.

This was translated into German by Reinthal as follows:

In des Traumes heiter’m Spiele

Hatte Kalew’s Sohn, der Starke,

Mit des Schattenreiches Mägdlein

Scherz und Tändelei getrieben;

Deshalb blieb die laue Welle,

Die ihm seine Hüften netzte,

Unerklärt dem Sinn des Mannes,

Den des Traumes Fesseln banden.

Kurman (1982: 191; 2007: 201–2) translated this – or rather not exactly this (on which see below) – as follows:

Kalev’s brave son,

[In the playing of his dream,

had cosseted the maids of hell

in his embrace;]

he couldn’t make out the warm wetness

which soaked his left side;

his senses didn’t understand,

they weren’t free from slumber’s bands.

As the reader can conclude from the brackets used in Kurman’s translation – and from the translations itself – the new version ran as follows (Kalevipoeg 1862: 181):

343

Kalewide kange poega

344

Mees ei mõistnud soea märga,

345

Kura külle kastejada

346

Mite meelel mõistaneda,

347

Unepaelust peastaneda.

First of all I have to draw attention to a mistake in the translation made by Reinthal, which can be detected even more easily if one does not look at the original: Reinthal’s fifth line starts with “deshalb”, which is a German causal conjunction and the translation of Estonian sest, which is found in the original. So far, so good. But if we now concentrate on the German text we notice that there is no logic to a causal conjunction. Put simply: Kalevipoeg had fun in the underworld and that should be the reason that he does not understand the warm wetness. Where is the connection? It should be the other way round: because Kalevipoeg had an erotic dream the warm wetness at his side should not amaze him; on the contrary, it would fit very well, and there is no problem with understanding and accept it. Only when the water rises to his throat does he awake: that is logical.

But why, then, do we also find the causal conjunction sest in the Estonian original? And, interestingly enough, also in the unpublished German translation provided by Kreutzwald in his letter to Schultz-Bertram quoted above?

Drum vermocht die warme Nässe

Seiner linken Seit’ Befeuchtung

Sich dem Manne nicht zu erklären,

Sich nicht aus dem Schlaf zu reißen3

This was meant as verbatim translation and is certainly unpolished. The last four lines, where Reinthal’s mistake actually is, provide the key to the problem. These lines are, to be honest, syntactically quite complicated or even opaque but there is enough valuable and unambiguous information to enable us to make a correct translation, also based on the semantic expectation that we have (from the visit to the underworld and what happened there) and taking into consideration the notion of parallelism in Finnic folk poetry.

“Mehe meel” (“the mind of the man”) in line 370 is without doubt nominative and has to be the grammatical subject of the construction. There can also not be any discussion about the case of “Unepaelust” in the next line, which is elative and means “from the fetters of sleep”, and the verb “peastaneda” is doubtlessly transitive or factitive and means “to free”. Reinthal’s “Den des Traumes Fesseln banden” (“whom the fetters of sleep bound”) is therefore certainly wrong.

The construction becomes complicated through the verb mõistma in its archaic parallel form (“mõistaneda”) and the double negation as well as the partitives “soea märga” (“the warm wet”) and “Kurakülle kastejada” (“the wetter of the left side”). Partitives cannot function as grammatical subjects if the same sentence also has a nominative (which is what “mehe meel” is). The only solution is in the meaning of mõistma, which today is generally rendered as “understand, comprehend”, but which in Kreutzwald’s time also had another meaning. In the dictionary of Wiedemann (1869: 680), one of the first meanings is German merken (“feel, notice”), and right at the beginning of the whole entry the sentence “juba hakkab mõistma” is glossed by German “das Bewusstsein fängt schon an zurückzukehren (von Ohnmächtigen)” (“consciousness starts to come back (of those who had fainted)”). If we apply this meaning, the passage where the “mind of the man” is the grammatical subject and where twice a form of mõistma is negated has to be read, i.e. understood, as follows: the man did not regain consciousness and continued sleeping because the warm wetness fitted smoothly into his dream. Then the causality is logical.

A final confirmation of the correctness of this interpretation is found when we look at the unpublished Proto-Kalevipoeg where the same episode is described – and in greater detail and more explicitly (which shows us that Kreutzwald had already made changes between the Proto-Kalevipoeg and the first version; on the right my English translation):

Kalevide poega oli

The son of the Kalevides had

Unenäo naljatusel

in the game of the dream

Praego põrgo piigasida,

the maidens of hell,

Sarvik taadi tüterida

the daughters of Horny,

Omas kaisus ellatanud;

just tenderly embraced,

Mis ehk mõnda soonekesta

which perhaps some vein

Unes pani paisomaie.

has brought to swelling in the dream.

Sellepärast soea märga,

Therefore the warm wetness,

Poole keha kastijada

the wetter of half his body,

Tema tähäle ei pannud

was not noticed by him

Ega unepaelust peäsnud

and he could not escape the fetters of sleep.

(Proto-Kalevipoeg X: 106–16, p. 184 of the manuscript; also published in Kreutzwald 1961: 302)

In this version, there is no semantic ambiguity because the events of the dream are exactly described and because the verb at the end of the passage is intransitive (contemporary Estonian pääsema “escape, get away”, instead of päästma “save, rescue” in the second version). Unfortunately, Kreutzwald himself destroyed the logic by cutting twice into this passage, which led to the shortened version in the 1862 edition which lacks five lines (mentioned above).

This was only one of ten total elisions of this episode in the 1862 edition, but it may be the most momentous. The others are spread through the eighty-six lines (lines 381 to 466) that had been rendered in Latin by Reinthal, with the final elision at the beginning of the following episode, where the author had originally referred to the previous section – a reference which had become unnecessary in the new version. The whole origin legend is cut from an original 206 lines to 153, reducing it to three-quarters of its previous length. The legend is still recognisable but, as a result of this Biedermeier-style reduction, some authentic features have disappeared – and misunderstandings have led to mistakes in the translations.

The third solution

An even more radical solution was made by one of the later translators, Ferdinand Löwe. In his new German translation (1900), he simply erased the entire episode, explaining this in a footnote:

In the following lines 321–420, an adventure is narrated which has its origin in a remarkable rock configuration near the Raudoja pub on the Piep road. Vernacular fantasy has given this a grotesque and cynical interpretation. The former translator thought that it would be better to render some indecent passages in Latin; but as this does not really help its offensiveness, we prefer to erase the whole story, which does not contribute to the characterisation of the hero nor is it of any importance for the whole poem. (Löwe 1900: 188)

Consequently, Löwe jumps from line 320 to line 421 and no trace of our bizarre origin legend remains except a footnote and a gap in the line numbering.

Most later readers of the text did not comment on this, probably because they did not notice it. However, one of the first reviewers was curious (and annoyed?) and complained about the missing passage (Sandvoß 1901: 416, see section 5.4, below); nevertheless, missing as it was, he could only speculate about it, as he obviously did not possess the original edition.

The consequences

Löwe’s opinion that the episode does not contribute to the whole story has to be firmly rejected. Firstly, the episode does contribute to the characterisation of the hero, be this only in his need for sleep. Secondly, it is important for the whole of the epic, as one finds here a parallel to the folk poetry and mythology of other peoples. The motif of closing a source by a well-directed stone is not specifically Estonian. It can also be found in Norse mythology, where Þórr throws a stone into the vagina of the giantess Gjálp in order to stop the floods produced by her (Annist 2005: 123, with further references p. 340; the passgae can be found in Snorri’s Prose Edda at the beginning of chapter XVIII). This parallel between the Kalevipoeg and Norse mythology had already been detected by Jan de Vries (1957: 141), also referred to by Martti Haavio (1965: 170). The international motif is often called “Throw into the vulva” or “Throw into the vagina”, but the correct formulation would be “Throw into the opening of the urethra”, although there is normally no vernacular word for this specific anatomical part of the body and other words are used. In any case, the meaning is the same. The important thing about this motif is that the liquid is mostly urine, although attempts have been made to interpret it as blood, i.e. a menstrual flow (Clunies Ross 1981: 374); and, secondly, that the person responsible is always a goddess, giantess, sorceress or witch. Moreover, it is always the opposite sex, i.e. female, as the hero is always male in these stories and a heroine could not block a man’s urine flow in this way. And it is always a representative of another power that threatens to drown the hero; in other words this is a combat between gods and mankind/giants, and perhaps it may even present traces of a struggle between (old) matriarchal and (new) patriarchal authority as is recognised from several European mythologies (cf. Clunies Ross 1981). The divine connection is also expressed in the name assigned to the motif by Stith Thompson: “A933: River from urine of goddess (giantess)” (Thompson 1975, vol. 1: 171). He adds references to Irish, Icelandic, French, Sudanese, Indian and Korean; he does not, however, mention the Estonian variant.

Whatever reasons are responsible for the elision of the text or simply defusing the episode, the result is a kind of separation from the rest of the world. A compact and authentic origin legend has been cut, defused and destroyed because of the rules of decency. Even those editions where the original text is added in brackets or in Latin do not rescue the ruined text. Fragments remain, and this conveys the message that there is something wrong with it, with the explanation given somewhere else, in a footnote, a preface or an annotation. Thus a decency problem of the nineteenth century has its negative consequences to this day.

1  Unpublished, from the Archive of Cultural History if the Estonian Literary Museum: EKM EKLA f 192, mA 169:23, l. 6/11. In this letter, Kreutzwald also included a parallel German version which so far remains unpublished.

2  This word, Päppchen, was extremely difficult and controversial to decipher from Kreutzwald’s handwriting. I am grateful to several friends and colleagues for their support. The reading as “Päppchen”, which can mean “sweetheart” in Low German, is based on a suggestion by Heinrich Detering, p.c.

3  Unpublished, from the archive of the Estonian Literary Museum: EKM EKLA f 192, mA 169:23, l. 6/11.

5. The German Reception of the Kalevipoeg

First reviews

Given that the German language plays a special role in Estonia and that the first version of the Kalevipoeg was a bilingual edition, it is not surprising that the German reception of the epic was both earlier and more intense than that in other countries. “German reception” in this chapter means the reception in Germany (and, to a minimal extent, Austria and Switzerland) in the form of reviews and translations. Complete rewritings of the epic material will be treated in more detail in the following chapter (i.e. see chapter 6 on Israël 1873, Grosse 1875, Kalevipoeg 1894, and Balcke 1997).

The motor of the reception in Germany was the Berlin professor Wilhelm Schott (see Hasselblatt 2014, especially pp. 161–4), who started to deal with matters Estonian in 1841, when his review of the first issue of the proceedings of the Learned Estonian Society was published (Schott 1841). He then continued to review almost every successive edition of these proceedings. As a consequence, the review of the first issue of the third volume introduced the Kalevipoeg to the German public. In this issue, we find not only the announcement of the epic (Santo 1854) but also some “Fragments of the history of the Estonians” (Schultz 1854) that also contained information about the ancient hero Kalevipoeg. In his review, Schott still does not know anything of the difficulties with the censor and reports that the publication was scheduled for 1854, adding a footnote with the remark that he does not know whether this really happened (Schott 1855: 445).

When the first instalment of the Kalevipoeg was finally released in 1857, Schott immediately wrote a review for the Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes, which was one of his favourite journals for publishing his popular articles in. At that time, the Magazin appeared three times a week and was influential on the German literary and intellectual field (see Appel 1953). In his review, Schott retold the contents of the first three tales in the first instalment and also provided some samples of the text. He pointed several times to parallels in Finnish material, which is understandable as the Kalevala was well known in Germany at that time (see Webermann 1981). Besides, the first German translation of the Kalevala by Schiefner had been published in 1852, and Schott himself had delivered a number of contributions on the Finnish epic (Schott 1848, 1852, 1853, cf. Hasselblatt 2014: 131–138). For Schott, the Estonian legends that the Kalevipoeg belonged to had to be seen within the Finnic context. He felt very sympathetic towards the circumstances of these nations. In his opinion the Estonian legends are a “gallery of noble pictures surrounded by a black ribbon”, in which the “longing for a lost happy independence” can be felt. Now, finally, these legends enter “the stage of the great European world hand in hand with those of sibling spirit of neighbouring Finland and perhaps bring a refreshing stream of air from their side along into the sultry and oppressive atmosphere of our present times” (all quotations from the two first introductory paragraphs of his review, Schott 1857: 457). He uses here the same formulation as sixteen years earlier, when he wrote his first review of the Verhandlungen. In that review, he presented the aims of the Learned Estonian Society and characterised this first issue of the Verhandlungen as “attractive already owing to the fact that it provides especially us Western Europeans with almost completely new material, and enters like a pleasantly fresh breeze into the sultry atmosphere of the familiar and the everyday” (Schott 1841: 455). This means that he had not lost anything of his impassioned enthusiasm regarding Finnic folk poetry, where he also placed the Kalevipoeg. The exotic, the unknown that differs from the everyday, was for him the fascinating thing, and that is what he sought to convey to his public.

In 1859, when Schott had received the next instalment with tales 4 to 6, the subsequent review appeared (Schott 1859). He again recounts the contents and gives some samples of verse. At the end, he also comments on the translation by Reinthal, being rather more critical than positive. In the same year, Schott gave a lecture on the Kalevipoeg and the translation by Reinthal at the Berlin Academy (reported in the Monatsberichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1859. Berlin 1860: 699).

One year later, Schott combined his two articles from the Magazin into one article to be published in the more scholarly Archiv für wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland, which was the other important periodical Schott used for his publications and where he was actually one of the editors (see Hasselblatt 2014: 103). This scholarly journal was founded in order to convey knowledge about the Russian Empire to the West. It was quite widely disseminated and read by Western European intellectuals, although it was actually an instrument of Russian propaganda funded by the Russian tsar (see Kretschmar & Kouschil 1996). The article for the Archiv (Schott 1860) differed only slightly from the two articles written for the Magazin: the number of quotations from the text is merely lower. This marks the difference between the two periodicals: the Magazin had its emphasis on belles lettres whilst the Archiv was a strictly scholarly publication. That is why Schott concentrates more on the comparison between Kullervo and Kalevipoeg in the article for the Archiv. Schott had already published a treatise on Kullervo (Schott 1853) and pointed once more to some correspondences between the two heroes.

Anton Schiefner, who was involved with the Kalevipoeg from the very beginning (see chapter 2), also published his first treatment of the epic before its completion. To be exact, his article was an excerpt from the report for the candidature for the Demidov Prize of the St Petersburg Academy, written together with Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann. Half of the article is a retelling of the contents of the first thirteen tales which had been published up to that time. The other half deals with parallels between the Kalevala and the Kalevipoeg and sheds some light on interesting connections with Norse mythology. In this respect, Schiefner’s treatment differs from that of Schott as Schiefner wanted to show general European agreements whereas Schott tried to stress the exotic character. Schiefner finds an astonishing number of agreements between Kalevipoeg on the one hand and Þórr and Óðinn on the other, ending up with a conclusion which is still valid today (regarding the heavy German influence on Estonian): “Just as the Estonian language stands a step closer to the Germanic languages by inflexional system than Finnish does, so too do the Estonian heroic legends in a more intimate relationship to the Germanic and especially the German epic by the tragic character of their heroes” (Schiefner 1860: 290). Strictly speaking, however, this contribution does not form a part of the German reception as it was published in the Proceedings of the Academy in St Petersburg and only reached relatively small scholarly circles in Germany, if any at all.

The publications by Schott and Schiefner were not the only sources of information about the epic. Right from the beginning, Kreutzwald himself made efforts to spread the text abroad, and he asked his friends and colleagues to do the same. In October 1860, Schiefner was able to inform Kreutzwald of the fact that he (Schiefner) had distributed around twenty copies of his article in Germany. He listed several names, with such prominent persons as Ludwig Uhland and Jacob Grimm among them (Walravens 2013: 156).

Jacob Grimm, of course, must already have known of the existence of the Kalevipoeg. He regularly read the Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes and the Archiv (see Kunze 1957: 73) and was informed about the Estonian world of legends (see Hasselblatt 2010). In addition, Reinthal himself had sent him the first issue of the fourth volume of the Verhandlungen, where the first instalment of the Kalevipoeg was included. Grimm expressed his thanks with a cordial letter of four pages, in which he did not hide his recognition of the epic:

I was surprised by the publication of such an important poem, and these are only three out of twenty. Your skilful, fluent German translation immediately shows your expertise in the Estonian language, with which I am familiar only to a small extent [. . .]. I had hardly expected that there were still such large pieces of folk poetry among the Estonians. (Grimm 1857)

This letter by Grimm to Reinthal, which was Grimm’s only letter to him, later turned into a kind of relic which could be used in different contexts and for different purposes – even if it was not completely correct with respect to the contents. The letter quickly gained fame as it was read aloud at the meeting of the Learned Estonian Society on 2 October 1857, which in its turn was reported in the Tartu paper Inland (no. 41, 14 October 1857, col. 683, both dates Julian calendar).

The first to make use of Grimm’s letter was Villem Reiman in an article on the occasion of the centenary of Kreutzwald. Here he praises Kreutzwald’s persistence and stamina when it came to putting the epic together and finding the right form. Reiman especially stresses the importance of the poetic form:

The verdict of Jacob Grimm himself, writing after the first instalment: “I almost would have wished that everything told in prose had been written down in prose, too”, could not make him change his mind. And we have to thank him for the fact that he not only provided a large collection of material but also gave us, according to his abilities, a whole. (Reiman 1903a: 11)

Reiman had probably read the original letter or the published version in the Sitzungsberichte, and taking one quotation from it for his argument was certainly correct and permissible. But in the following, this quotation, which was somewhat deprived of its context, started to lead its own life and in this way did not do justice to Grimm. In order to understand what happened, we must look at a somewhat longer passage from the letter:

I had hardly expected that there were still such large pieces of folk poetry among the Estonians, as come to the surface now.

It makes me a bit nervous that the confirming asterisk appears for the most part, but not always, in the margin;1 someone who knows the Estonian language and its manner of expression will find it easy to combine fragments and fill in the gaps, the verses pour from his mouth. Did Lönnrot do it the same way? He at least gives numerous variants and I would like Kreutzwald also not to be too thrifty with this; indeed, Lönnrot’s second edition of the Kalevala became endlessly richer than the first collection. All arrangers of an epic have their rights, even Macpherson was not a liar (this passage should be omitted in the preface);2 but younger arrangers have to strive greedily for all kinds of affirmation, and I almost would have wished that everything told in prose had been written down in prose, too. I do not take it upon myself to have a decisive verdict on this before having become more familiar with the ways of this kind of poetry; first, however, all the rest [of the material] has to be printed so that an opinion can be formed on more certain grounds.

(Grimm 1857: 96–7)

In 1953, when the 150th anniversary of Kreutzwald’s birth was celebrated, a book on his philosophy and activity was published. A chronological table was provided at the end of the volume where, for 30 September 1857, it is said: “Jacob Grimm’s letter (to C. Reinthal), in which the publication of the ‘Kalevipoeg legends’ is recommended in ‘unchanged shape’” (Naan 1953: 228). This was, together with Reiman (1903a), the source for Erich Kunze in his study on Grimm and Finland, where he states: “He [Grimm] recommended Carl Reinthal, the German translator, to publish the Kalevipoeg legends in unchanged shape” (Kunze 1957: 78–9). It is in no way correct to speak here of a recommendation; Grimm only uttered a cautious desire without giving a final verdict. August Annist also goes too far, in my opinion, in his interpretation when he writes in his introduction to the critical edition about the criticism of the first version of the epic and Reinthal’s translation: “In a certain respect, the world-famous German folklorist Jacob Grimm joined them [the sceptical reviews, CH], writing in a letter to Reinthal from 30 September 1857 that he thought it would be better to edit the folk legends of Kalevipoeg in an unchanged, not a poeticised form” (Annist 1961: 40).

This finally shifted in 2002 with Ülo Valk, who in his turn mentioned Annist as his source, into the following: “In 1857, Jacob Grimm wrote a letter to Carl Reinthal, the German translator of the epic, advising him to publish the legends about Kalevipoeg without any changes” (Valk 2002: 410). In this way, a quotation deprived of its context turned from a desire into a recommendation and later even into advice. This suggests an involvement by Grimm in the development of the Kalevipoeg which had not taken place. But Grimm was a world-famous scholar, and what could be more attractive than his involvement in the history of the origins of the Estonian epic, even if he had only written one letter without any specific intention to interfere? More correct was actually the observation by Webermann, who wrote in a neutral way: “It is an interesting fact that Jacob Grimm also gave thought to this [marking original pieces of folk poetry, CH] in a letter to Reinthal from September 30, 1857” (Webermann 1968: 28, note 53).

Wilhelm Schott’s treatise

Immediately after the publication of the final instalment, Schott (1862) published a longish study on the Kalevipoeg that is the most comprehensive German contribution on the epic to date – if we do not include the “Sources” published by Kreutzwald’s son-in-law several years later in the proceedings of the Learned Estonian Society (Blumberg 1869).

Schott’s treatise is based on a lecture he delivered at the Berlin Academy on 15 May 1862. For the printed version, Schott added a comprehensive, almost profuse commentary to his text which forms exactly two thirds of the seventy-five pages. The first third, i.e. the main text, consists of a general characterisation of the epic (pp. 413–18) and a detailed description of its contents (pp. 418–37). In the introduction, Schott also indicates the parallels with and – according to him, even greater – differences from the Finnish Kalevala. The Kalevala, on which Schott himself had published several articles (Schott 1848, 1852, 1853), is clearly regarded as generally known among the public. In Schott’s view, the main difference between the Estonian and Finnish epics lies in the main character: in the Estonian epic, this is one hero overshadowing all other characters, whilst in the Finnish epic, there are three main characters, who “all shine with their own light” (p. 415). In Kalevipoeg, Schott sees parallels with the biblical Samson, and Kalevipoeg is a kind of classical hero and son of a king. In contrast, Kullervo, from the Kalevala, is rather an “embodiment of the curse of slavery” (p. 417). This difference is important only for the assessment of the individual commitments of both Kalevipoeg and Kullervo (seducing his sister, manslaughter), not for the entire epic(s) as such. In terms of each epic seen as a whole, however, the part of slavery clearly belongs to the Estonians. In Schott’s eyes, the epic songs of the Finns are of “Homeric freshness and cheerfulness” but the Estonian legends are “surrounded by a black ribbon” (cf. the same words in Schott 1857: 457). Schott astutely recognises that this is a direct consequence of the different political pressures on each culture: the Finnish peasant has always been free, but the Estonians have been suppressed by the clergy and nobility. And this difference in historical experience is, according to Schott, reflected in the folk poetry. Consequently, “The Estonian also enjoys complaining about his lost youth whereas the Finn, whose heart is always young, feels no desire to do so” (p. 417). And he concludes: “The Kalevala is a fresh spring morning with silver clouds in the blue aether, Kalevi Poeg is a colourful and resplendent autumn evening partly painted in a fantastic mixture of hues” (p. 418). This striking and catchy quotation has been picked up by several researchers, as was also noticed by Schott, who wrote about it to Kreutzwald in April 1874 (Walravens 2010/2011: 61–2; Estonian translation Lepik 1961: 355). We can find it, at least, in the article of Carrière (1867: 177), in the book by von Tettau (1873: 35), and in the introduction to the Danish prose version (Rasmussen 1878).

The following pages of Schott’s treatise (418–37) provide a detailed summary of the Kalevipoeg. Through its extended commentary of almost one hundred endnotes – with their own footnotes – this forms the main investigation of the work. One might even call this treatise long-winded, as Schott seemed to want to tell everything he knew and whatever he thought might be somehow relevant to the topic. In his notes, we find additional and secondary sources, explanations, interpretations, etymological considerations, criticism of the German translation and quotations of relevant parallel texts or passages. These quotations could be long, and in two cases even consist of an entire tale or legend: note 15 (pp. 444–6) retells the tale of Vanemuine from the proceedings of the Learned Estonian Society (Verhandlungen der Gelehrten Estnischen Gesellschaft 2/4, 1852: 72–6), and note 21 (pp. 452–3) presents the first part of August Ahlqvist’s version of the tale Videvik ja Ämarik (“Videvik and Ämarik”) – without naming the source, but most obviously taken from Ahlqvist’s “History of Estonian Literature” (1856). Concerning the latter, it is interesting that Schott had already published the same tale (from the same source) a few years earlier in the Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes (Schott 1858), but here he does not use the same translation. There may be two reasons for this: either Schott no longer had a copy of the translation or of the respective issue of the Magazin, or he disliked his earlier translation and provided a new one. I tend to assume the first. Schott was extremely productive in these years and he may simply not have kept a copy of everything, as this was complicated and time-consuming in his day, at least in comparison to our digitised world today.

This manner of conveying foreign sources to the German reader – albeit in a footnote – was Schott’s style: this was his manner of reception for a piece of foreign literature. For him this was a permanent process in which he was not only teacher but also learner. This can be seen from a footnote to note 14 (p. 444), where he refers to one of his own articles and then asks the reader to make some corrections to his previous articles in case they want to use it. And then a list of corrigenda follows, commenting on an earlier translation of a text by Mannteuffel, which had been published in the Archiv (Schott 1854).

A great deal of Schott’s commentary concentrates on the German translation by Reinthal, which in some places is strongly criticised. In his opinion, the translation is too free and sometimes too romantic. This is understandable, since for Schott the valuable element of a bilingual edition lay in exact equivalents, which was also interesting for didactic reasons. A translation that was “too poetic” was simply annoying. Consequently, there are several passages in the annotations with new alternative translations provided by Schott.

Sometimes, however, Schott overshot the mark and was too detailed or almost dogmatic and even wrong. When referring to the fact that in the Kalevala as well as in the Kalevipoeg an eagle brings Kalev to the coast on its wings and puts him on the ground, he mentions the respective verbs – Finnish heittää and Estonian viskama (both meaning “throw, cast”) – and continues: in this context, both verbs have to mean something like “put down, set down”, and it is incorrect to translate this as “put down rudely” (p. 447). First of all, Schott has no evidence for his claim that heittää and viskama had such an additional, specific meaning here; secondly, the difference between Reinthal and Schott is rather small here, resting on a single additional adverb; thirdly, it cannot be ruled out that Reinthal deliberately – and for semantic reasons – added this adverb in order to render the “throw”-element of the verb. And finally: Reinthal’s translation is metrical and he simply needed another two syllables to make a full line:

Bis sich sein Geschick erfüllte

When by way of great good fortue,

und nach Gottes weiser Fügung

By the guidance of the heavens

ihn sein Aar am Felsenstrande

On a high rock cliff the eagle

Wierlands unsanft niedersetzte

Cast the man to the shores of Viru.

(I: 105–8 [Reinthal])

(Kartus 2011: 32)

Schott should at least have offered some alternative; otherwise his criticism is too vague and not really convincing.

But there are other places where his criticism is fully justified and concerns real mistakes instead of a mere disagreement on the level of style. One such mistake was detected by Schott in the passage with the (second) curse of the sword in the eleventh tale. The hero’s sword was stolen by the sorcerer while Kalevipoeg slept, but it then slipped out of the thief’s hands in the Kääpa River, where Kalevipoeg later finds it. However, Kalevipoeg cannot get it to move, to rise from the bottom of the river and allow him to take it with him, because the sword is angry that he had committed manslaughter. Out of resentment, Kalevipoeg now puts his own curse on the sword: may whoever carried you – thinking of the thief – one day also be killed by you. This passage is extremely important for subsequent events because Kalevipoeg’s formulation is ambiguous and finally leads to him, not the thief, being killed by the sword. In his translation, Reinthal had disambiguated the formulation of the hero, saying “dem du eigen angehörtest” (“to whom you belonged”) – and that could only refer to Kalevipoeg, not to the thief. That was, of course, a serious mistake and Schott was right to point it out (p. 471).

Another great advantage of Schott’s treatise is that he regularly made references to international folklore, placing material of the Kalevipoeg in relation to texts and traditions of other countries and cultures. He mentions Greek, Arabic, Turkic, Tibetan, Mongolian and folklore elements of the Far East – as this was the main subject of Schott, who started as a Sinologist – but for example Dante also manages to pop up in his comments. This brings a comparative aspect into the picture, which is illustrative of Schott’s intention. He wanted to show the international connections; he did not want the Kalevipoeg to be received as an example of an exotic text from some forgotten region at the periphery of Europe. He wanted the Western readers to perceive it as a part of a greater whole and to give it a place within the broad spectrum of Eurasian culture. He succeeds in this with this treatise, which was later used by numerous other scholars (see chapters 6 and 7).

Schott’s academic treatise must have been the direct trigger for the correspondence between him and Kreutzwald, although Kreutzwald had known of Schott already for some time. Schiefner first mentioned Schott to Kreutzwald in a letter from 6 February 1859 (Walravens 2013: 94; Estonian translation KKV III: 91), and in November the same year, Schiefner informed Kreutzwald about the fact that Schott had written a review of the second instalment of the Kalevipoeg, where he also criticised the translation by Reinthal (Walravens 2013: 134; KKV III: 144). In his answer, Kreutzwald asked whether Schott’s knowledge of Estonian was sufficient to criticise the translation by Reinthal (Walravens 2013: 137; KKV III: 149). Kreutzwald had not yet read the review and shortly thereafter he asked the secretary of the Learned Estonian Society, Theodor Beise, to provide him with a copy of the relevant issue of the Magazin (KKV II: 581). In the following year, when he had obviously read Schott’s review and the problems with Reinthal became insurmountable, he wrote to Schultz-Bertram (KKV IV: 60) that Schott (who lived in Berlin) apparently knew Estonian better than Reinthal, mockingly adding that one might send Reinthal to Berlin for a year, where he might learn some Estonian and broaden his horizons (KKV IV: 68).

However, nothing happened until 1864, when Schiefner reported to Kreutzwald that he had received Schott’s treatise. Schiefner also pointed to some minor mistakes in Schott’s work and the fact that Schott had called both Faehlmann and Kreutzwald half-Estonians, which was an obvious error (Walravens 2013: 238; KKV III: 304). The relationship between Schott and Schiefner had already been uneasy for some time, and in his very first letter where Schott’s name appeared, Schiefner had told Kreutzwald that Schott did not like him (Walravens 2013: 94; KKV III: 92; see also Hasselblatt 2014: 135–8). This is relevant to note for the context, even if it did not directly influence the relationship between Schott and Kreutzwald.

In October 1864, Kreutzwald had received and read Schott’s treatise, as he reported in a letter to the Finnish scholar Otto Donner, who had left for Berlin (KKV IV: 340). Kreutzwald asked Donner to tell Schott that he would soon send some minor corrections to Schott’s treatise. He also asked Donner to tell Schott that it was inexcusable that Schott had made both him and Faehlmann into half-Estonians: both of them were flawless Estonians and Kreutzwald added that he had spoken exclusively Estonian up to his twelfth year.

Nevertheless, getting in contact with Schott still took some time. In February 1865, Kreutzwald asked Donner, then in Berlin, whether he could send him Schott’s address (KKV IV: 344). However, Kreutzwald still had not written to Schott in July 1865 (KKV IV: 348), and only finally did so in the spring of 1866. The first letter from Schott to Kreutzwald is dated 9 April 1866. In this letter, Schott thanks Kreutzwald for the many valuable comments and corrections that he had received. As the letters from Kreutzwald to Schott are not preserved, we can only guess what he wrote, but we have some indirect evidence: one month later, Schott delivered a lecture at the Berlin Academy, which appeared later in print (Schott 1866), and half of this article consists of corrections to annotations in his own treatise from 1863 which can be inferred to go back directly to Kreutzwald’s letter. The correspondence between Schott and Kreutzwald lasted nine years and later dealt with different aspects of Estonian literature, but the Kalevipoeg was definitely the trigger for their ongoing dialogue (Walravens 2010–11; Estonian translation Lepik 1961).

Other reviews, minor studies and marginal notes

In addition to Schott’s study, which dealt exclusively with the Kalevipoeg, works treating Finnic folklore generally or the Finnish Kalevala specifically in the following period also mentioned the Estonian Kalevipoeg (see Schiefner 1863a). Schott himself also continued to deal with the topic. He published a small contribution to the legends of Kullervo and Kalevipoeg in the following year and compared them with Russian and Chinese material (Schott 1863). Schiefner did exactly the same thing in the same number of the Archiv (Schiefner 1863b), where he pointed to some striking parallels between the Russian and the Finnic legends. Schiefner’s article is slightly longer than Schott’s and was taken from a Russian publication. Schott, as one of the editors of the Archiv, commented on Schiefner’s article in footnotes and even added his own text, which was printed in the very same issue of the Archiv.3

The numerous publications by Schott show that the reception of the Kalevipoeg was more intensive, more prominent and more important abroad than in Estonia itself, where the literary field was only just beginning to emerge. Moreover, in Estonian newspapers the foreign reception of the Kalevipoeg was mentioned positively, and it was even stressed that Estonians should correspondingly give more attention to the epic (Postimees 15 June 1866). The distribution in Estonia – i.e. the sale of the epic – was sluggish. This was not only true of the original expensive bilingual edition but also of the parallel monolingual German edition (Kalevipoeg 1861).

In contrast to the treatise-like reviews of Schott, there were additional reviews of the epic of a more “ordinary” sort. For example, over one column in the Literarische Centralblatt für Deutschland was dedicated to the Kalevipoeg (A. K. 1864). The reviewer gave a summary of the epic and pointed to a principal difference with respect to Macpherson: in Kreutzwald’s work we find some contradictions which a Macpherson-like author would certainly have removed. The fact that there were still some inconsistencies in the epic was taken as nothing less than a proof of its authenticity. In the same review, Schott’s treatise is also mentioned as a useful tool for understanding the work of Kreutzwald.

The next level of reception was in the form of essays and analytical articles. The best example for this was an article by Moriz Carrière (1867) in the Internationale Revue. The twenty-fifth volume of the Archiv (1867) was its last, and the editor suggested by the editor recommended the Internationale Revue as suitable for this kind of publication and follow-up, but the venue was more essayistic and less scholarly than the Archiv. At first sight, Carrière produced nothing more than a summary of the Kalevala and the Kalevipoeg, and the Kalevala received much more space. The first and the beginning of the second part of the two-part article were devoted to it, before turning to the Estonian epic. However, Carrière knew the field and gave an elegant and impressive overview of the state of affairs in his introduction:

After Castrén above all had collected and intellectually interpreted the mythological traditions of his people, after he had published in detail many charms, songs and tales, after Lönnrot had arranged the heroic songs of the Finns, Kreutzwald those of the Estonians, after Schiefner, Schröter4 and Reinthal as translators had integrated them into the Western literary tradition, after J. Grimm and W. Schott had studied them thoroughly, it is possible for us to sketch an illustrative picture also of this branch of the tree of mankind. (Carrière 1867: 76)

Here, indeed, are listed all important persons who had played a significant role in conveying Finnic folklore. If one had read the respective works, it was possible to form an independent opinion about this cultural area that had recently been discovered. One could certainly not expect this from an essay of only roughly ten pages like Carrière’s, whose main goal was to present the contents of the epics. Nevertheless, he very often shows parallels and analogies with the Germanic, Norse and Greek epics – mythologies and legends which were supposed to be well known among the readership. Through this, Carrière made an interesting contribution to a general embedding of the Finnic material in the European context, in other words de-exoticising these cultures. He also presents an interesting comparison that no-one else had until then considered: “I would like to add that the Finnish poetry is nearer to the Germanic, the Estonian nearer to the Slavic, and especially in its idyllic and melancholic folk-songs is related to Latvian poetry,5 although it rather prefers objective narration to the subjective lyrical form” (Carrière 1867: 177).

Another consequence of the relative popularity of the Kalevipoeg can be seen in the fact that a number of publications followed that only indirectly dealt with the epic, mentioned it in passing or simply presumed that the existence of the epic was well known among the readers. One such publication was a notice by Georg Schultz-Bertram (1868) in the Magazin, where he did not deal with the literary aspect of the Kalevipoeg but with its folkloric roots. He describes the traces left by the hero in Estonian topography, which had been a well-known phenomenon in Estonia for quite some time. Certain hills or valleys or lumps of rock had always been connected with Kalevipoeg. Schultz-Bertram now presented this phenomenon to a foreign public for the first time. Two years later, an editorial note in the Magazin (1870: 462) referred to some Estonian sources and reported a controversy about the authenticity of the Kalevipoeg – again a proof of the degree of fame that the Estonian epic had obtained among the readers of the Magazin. Two years later, Schott contributed a short article, or comment, on the procession caterpillar for the Magazin, which was also based on an episode (tale 16, lines 924–31) from the Kalevipoeg (Schott 1872).

The Kalevipoeg was sometimes mentioned within articles on Estonian legends in general. Mihkel Weske (Veske), an Estonian who obtained his doctorate in Leipzig, published a short article on Finnic mythology in a German journal (contextualising it within the German reception). In his article, Weske (1873) quotes lines 184–358 of the first tale of the Kalevipoeg. He comments on the translation by Reinthal, which he corrects in one detail – namely where in an enumeration of fifty horses and sixty coachmen is mentioned. His argument is that this seemingly illogical passage was necessary in the Estonian version on account of alliteration: the Estonian word “sixty” (Estonian kuuskümmend) has been used here in order to have the same initial sound as the following word for “coachman” (Estonian kutsar). This might be defensible for the Estonian original, says Weske, but it is not necessary to do the same in a translation where there is no alliteration. Weske’s argumentation is not unreasonable, and even remarkable for the 1870s, though one might ask why Kreutzwald did not use the “sixty” in the previous line because the “fifty” (Estonian viiskümmend) does not alliterate with the “horses” (Estonian hobused) – but this might be due to the mechanism of parallelism in Finnic poetry, where numbers in parallel lines must vary. However, that is not the point here. The point is that such philological details of the Kalevipoeg were reported and discussed in German journals in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. That in itself is remarkable and tells us something about the reception of the epic in Germany at that time.

Another field where Kreutzwald’s work could be mentioned is in treatments of the Finnish Kalevala. It happened more than once that authors of such articles or monographs also mentioned the Estonian epic, although the main topic was the Finnish Kalevala. One of the first of these was the monograph by Wilhelm Johann Albert von Tettau (1873), who had read Schott’s treatise and quotes from it. In his introduction, the author gives a short summary of the Kalevipoeg – but not of all twenty tales: he concentrates only on those episodes that he deemed interesting for his work (von Tettau 1873: 32–5). In contrast to the aforementioned reviewer (A. K. 1864), von Tettau points to a principal difference between the Kalevala and the Kalevipoeg and regards Kreutzwald as a kind of Macpherson:

The process is hardly anything other than the one Macpherson was guilty of when he published his Ossian, except that Kreutzwald acted more honestly and did not keep his own share of the poem a secret, and he did not possess the poetic genius of Macpherson, who in his time inflamed the entire intellectual world. (von Tettau 1873: 33)

At the same time, he also expresses recognition of the value of the content of the work:

To the most interesting tales belong those that describe the visit of Kalevipoeg to the underworld (twice) and his voyage to find the end of the world. These, on the one hand, give a picture of the Estonian beliefs of heathen times about the hereafter which have not yet completely vanished, and, on the other hand, they illustrate that the same legends can be found almost unchanged among peoples with the most different origins. (von Tettau 1873: 34)

Von Tettau thus correctly stresses some specific elements and points to parallels among other peoples prior to the systematisation of such correlations by comparative folklore research. And he continues: “What distinguishes the Kalevipoeg from most other comparable poems is its ethical value and its moral orientation, for its final goal is to point to eternal justice which does not leave any outrage unpunished” (von Tettau 1873: 34). This seems to be an inadmissible reduction of the whole message of the epic to the circumstances of the death of the hero, and that interpreted in the sense of the New Testament – all who draw the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52). On the other hand, one has to agree with von Tettau in some respects: one can certainly speak of ethical values being conveyed by the epic (see Petersen 2004). It is in any case remarkable that the Kalevipoeg met with responses even in non-academic circles – von Tettau was, indeed, vice president of the Royal Academy of the Sciences for General Benefit in Erfurt, but in his professional life he was a politician, and hence one might regard him as a layman in literary matters. On the other hand, he was interested in history and published several books about German antiquity. And his work found its readers. When Conrad Beyer published his Deutsche Poetik (“German Poetics”, 1887), he included a chapter on “The folk epics of the Finns, Estonians and Lapps” (§114, part 4). His summary of the Kalevipoeg is clearly based on von Tettau, even partly using the same wording. Also the Italian scholar Paolo Emilio Pavolini (1902: 19) quoted von Tettau.

Another interesting contribution came from the Italian scholar Domenico Comparetti. He had already made his reputation with several studies on literature and folk poetry and, in 1892, he published a monograph on the Kalevala of over 300 pages. This detailed study on the Finnish epic is still worth reading, although some passages might be regarded as outdated. Most of the comparisons that Comparetti makes are with the Germanic and Slavic cultures, but he also includes five pages that deal with the Estonian parallels (Comparetti 1892: 42–6). The author stresses the great differences between the Kalevala and the Kalevipoeg: looking at the Estonian epic “we have a general picture which in the character of the hero, in the nature of its action as well as in its idealism and its poetic style differs sharply from that of the Kalevala” (Comparetti 1892: 43–4). However, he does not fail to see connections between them:

On the other hand, we have numerous points of agreement with the epic songs of the Finns, such as the son of Kaleva and other things, and the Finnish songs, which can easily be rendered in Estonian, are widespread in Estonia. Therefore the collectors of these songs not only had to write these down from different places in Finland, but also those of Estonia. (Comparetti 1892: 44)

Comparetti’s influential study does not, however, really belong to the German reception per se as German is used here as an international scholarly language, and the book is a translation from Italian. And one final remark on Comparetti might be added, when he states that “traditional Estonian poetry, as we know and see it today, takes only a secondary and dependent position with respect to the Finnish” (Comparetti 1892: 44). Generally speaking, Comparetti held the opinion that everything Finnish is “proper”, “real”, “original” and “prototypical”, whereas everything Estonian is only a diluted imitation. This is an opinion that was often encountered around the turn of the twentieth century and, it may be pointed out, has been persistent within Finno-Ugric studies even up to the present day. The reason for this is simply a quantitative problem, deriving from the fact that Finnish is the largest Finnic language and the second-largest Finno-Ugric language (after Hungarian) in the world. Therefore it was noticed earlier and has been better observed and accordingly investigated more intensively. Most of the scholars from Central or Western Europe start with Finnish or Hungarian when they look at the Finno-Ugric language family. After this, they notice that the Finnish language often displays older forms while closely related Estonian shows a number of innovations such as omitting possessive suffixes and the negation verb. Additionally, the history of Estonia is characterised by more wars and foreign conquests than that of Finland, which, again, brought about a different contact situation with respect to other cultures. The consequence is an inadmissable simplification: Finnish must be the archaic representative of the Finnic branch. But this is not true. There are counter-examples like Estonian ema, ‘mother’, using an old Uralic stem where Finnish has taken a Germanic loanword (äiti); one has to look carefully at every single feature.

A new German translation

As mentioned earlier, Kreutzwald himself was not very content with his first translator, Carl Reinthal, and therefore the last five tales of Kalevipoeg were translated by him and Georg Schultz-Bertram. Soon, however, he began to consider organising a completely new translation. He contacted both Schultz-Bertram (see KKV IV: 184; Lepik 1961: 308) and Schiefner (Walravens 2013: 101, 113) on this topic, but both eventually declined the offer. He must then have asked Schott to do this, but the latter also declined – though not because of lack of command of the language, nota bene. Schott stressed in a letter from 12 March 1867 that he would certainly like to undertake the task but that there were two reasons which prevented him from accepting it. First, his main obligations at the university were in the field of Sinology and East Asian studies, and he simply lacked the time needed for the work. Second, he doubted whether the German market would show sufficient interest for such an undertaking to be worthwhile (Walravens 2010/2011: 20; Lepik 1961: 307).

Two years later, Kreutzwald’s collection of fairy tales was published in Germany (Kreutzwald 1869a). In a letter to Kreutzwald from 4 May 1869, it was Anton Schiefner who suggested that the very translator of these fairy tales, Ferdinand Löwe, could perhaps also be considered to undertake a new translation of the Kalevipoeg (Walravens 2013: 336; KKV III: 435).

With Löwe, the first “real” translator entered the stage – “real” in the sense that, up until that time, all translations from Estonian into German were made by scholars for practical or illustrative purposes rather than by individuals who did translation as more regular work. This is also to a certain degree true of the first two translators of the Kalevipoeg, Reinthal and Schultz-Bertram: the former was mainly active as a priest while the latter was a physician, although Schultz-Bertram could also be called a journalist and writer. The same holds true for Ferdinand Löwe, but he seems to have translated much more and he tried to earn at least part of his living with his pen. Löwe was born in Hamburg in 1809 and had studied in Leipzig and Berlin, where he met the famous Young Germany writer, Karl Gutzkow. From 1836, Löwe lived in St Petersburg, where he obtained a position in the library of the Academy in 1839. In addition, he was also active as a journalist for the St. Petersburger Zeitung. With the German Revolution of 1848, he returned to Hamburg in order to actively contribute to the building of the new society that he hoped for. Not much later, however, he had to leave Germany again and headed once more for St Petersburg, where he was able to resume his old position as a librarian. In 1854, he even took Russian citizenship. In the first place, he was a translator from Russian and in this capacity he brought, among others, Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Krylov to the German reader. Having retired in 1863, he changed residences regularly – commuting between Russia, Germany and Estonia. From 1865 onwards, he sojourned for several periods in Tallinn. In these years, at an advanced age, he started to learn Estonian. The sources about the life of this translator are scanty: besides Schiefner’s letters, there is only one article by Leo Anvelt (1973, with further references). These do not tell us why he came to Tallinn. Löwe died in Stuttgart in 1889.

When Schiefner proposed Löwe as a potential translator for Kalevipoeg, Kreutzwald directly asked him to make this proposal to Löwe in his letter of 9 May 1869 (Walravens 2013: 337; KKV III: 437). One month later (9 June), when Kreutzwald had finally seen Löwe’s translation of his fairy tales, he explicitly expressed his wish for Löwe to be the translator of his Kalevipoeg (Walravens 2013: 338; KKV III: 439). The Learned Estonian Society then became involved, and Löwe could settle to work on the translation at the beginning of 1870. However, all kinds of obstacles soon followed: delays, misunderstandings, financial problems, discontented honorarium expectations and difficulties in finding a publisher – enough to disrupt the whole undertaking for one decade. In the meantime, Löwe lived in Stuttgart. It was not before the start of the 1880s that things started to move again, and a translation sample was published in the tenth volume of the proceedings of the Learned Estonian Society (Löwe 1881).

In 1887, Löwe had completed the new translation and hoped to get it published at a Tartu publishing house. But things went differently: the possibilities for publishing the new translation in this publishing house died with the Tartu publisher Emil Mattiesen in 1888. His heirs did not hurry with the work and the Learned Estonian Society could not interfere (Anvelt 1973: 221). Various unsuccessful attempts were again made, but it was not before 1898 – when Schiefner, Kreutzwald and Löwe himself had all long since been buried – that the Tallinn publisher Kluge purchased Löwe’s manuscript from the heirs of Mattiesen. In this way, the new German translation of Kreutzwald’s epic finally appeared in the last year of the nineteenth century (Löwe 1900).

This translation was – like the original edition and the two subsequent editions of 1862 and 1876 – printed without the name of the author. It was only in the preface that Kreutzwald was mentioned as the main creator of the text. This suggested, again, a kind of anonymous work which increased the authenticity, and with it the authority, of the text, which made it much easier for the text to be perceived as “real” folk poetry (as discussed in section 3.1).

Löwe’s translation follows the third edition of the epic from 1876, i.e. the last edition provided by Kreutzwald himself. The translation forms a uniform and integrated whole and is certainly better than the much-criticised version of Reinthal. Moreover, the introduction and the seventy-five pages of annotations by Villem Reiman make the edition even more valuable. On the other hand, Löwe acted somewhat high-handedly when he omitted two rather long passages: 190 lines from the eleventh tale – the so-called “barrage of peas” (XI, 781–970) – and 100 lines from the fifteenth tale – the Raudoja episode (XV, 321–420), treated in detail in chapter 4 above.

Be this as it may, Löwe’s translation was positively received and was also reviewed several times, even in journals outside Estonia. A first short review appeared in the journal Grenzboten (“Border Courier”), which was founded in 1841 and was “an influential organ of the Northern German national-bourgeois liberalism for decades. [. . .] A turn in the political attitude of the journal happened in 1871, when the new editor Hans Blum (1841–1910) [. . .] made the Grenzboten into a mouthpiece of Bismarck’s policy” (Rózsa 2001/2002: 27). This characterisation is relevant here, because we are not dealing with a literary review of the Kalevipoeg, but with a political statement. Mária Rózsa, too, admits – though in another context – that “the treatment of political issues was dominant” in the journal (Rózsa 2001/2002: 40). We can see the same trend in the review by Adolf Philippi, who dedicates more than half of his account of criticism to a survey of the situation in Estonia and of the role of Germans in the history of the country. He is very critical with respect to the Baltic Germans as – in the context of Russification – their “Germanness was lost and behind them remained Catholicism which, collaborating with the Poles, now provides difficulties for the Reich” (Philippi 1900a: 627). This is Bismarck at his best, one could say, and has nothing to do with the Estonian epic. Philippi continues with his political comments and only the last third of his review affords a short summary of the contents of the epic – with minor mistakes – concluding with a friendly and positive résumé: “The comparative researcher can here distinguish myth from poetry, the critic folk-song from free rendering, and the average reader, who is not interested in all of this, will finally confess that he has read a pleasant fairy tale enriched with many beauties” (Philippi 1900a: 628). With a characterisation of the depiction of nature as “magnificent and melancholic” and praise of the instructive annotations, the review ends.

This review already shows that Estonian literature was not really the main point. Even more, the following reactions to this review prove that Germany was busy with other issues than distant literatures. Philippi’s review must have been read by a German from Estonia, who complained about the political tendencies and published an article in the Kreuzzeitung where he criticised Philippi as “oddly un-German” (last quarter of 1900, here quoted according to Philippi 1900b: 290). This, again, was the trigger for a caustic comment by Philippi: “the author presents in great detail the history of his country in the correct Baltic German version, which we have often heard and which, no matter how many times it is repeated, does not become any more convincing” (Philippi 1900b: 290). Once more, Philippi refers to Estonian history and correctly stresses that it was not he but the author of the annotations of the Kalevipoeg who pointed to the historical situation of the Estonians.

It should be clear that all this has nothing to do with literature. But these reviews and polemics are nevertheless interesting and relevant because it was a literary work that triggered this discussion. And this is of course also a form of reception. In the reaction by Philippi, there was in addition an interesting statement on the Kalevipoeg, when he concludes his remarks and, in fact, rescinds his former praise, or at least his positive assessment of the epic: “As a poetic work, it is not really peculiar, and as a literary monument it is also of only limited interest. But as it is of some value for those readers that our journal is originally aimed at, I gave a friendly review and tried to render the impression that the average reader will receive having gone through the twenty tales” (Philippi 1900b: 290). All in all, this was not much more than a friendly mention of the work, with no acknowledgement – let alone an evaluation – of contents or aesthetics.

Also in 1900, a short announcement of Löwe’s translation appeared in the journal Globus (Winter 1900). Its author signed himself “Libau. A. C. Winter”, i.e. he lived in the region, but in Liepāja, in the Latvian-speaking area. Nevertheless, Winter was obviously familiar with the material and also knew about the circumstances of the history of the translation. In his view, the classification of the text as the “Estonian national epic” was not permissible, as later research has shown. Nevertheless, the work obtains a certain value owing to the embedded original verses. But – he concludes in his final criticism – the editor must be blamed for having reduced the usefulness of the present edition by omitting the asterisks Kreutzwald had put in his first edition to mark the original folk poetry. This indicates that Winter was familiar with the first edition of the epic. And he knew of the difficulties concerning the translation. He describes Löwe’s translation as successful, but not over all as faithful as the scholar would like to have it: for the first time, something is said about the quality of Löwe’s translation, and that partly in a critical way. But Winter also offers some convincing arguments when he states that Löwe sometimes placed the Estonian figures in the wrong context only because some word fitted better into the alliterative pattern, and one should not “set figures on the Estonian Mount Olympus who have no right to live there”, runs his – correct – observation. Of course, Löwe’s translation cannot be compared to the partly abstruse oddities by one Israël or Grosse that will receive attention in the following chapter (chapter 6), but Winter had a point here.

A short announcement of the new translation was published in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, the author being Leopold von Schroeder, an Indologist from Vienna who was born in Tartu (von Schroeder 1901). Therefore he was, like Winter, familiar with the region, the material and especially with the epic, as he had published a longish study on it ten years earlier (von Schroeder 1891). In his announcement, von Schroeder happily welcomes the fact that the German translation of the Estonian epic had finally been published. He knew the circumstances and the background of the history of the translation and he also knew everything about the criticism of the first translation. He therefore makes positive judgements about Löwe’s decision to render the entire epic in German alliterative verse, though there might be some verses where the translator did not succeed in finding the proper words. On the whole, however, his judgement is positive, and once more the annotations provided by Reiman are praised.

A quite comprehensive review of Löwe’s translation appeared in the Preußische Jahrbücher (Sandvoß 1901). Actually, this is mostly a presentation of the contents, which accounts for two thirds of the text (Sandvoß 1901: 407–18). Prior to that, the reviewer describes how the epic came into existence and mentions some German-language literature on the topic. He also points to the works of Grosse and Israël (see chapter 6, below). Sandvoß then offers some critical remarks regarding the translation, even speaking in a footnote of “numerous linguistic horrors, which were evoked by the translator’s adherence to the alliteration” (Sandvoß 1901: 407), but finally the translator earns his respect – even if one or another alliteration cannot be regarded as well done: “It really means something if you read seventeen and a half thousand of these lines fluently and without grumbling, only here and there slightly shaking your head” (Sandvoß 1901: 406). Generally speaking, Sandvoß’s review is positive and written with sympathy for the topic. His numerous comparisons to and even derivations from Germanic language forms and mythology do seem in part to be far-fetched, but these were normal for the time and can be considered unavoidable.

Concerning other aspects of the Zeitgeist, however, Sandvoß could only make ironic remarks. He, too, noticed Löwe’s omission of the Raudoja episode in tale fifteen (see chapter 4 above) and complained about it: “The chastity of the translator conceals from us an episode v. 321–420, which in an earlier version at least was given in Latin. Well, we live in the era of lex Heinze,6 which requires a thrilling obscene joke in the place of naked beauty” (Sandvoß 1901: 416). Although the review is no essayistic masterpiece and concluded quite abruptly, it is noteworthy that it appeared in Preußische Jahrbücher, a well-known journal with a high status, and at more than sixteen pages, it was definitely more than a short announcement.

Finally, a contribution in the journal Das litterarische Echo must be mentioned. A certain Reinhold Kaupo, which turns out to be the pseudonym of the Latvian critic Teodor Seifert (see Pukits 1911: 15), wrote an article about the Estonian national epic which could be regarded as a review of Löwe’s translation because this is mentioned in a footnote at the end of the article (Kaupo 1902). But the article is more: it is also a sketch of Estonian history and an interpretation of the Kalevipoeg as part of the Estonian “Renaissance” (Kaupo 1902: col. 967). Therefore it is questionable whether one could call it a national epic at all, but referring to the Nibelungenlied, which likewise partly displays younger material, the answer is nevertheless positive. For the self-consciousness of the Estonians, it was, concludes Kaupo, extremely important, and in this he is correct, of course. The interesting thing with this review is that the author came from the eastern Baltic region – from Riga – but that he found an important German journal for his article.

Looking across these many responses, it is not wrong to conclude that the new translation by Löwe can be characterised as prompting real reception of the epic – not only because the translator was one of the first professionals in the field, but also because of the relatively widespread impact which can be seen from the various reviews.

The twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century

In the years that followed, the Kalevipoeg remained present as a kind of ambassador of Estonian culture. During the First World War, a collection of fairy tales and folklore texts was published in order to provide the German public with material on the region – a region claimed to be “old German(ic) ground” in those days. The volume was put together by August von Löwis of Menar and included a separate chapter on “Epics” which was dedicated entirely to the Kalevipoeg (Löwis of Menar 1916: 75–92). Löwis of Menar came from Riga and received his doctorate in Berlin in 1912 with a dissertation about German and Russian fairy tales. His collection is competent and presents, in addition to a summary of the epic, several samples using the original translation by Reinthal. The year of the publication and its positioning in a series entitled “Ostsee und Ostland” (“Baltic Sea and Baltic Land”) probably did not lead to a wide distribution, but when Löwis of Menar published the same text six years later in his collection of Finnish and Estonian fairy tales, permanent success was guaranteed (Löwis of Menar 1922). This collection appeared as part 20 of the prestigious series Die Märchen der Weltliteratur (“World Literature Fairy Tales”) and has been continuously reissued ever since (in 1927, 1962, 1972, 1976, 1981, 1985, 1988, and 1994 – partly as new editions, book-club editions or licensed paperback).

After the First World War, the presentation of the epic might be in the style of romantic mystifications, as the short article by Rosa Kaulitz-Niedeck (1920) shows. Kaulitz-Niedeck opens with the following introduction: “Smooth and melodious is the language of the Estonians; their sounds, which touch the ear in a pleasant way like those of Italian, sound like tender music” (Kaulitz-Niedeck 1920: 151). What follows is a summary of the Kalevipoeg illustrated with prose quotations taken from Israël’s book (1873, see below chapter 6.2.). However, the author did not reveal her source, and some readers might even have thought that she was the original discoverer of the Estonian epic, because the title of her essay runs “The national epic of the Estonians” with the subtitle “Reported by R. Kaulitz-Niedeck”. But such an isolated publication is nevertheless also a perfect proof of the growing interest in the Estonian epic.

But there were also other, more profound attempts to deal with the epic. A very elegant essay was published by Herbert Vielstedt in the acknowledged journal Die neue Rundschau (1937). In this twenty-page piece, Vielstedt tackles the question of the authenticity of the epic and, in doing so, he turns out to be well informed. The title of this essay – “The romantic circle” – betrays his conclusion:

Out of their love for everything folkloric and irrational, the poets go in search of the lost myth. They cannot find it and therefore they artificially create it. This substitute enters the world and gradually turns into the original; from mythology comes a myth. The process in itself is like a legend: the falsely attributed changeling turns into a prince and the legitimate child, the real ancient myth, is banned behind the ash pile of serious scholarship. (Vielstedt 1937: 464).

But even if the whole epic is a construction, according to Vielstedt there is nothing wrong with it. “If Faehlmann and Kreutzwald had lived some centuries earlier and if their names had, owing to some “lucky accident” fallen into oblivion, they would have become real rhapsodists” (Vielstedt 1937: 466). Vielstedt showed with his essay that exoticising was not necessary and that one could treat the Kalevipoeg like any other piece of world literature. More importantly, Vielstedt’s essay also showed that, even under the Nazi regime, it was still possible to publish other things than just ideologically tinted material.

The same holds for another, albeit much shorter, article from the same period. Gerhart Ernst wrote in the Berlin journal Geistige Arbeit about parallels between Finland and Estonia with respect to their folklore poetry before informing the reader about the history of the Kalevipoeg and its contents. The compact essay is characterised by a certain sympathy for the people in question, which culminates in the final sentence: “So, small Estonia can claim for itself the fame of obtaining a larger collection of folk poetry than any other people of the world” (Ernst 1938: 8).

After the Second World War, the reception of Estonian literature in the German language area was slightly distorted owing to the changed political circumstances. On the one hand, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union and seriously faced the threat of falling into complete oblivion. Germany herself was occupied, too, extensively destroyed and soon to be divided. On the other hand, once there were two German states, there were also two German literary fields, and the fact that Estonia was now de facto part of the Soviet Union made it possible for reception to take place from this angle. Additionally, an active exile community promulgated information about Estonia in general and Estonian literature in particular. The result was that a great deal was achieved in the four post-war decades (see Hasselblatt 2011: 157–290).

With respect to the Kalevipoeg, one could state that its presence continued the same way. It was only two years after the war when the German writer Wilhelm Lehmann published an essay on the Kalevipoeg (Lehmann 1962, originally 1947). Almost two-thirds of this essay forms a summary of the twenty tales, followed by some information on Kreutzwald and, finally, a quite poetic stream of associations. In contrast to Vielstedt, no argumentation or interpretation can be found; Lehmann just lets his thoughts and comments run, dropping here and there some quotations from the epic. An interesting detail is, by the way, that he used the first translation by Reinthal and Schultz-Bertram, not the more recent one by Löwe, which he presumably did not know, because he speaks indirectly about “the lucky ones who could get hold of this rare book” (Lehmann 1962: 24). He does not even want to judge the epic, which he felt is something for “philologists, historians and mythologists. Nor can we read his [Kreutzwald’s] work in Estonian. We read it in Poetic [which is, thus, used here like the name of a language, CH] and receive it as a whole. The events described are rhythmically preserved, syllable for syllable” (Lehmann 1962: 24). Of course, this sounds rather unctuous today, but the important thing here is that someone had discovered the epic and publicised his own thoughts. It is an individual act of reception which is not completely forgotten, noting especially that it has been reprinted twice.

The Kalevipoeg seems to have maintained a relatively constant presence in one way or another in the 1960s – with a virtual prelude in the 1950s: from the letters of Adolf Eduard Graf, a German translator of Russian and Estonian literature living in East Germany, we know that he tried to publish a prose version of the Kalevipoeg in the German Democratic Republic, but the publishers showed no interest (Graf in a letter to Endel Mallene, 25 July 1961, quoted in Teder 1981: 740). As this letter is the only scant information, it is impossible to say whether Graf himself had compiled a prose version or whether he had a translation in mind. Eno Raud’s version for youths was delivered to the printing office on 11 April 1961, according to the information that Soviet books provide (Raud 1961: [88]), and it cannot completely be ruled out that Graf had obtained a copy of the book already in the (early) summer of 1961. But for a proposal to an East German publisher and the rejection, certainly more time was necessary than a letter dated 25 July allows. The conclusion must therefore be that Graf himself had probably compiled something.

In West Germany, some Baltic Germans, former inhabitants of Estonia, showed a certain level of activity in the literary field. In 1964, Helen Gehnert published a small collection of fairy tales and legends with a separate section on the Kalevipoeg (Gehnert 1964: 152–81). What was new was the fact that she made her own translations using the 1961 critical edition of the epic. Although the circulation of this book would not have been very wide, this was another step in the proliferation of the epic material. Gehnert’s book had appeared at the publishing house of Harro von Hirschheydt, which specialised mainly in Baltic German, but to a minor degree also in Estonian and Latvian themes. Therefore it is no surprise that this publisher launched a reprint of Löwe’s translation in 1973, and in the same year also a reprint of a shortened version of the Kalevipoeg that was published in 1894 in Tallinn (see section 6.4, below). Later, the same publishing house also issued a new prose version (Balcke 1997, see section 6.5, below).

The final publication in this period was the often-mentioned youth version by Eno Raud, which appeared in German translation in 1988. It was classified for “readers older than ten”, but it is generally a good summary of the entire epic and also readable by adults.

Another realm of reception is the representation of the epic in literary handbooks and scholarly literature. In this field, the most important scholar dealing with matters Estonian in post-war Germany was Otto-Alexander Webermann. He was working in Germany as an Estonian researcher when the war broke out. In 1945, he was even mobilised into the German army and he decided to remain in West Germany after the war. There he published on various topics of Estonian literature and cultural history (see Hasselblatt 2011: 271–3). Regarding the Kalevipoeg, his most relevant and valuable article was his contribution to the epic conference in 1965 (Webermann 1968). Webermann also made the selection of names for the first edition of the famous Kindler Lexicon (KLL in the bibliography), but only Kreutzwald’s collection of fairy tales was included in the first edition, not the Kalevipoeg. When Renata Blodow, who wrote most of the entries, settled into the work, the project had already reached the letter L. She urged the publisher to include an entry on the Kalevipoeg in the supplement, but for some reason this was forgotten.7 So only the second (Blodow 1990) and third (Blodow & Hasselblatt 2009) editions of the Kindler Lexicon contain an article on the Kalevipoeg.

If a German handbook on world literature decided to include anything Estonian, most probably Kreutzwald was among the first names to be taken up. The exception confirming the rule is a Swiss handbook from 1948 (second edition 1954) where August Gailit is the only Estonian name found (Lavalette 1954: 435). All others, if not restricted to the twentieth century, have included Kreutzwald, and then generally with reference to his epic and his fairy tales. As one can expect, Kreutzwald and the Kalevipoeg are also represented in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens (Raudsep 1993, 1996).

Finally, the anthroposophical approach must also be mentioned. This is only seemingly surprising, for Rudolf Steiner was an admirer of the Kalevala and the Finnish epic has to date a kind of cult status among anthroposophists. So it was to be expected that sooner or later the Kalevipoeg would also be noticed. The first text in this field was probably the book by Friedrich Balcke (1997, see section 6.5, below). Two years later, an essay appeared in an anthroposophical yearbook (Purga 1999), and another two years later Ilse Schuckmann published her slightly amateurish description of the epic and its genesis. She had heard of the Kalevipoeg for the first time during a lecture in Hanover in 1997 – delivered by Sirje Purga, the author of the above-mentioned essay. Later she had travelled several times to Estonia. She even went to “the archive of the state library in Tallinn”, as she called it, and studied some old German documents on Kreutzwald and Faehlmann (Schuckmann 2001: 4–5). As a matter of fact, she only used some printed sources that she mentions on page 5, viz. Kreutzwald (1852), Blumberg (1904), Reiman’s preface to Löwe (1900) and KKK. In this sense, nothing new is given here, and there are even some mistakes (e.g. the birthday of Faehlmann is incorrect), but it is an interesting act of reception nevertheless.

A new German edition

Although the Löwe translation was reprinted twice – in 1973 as mentioned above by Hirschheydt’s in Germany, and in 1996 in Tallinn – the text was not generally available when Estonia re-entered the Western European consciousness around the turn of the millennium.

In this situation the German psychiatrist Peter Petersen took the initiative for a new edition. He had got in touch with Estonia in the framework of professional co-operation and heard and read about the epic. He had read the Löwe translation and was fascinated by the text. He even discovered new facets and interpretations of it. He eventually became annoyed that there was no good edition available and therefore he made plans and sought funding for a new edition. Petersen never made efforts to organise a new translation – probably for lack of time and money. But even the organisation of a new edition of the Löwe translation at a new German publishing house required sufficient time and money. One thing was sure: the text had to be retyped completely, because the younger generation would not read the Fraktur in which it was printed in 1900 and later reprinted. An interesting side effect of this was, by the way, that also those foreigners who knew (some) German but were not familiar with the Gothic script gained easier access to the text. Originally a new commentary was planned, but even this plan turned out to be too ambitious. Finally Petersen restricted himself to the plain text of the epic, and omitted the outdated commentary of Reiman, but added a number of modern essays he had ordered from (mostly) Estonian scholars. In 2004, a fine hardcover edition appeared with a Stuttgart publishing house (Petersen 2004), which included five essays and a preface by the most famous Estonian writer at that time, Jaan Kross.

This new edition had several advantages. First of all, the visibility and availability on the German market was a positive sign of reception. Secondly, the access to the text was improved through the different essays by the Estonian scholars Peeter Järvelaid, Ülo Valk and Rein Veidemann, including the new psychological interpretation by the editor himself. Petersen stressed, among other things, that the most peculiar thing is that the hero (the good) does not kill the devil (the evil) but “only” fetters it. This was noticed by others, too – cf. the observation by Lepasaar Beecher (2001: 67): “The language of ‘fettering’ or ‘shackling’ is a persistent motif throughout Kalevipoeg”. Petersen, however, gives this motif a deeper and more psychological interpretation. The third positive effect of this edition was that Petersen did not want to follow Löwe in his omission of the Raudoja passage in the fifteenth tale (see chapter 4, above). He wanted a complete and unabridged version and therefore added the Reinthal translation of the verses omitted by Löwe. He even took over the Latin verses but added a German translation – not of the Latin verses, of course, but of the original Estonian, which was provided by the author of the present book.

With the inclusion of the previously omitted passages, the Petersen edition could be called the first full German translation of Kreutzwald’s epic, were it not that Petersen did follow Löwe in omitting the “barrage of peas” episode in the eleventh tale (see above). And there is another aspect in which this book falls back into the tradition of the nineteenth century: following the translation/edition of Löwe had the consequence of publishing the epic as an anonymous work – and that is exactly what happened. On the frontispiece only the names of the translator and the editor are printed; Kreutzwald’s name can only be found on the blurb on the back and, of course, in the prefaces by Kross and Petersen and in the essays at the end of the book. Nevertheless, one buyer of the book bitterly complained in an online review that this is “literary deception” and that they would not have bought the book, if they had been clear that this is not an authentic ancient epic but a relatively modern work of art.8 And one cannot help feeling that the reviewer is right: actually, there was no reason to repeat the nineteenth century’s practice in the twenty-first century, and the name of the author should have been given on the cover. Whether this was done deliberately or accidentally, it says something about the epic and its status. Another reviewer criticised the publisher’s announcement of the book as “European folklore”, but otherwise enthusiastically welcomed the new edition of the epic which can still help us “to understand the literature and the soul of the Estonians” (Wilms 2004: 95).

The fate of the Estonian national epic in the era of digitisation and the internet remains to be seen. It cannot be ruled out that the effects of the new technological possibilities are positive rather than negative: in 2012, a print-on-demand edition of the German edition of the Reinthal-Schultz translation, originally issued in 1861, was detected and ordered. It ran under the label Nabu Public Domain Reprints and was shipped (to the Netherlands) from the United Kingdom. It is, as expected, a facsimile, but the frontispiece and the cover with a photograph or fantasy picture of a ruined castle on a green hill received a new printed title which is defective in a funny way: “Kalewipoeg: Eine Estnische Sage, Zusammengestellt”, and then in the next line, “Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald”. This is no German, nor would it be English to say: “Kalewipoeg: An Estonian Tale, Compiled”. It seems questionable whether a human hand, let alone mind, was involved in the production of this book, but on the other hand someone must have looked up the full given names of Kreutzwald because inside only “F. R. Kreutzwald” was printed. Be that as it may, this is reception, too, and in this sense it is exciting to see how the reception of the Kalevipoeg is continuing into the future.

1  In the preface Kreutzwald had announced that original pieces of folk poetry would be marked with an asterisk, CH.

2  In the preface, Kreutzwald had stressed the authenticity of the text and distanced himself from a Macpherson-like pack of lies, CH.

3  An obvious editorial error can be observed in that pages 617–20 of the 22nd volume of the Archiv partly have the same contents as pages 590–4, although in another translation.

4  In 1819, Rudolph von Schröter edited a German translation of Finnish runo songs which was important for the foreign reception of Finnish folklore; a second edition followed in 1834.

5  Carrière obviously presumed the existence of a Balto-Slavic unit, and he therefore puts Latvian and Slavic together.

6  A term for a number of laws against indecency from the last decade of the nineteenth century in Germany, named after a sensational case in Berlin in 1891 against a certain couple named Heinze.

7  Letter from Renata Blodow to the author, 5 December 2004.

8  http://www.amazon.de/product-reviews/3932386744/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, viewed 26 June 2014.

6. German Rewritings of the Kalevipoeg

The advantage of the disadvantage

Translation is not the only way of spreading information about a (piece of) foreign literature, nor the only method of reception. It is also possible, on the basis of an existing translation, for new texts in the same language to be generated. This is exactly what happened with the Kalevipoeg. I would call these versions “rewritings” because the authors of the texts treated in this chapter wrote a new text rather than translating the original epic – mainly for the simple reason that they did not know Estonian.

Here one interesting factor comes into the picture, namely the phenomenon I earlier called the “advantage of the disadvantage” (section 2.3). Throughout this book, mention has been made of the Finnish Kalevala; I even put the Finnish epic into the position of an obstetrician for the Kalevipoeg (section 2.2). Indeed, the Finnish epic was a model and example for the Estonians who admired and maybe even envied the Finns in many respects: the Finns’ social and political circumstances and their literary development were much more favourable than those of the Estonians. Serfdom was unknown to Finns and their political autonomy within the tsarist empire had led to a level of emancipation and general state of development – also with respect to the Finnish language – which made it possible and even logical for Elias Lönnrot to publish his epic in Finnish only. When the first edition of the Kalevala was published in 1835, no parallel text in any other language was given. Foreigners who could not read Finnish had to wait for the translations into Swedish (1841), French (1845) or German (1852).

The fact that Estonia had not yet reached emancipation led to the bilingual edition, as described in chapter 2, and this disadvantage turned into an advantage with respect to foreign reception. German was one of the world languages at that time and the publication within a scientific series guaranteed dissemination in Europe. Everyone able to read German could immediately take notice of the Estonian epic. The fact that the Kalevipoeg came roughly one generation later than the Kalevala no longer mattered because the reception started without delay. Thus the difference of twenty-odd years between the publications of the epics of these sibling languages was levelled. On the other hand, the Kalevala of course partly paved the way for the reception of the Kalevipoeg: when it was published, people interested in epics and the north-east of Europe had already heard something about the Kalevala and were immediately ready to dedicate themselves to the next long text from a distant country. And this happened faster than in Estonia itself: note that in the first decades after the publication of the epic, the foreign reception of the Kalevipoeg was more vital and significant than that in Estonia. Here, it took another generation before the epic really arrived in society. But the field was prepared in Central Europe and scholars, writers and even amateurs jumped at the Estonian epic.

We shall here address four German texts written on the basis of the Kalevipoeg: those by Israël (1873) and Grosse (1875), an anonymous prose Kalevipoeg for children (1894), and that by Balcke (1997). Each of these works treats the text in a different way and each probably had a different target audience – but they are united by the fact that the text of Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg was perceived as authentic and “really” folkloric and therefore an adaptation and revision of the material was regarded as possible.

Israël’s book from 1873

The author of the first book considered here was a certain C. Chr. Israël. He had spent the “most beautiful years of his life in Livonia”, as he tells the reader in the preface (Israël 1873: vi), but I was unable to find any further traces of this man except for his book from 1873. Even his full first names – probably Conrad Christian – are uncertain as they were found only in one library catalogue, and then in the form “Christian Konrad”, which does not correspond to the abbreviations printed in the book and cited above. The Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie lists only one given name, Christian.1 The title page attributes to him the title “Reallehrer und past. extr. ord. zu Hanau”, which informs us that he was a teacher and a priest without employment living in Hanau, a small town some 25 km east of Frankfurt am Main. The handsome booklet – it measures 10 by 14 cm and has fewer than 100 pages – was produced by a publisher in Frankfurt. It is a nice example of foreign reception because it directly shows the potential of the text. What Israël did in his Kalewipoeg oder die Abenteuer des Kalewiden (“Kalevipoeg or the Adventures of the Kalevides”) was to retell the story in his own words. He did not pretend to present a translation – about which he was at least honest, as the subtitle informs us: Eine estnische Sage, frei nach dem Estnischen bearbeitet (“An Estonian tale, freely revised on the basis of the Estonian version”). Schott’s assumption (made in a letter to Kreutzwald, see Walravens 2010/2011: 53; Lepik 1961: 346) that Israël did not speak or read Estonian was probably correct, so it would be more correct to have said: “on the basis of the German version”.

What is meant by “revision” can be seen in the introduction, where the author frankly admits

I do not think that Kreutzwald really matched the original form of the song. The poetic power of the individual parts should have resulted in an artistic unity . . . Therefore I rearranged the material . . . I am far from thinking that I have repaired the original song completely, but I do think that I have come a little nearer to it and that I have shown the way towards a new poetic treatment. (Israël 1873: IV–V)

This passage reveals and explains everything: Israël thought – as did Kreutzwald when presenting his first draft to the Estonian Learned Society in 1853 (Kreutzwald 1963: 9) – that there had been an initial and unspoiled version which one could try to reconstruct. This reconstruction meant rearrangement and, interestingly, a conversion from poetry to prose. Although this last step was in one sense correct as the original tales about Kalevipoeg were in prose, it is nevertheless astonishing because Israël speaks on the other hand about an original song. But this obviously did not imply the narrow meaning of poetic form but the general, more folkloric meaning of traditional lore handed down from generation to generation. And if this was the case, as Israël assumed, then one was dealing with authentic folklore material and could work with it, revise it, change and rearrange it. In the view of Israël, Kreutzwald was just one person who did something with the material, and he, Israël, was the next one.

Israël retold the main events of the epic in prose form, reducing the 19,000-odd lines to fewer than ninety small pages. He also rearranged the material and put it together in fourteen new numbered chapters, each designated an “adventure” (German “Abenteuer”) instead of a “tale” or “song” or “canto”, as was customary. Each of the chapters received a title, too, starting with “The robbery of the mother” (first adventure) via “The magic sleep” (tenth adventure) and ending with “The Kalevide’s grief and his death” (fourteenth adventure). At the end, nine pages with explanatory comments are added. Two examples from these comments will suffice to illustrate the principles of Israël’s work as a compiler.

In a comment on the passage where Kalevipoeg visits the grave of his father to ask him for advice – originally in the third tale, here at the end of the “first adventure” – Israël states: “Instead of the rather weary, leisurely and emotional conversation of the Kalevide with his dead father presented in the original song, I have here tried to replicate a real death incantation (which the original song must have had) of the Edda, with which there are anyway many correspondences” (Israël 1873: 89, note 6). One can ask here: why should an Estonian hero act or lament in the same manner as his Germanic fellow heroes at the other end of Northern Europe?

The second comment concerns the entrance to the underworld in the “twelfth adventure”, explained in the following note: “I felt obliged to put the entry into the underworld on the Isle of Sparks at the end of the world, so that the whole voyage would not be a waste of time as it is in Kreutzwald’s version. This seems no act of violence to me inasmuch as also Ulysses found the realm of shadows only behind the Okeanos and because the tale itself seems to point to Iceland’ (Israël 1873: 96, note 30). Again, there is no logic which would force us to believe that the Estonian hero should act in the same way (and be located at the same place) as some fellow Greek hero does on the other side of Eastern Europe. Why should he?

We could simply dismiss these decisions as a kind of narrow-mindedness of the nineteenth-century educated or pseudo-educated class, whose horizons ended at Latin and Greek antiquity. But this would be the wrong conclusion: it was just this class whence came the interest in cultures other than those already very well known. They had read their Edda, their Nibelungenlied and their Odyssey – and they wanted more. That is why they were so curious about Kreutzwald’s work and that is why they worked on it. From the viewpoint of reception it does not matter whether we read original folklore or Kreutzwald or Israël. What was conveyed was interpreted as essentially Estonian tradition, and that is all that matters.

A further interesting and important aspect is that Israël surely felt sympathy for the Estonians. This can be seen in a note on the “iron men” who appear at the end of the epic. Israël explains to his readers: “These must be the German knights (Brothers of the Sword) who came in the eleventh century via the sea to subjugate Estonia” (Israël 1873: 96, note 32). In the usual German historiographic terminology of that time, but partly even still today, the events described here (which actually took place in the thirteenth, not in the eleventh century) were never called subjugation, the usual term being “incorporation into the Western world”, “Christianisation” or the like. Calling it “subjugation” meant solidarity with the Estonians and their romantic view of their own history in the last third of the nineteenth century during the period of emancipation.

Another indication of Israël’s endeavours to concentrate on the Estonian original might be seen in the word “Hüglamaid” (Israël 1873: 69 and 95) for the giant’s daughter in the sixteenth tale instead of the correct “Hiiglamaid”. In the Estonian original, we see the form “Hiigla tüttar” (XVI, 857), which was – partly untranslated – rendered as “Higlamaid” (“Higla-maiden”) in the German parallel-text version by Kreutzwald and Schultz-Bertram. Probably Kreutzwald was aware of the German inability to identify two juxtaposed letter i’s as two i’s instead of one letter ü. That is why he chose the form “Higlamaid” with only one i. If Israël had only looked at the German version, he would no doubt have seen the form with one i. But obviously he also had a glance at the Estonian original where he saw the form with the double i and what is even more important, he also must have identified it as two letters because the next word “tüttar” contains the letter ü which is clearly different here. So in order to make his work more original, more Estonian, he took the original Estonian word and created the new hybrid word “Hiiglamaid” in his text (with an explanation in the annotation at the end, p. 95). But when he delivered a handwritten manuscript, I presume, the printer could not identify the juxtaposed i’s as such and created the neologism “Hüglamaid” which started to take on a life of its own (see below). This mistake, consequently, is not Israël’s but one made in the printing office.

It is questionable to what extent Israël really contributed to the reception of the Estonian epic in Germany. Today this book is to be found in few German libraries.2 But it was certainly read by those interested in Estonian folklore, as can be seen from quotations even from abroad (see Pavolini 1902: 4; note also that the Danish prose version is based on Israël’s book only: see Rasmussen 1878). The book reached the relevant bibliographies, and it made its way to Estonia, of course. So we find it, for instance, in the library of the famous protagonist of Estonian emancipation, Carl Robert Jakobson (Kahu 1966: 418).

In Germany, there was at least one short review, or rather a note of twenty-four lines, in the Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes, probably written by Schott. He recognised that Israël’s arrangement of the epic material was quite free, but finally he admits that Israël has “put the essence of the national epic into naïve fairy-tale prose, which is pleasant reading” (Schott 1873: 154).

Grosse’s book from 1875

Even more extreme was the treatment by Julius Grosse, which appeared two years later. Grosse was a German poet who lived from 1828 until 1902 and is more or less forgotten today. His Die Abenteuer des Kalewiden (“Adventures of the Kalevide”, 1875) is explicitly based on Israël’s prose version, although the author was also familiar with Kreutzwald’s version. But in his view, this had “an inorganic structure. All of Kreutzwald’s energy went into putting the existing fragments together and into filling in the gaps with his own fancy or retelling only formally. This might be captivating, graceful and plastic in points of detail, but he did not succeed in constructing an inner cohesion between the parts and in creating an organic work of art” (Grosse 1875: ix). Therefore Grosse took Israël as his first source, which he explains in his preface: “I have more or less followed the new arrangement of the material as Israël has done it, well, my first and foremost job was to retranslate his book into poetic diction and to epically expand his concise prose text” (Grosse 1875: xv–xvi).

Grosse arranged the entire material into an introduction and nine “songs” of different length, ranging from 268 to 528 lines, giving a total of 3,612 lines. The form Grosse decided to apply was a courageous amalgamation of Estonian and German style: he took the trochaid tetrameter from the Estonian folk poetry, put two lines together into a sixteen-syllable line – which is not that absurd but still conceivable – and provided it with conventional German end rhyme. This mixture made Grosse’s text quite odd, as can be seen from the following rhymes (which I will not try to translate into English but rather comment on in some detail; all page numbers according to Grosse 1875):

Einen grauen Ackerschimmel, riesenhaft mit goldnen Mähnen,

Wie ihn Wierland nie gesehn hat, oder je das Land der Dänen. (p. 74)

The rhyme mane ~ Dane, which is the same in English, is quite ridiculous and artificial because there is no reason whatsoever to make mention of the Danes here.

Unterdessen schweift’ das Werkroß auf den grünen Wiesenbreiten,

Graste frei im guten Kleefeld, doch es kam ein Rudel Wölfe,

Graue Bären aus dem Dickicht, sechs zuerst und später zwölfe – (p. 81)

The rhyme wolves ~ twelve with the colloquial or archaic form zwölfe for normally zwölf is probably unique in German poetry.

Dann bestieg’s der Kalewide, und mit ihm die Schlachtenlöwen,

Alew auch und Sulew folgten, in den Lüften grüßten Möven. (p. 166)

“Schlachtenlöwen” (“battle lions”) might be acceptable as a metaphor for “warrior” or something of the sort, but then to introduce, out of the blue, gulls (“Möven”) for the sake of the rhyme is, again, quite artificial and forced. In the entire epic no gull is mentioned, although the bird is, of course, endemic to Estonia. The lion, by the way, though not endemic to Estonia, is mentioned twice, and then in a metaphorical meaning (XIII, 483, and XIV, 666).

Reihenweis die Leichen lagen, die Erschlagnen haufenweise,

Männer in der Lebensblüthe – bei den Jungen lagen Greise,

Wohl zehntausend von den Feinden lagen kalt in Assamalla,

Harrend auf die Lichtwalkyren, die sie führen nach Walhalla. (p. 207)

This last pairing, the rhyme “Assamalla” ~ “Valhalla” may be the most fascinating: Assamalla (XVII, 196) is a well-known place on the mental map of every Estonian as it was the place of one of the final battles of the hero against the foreign conquerors. Kalevipoeg succeeded there in repulsing the enemies, but he also loses his horse. The place, in reality to the south of Rakvere in northern Estonia, is a sort of mental meeting point of the collective memory of Estonians. To associate this with some classical place from Norse mythology, Valhalla, just to take the opportunity for making a rhyme, seems astonishing at first sight. On the other hand, the slain enemies are those who are waiting for Valhalla, not the Estonians. And the enemies did come from abroad, probably from Germany or at least from some Germanic area. Therefore their destiny really might be named Valhalla. Generally, however, we have – again – to admit that this is once more the transport of Estonian material into a German(ic) context. And import more than export here, which is a crucial detail with respect to reception. Today these texts are more or less forgotten. But from the viewpoint of the foreign reception of Estonian culture, they obviously fulfilled a certain role and functioned – for a limited period – as ambassadors of Estonian literary culture. The real and complete translations followed later and they have received their rightful places on the bookshelves, but for the time being, these literary surrogates had to help out. This might by characteristic for small cultures that have been discovered by Europeans relatively late.

Like Israël’s book, Grosse’s work has probably not received very much attention.3 But, like Israël’s book, some foreign scholars quoted it (see Pavolini 1902: 4 or Hauser 1910: 466, where it is called a German translation of the epic). Again, it was rather within an Estonian context that the work was mentioned. Kreutzwald seems to have known it, as one can conclude from a letter that Schott wrote to him in February 1875 (Walravens 2010/2011: 63; Lepik 1961: 357). Obviously Kreutzwald was not too positive about it, as Schott promised that he would vehemently defend Kreutzwald in the event of the Magazin asking him to write a review of Grosse. Apparently no such request was made and no review of Grosse’s work has been found.

In Estonia, the book was noticed, as one can see from various sources and bibliographies. This is understandable, for it is always interesting to read what others think and write about you. And if those foreign ideas even fit into one’s own argumentation it is even better: at all times and in all cultures, it seems that a foreigner’s view by definition adds value to your own argumentation. That is why Mihkel Kampmann, when criticising the Kalevipoeg, made reference to Israël and Grosse rather than to Estonian criticism (Kampmann 1933: 51). Friedebert Tuglas also quoted Grosse (1875: X) for his comparison of Hercules with Kalevipoeg, although numerous others had earlier made this obvious comparison.4 But, once again, it was “sexier” to quote a foreigner. Like the Estonian journalist Anton Jürgenstein (1907: 475) in an essay for a German journal, Tuglas too characterised Grosse’s book as a “German edition” of the Kalevipoeg (Mihkelson 1908: 391). Jaan Undusk did the same in his essay on Tuglas, calling Grosse’s book a “German translation of the epic” (Undusk 1990: 588). All these authors overlooked the fact that Grosse’s work was an adaptation, an imitation only.

A shortened prose version for children, 1894

Another interesting case is a shortened prose version published in 1894 in Tallinn, of which the author is unknown (Kalevipoeg 1894). This so-called children’s version is a small booklet of sixty-four pages that, according to the subtitle, is intended for those aged between eight and twelve years. What makes it interesting is the fact that the text is clearly based on Israël (1873) and not on the original version. This can be seen from the order of the material as well as from the chapter titles, which in some cases are literally taken from Israël, e.g. “Robbery of the mother” or “The magic sleep”. And even a mistake from Israël was copied, when on Kalevipoeg’s voyage to the end of the world suddenly a “Hüglamaid” is mentioned (Kalevipoeg 1894: 47) – which is the final proof of Israël (1873) as the source for this book, because he was the inadvertent inventor of this term, as discussed above. But when Israël at least explains in an annotation who this Hiigla/Hüglamaid is, the readers of this edition are kept in ignorance and have to accept the term as some exotic being. It is astonishing that German circles in Estonia took an adaptation from Germany as a basis for their own adaptation instead of making use of their local sources – there was plenty of material on the Kalevipoeg available in Tallinn at the end of the nineteenth century. With the detour to Germany they brought new mistakes into the text.

Another anthroposophical voice

The final text deserving attention in this chapter is more than a century younger than those previously treated. It was published at the end of the twentieth century and belongs to a completely different context (Balcke 1997). Its author, Friedrich Balcke, is not known in the German literary arena, but is a school teacher connected with anthroposophical circles.5 This might be the reason why he became interested in and was fascinated by the Kalevipoeg (see section 5.5). His retelling of the epic in prose form is apparently based on Löwe’s translation, and there is in principle nothing wrong with it. Why not give a concise prose account of an otherwise 19,033-line-long verse epic? Actually Eno Raud did the same with his prose version and a number of other prose versions had been published, too. There are, however, several elements which put Balcke’s attempt into the layman’s corner.

First of all, the language is not convincing: it is partly sloppy, partly artificially pretentious and thus simply weak. This can be illustrated by the very first sentence of the book, which runs: “Schwebte in Machtfülle über allem Taora als höchster Gott” (“Floated, in full power above all, Taora as highest God”; Balcke 1997: 3). This is syntactically simply impossible or at least extremely odd or artificially poetic – there are no sentences with an initial verb in normal German syntax. The next element, the prepositional phrase “in Machtfülle”, is also rather strange because it is, again, artificially poetic, meaning obviously just “mighty” or something of the like. Then follows “Taora”, which is an accidental or deliberate mistake – the correct form would be Taara – and which means nothing to the German reader. Moreover, the vowel combination “ao” is quite rare in German, thus creating something exotic. With this initial sentence, Balcke wanted to guide the reader into the realm of mythology, but one fears that the only result will be the reader shaking her or his head.

Secondly, there is no information about the country, the history or the background. The book has no introduction, no preface, no further information about the author Kreutzwald, no mention of Estonia (only in the second paragraph of the first chapter), no indication of some perhaps previously published work with the same title, no annotation, explanation, comment or whatever. This too makes it difficult for the reader to contextualise the work.

In addition, the book is far from being technically perfect, let alone convincing. On the cover, we read Kalewipoeg, but throughout the book we find only Kalevipoeg, i.e. the current spelling. There is no source where we find Kreutzwald’s given names written with a hyphen, but here we read “F.-R. Kreutzwald”. There is an abundance of typos, and there is even a cryptic passage with a question mark (p. 40), as though Balcke had taken his material from an obscure and complicated manuscript which was difficult to decipher.

All in all, this amateur’s account of Kreutzwald’s epic will not have reached very many readers, let alone newspapers or literary magazines, as it was published in a small publishing house specialising in reprints. But it has, at least, an ISBN number and of course forms part of the corpus of German rewritings of Kreutzwald’s epic. That is how I wished to conclude this critical account. However, a sad postscript has to be added: the existence of an ISBN does not mean very much in itself. The number is listed as “3 7777 0007 X” but when I – just for fun – checked it, I discovered that this ISBN was given twice by the publisher: a reprint of a completely different book from the next year has the same number. So the basic purpose of an ISBN, namely the unique identification of a printed work, is not given here.

1  http://www.deutsche-biographie.de.

2  A search in the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (13 November 2014) rendered five copies in the libraries of Berlin, Göttingen, Frankfurt am Main, Kiel and Munich.

3  A search in the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (13 November 2014) rendered, however, over ten copies, viz. in the libraries of Augsburg, Berlin, Gießen, Göttingen, Halle, Hamburg, Marburg, München, Schwerin, Weimar, and Wiesbaden.

4  Cf. Schultz-Bertram in his speech for the Learned Estonian Society from 1839, quoted in Laugaste/Normann 1959: 98, cf. also Büchner 1865.

5  Information by e-mail from Hirschheydt-Verlag, 15 July 2010.

7. From Folklore to Literature. Folkloristic Metamorphosis in the Foreign Reception of the Kalevipoeg

Translations into other languages

Despite the “advantage of the disadvantage” (see section 6.1) and the levelling of the distance to Finland in terms of cultural history, the Kalevipoeg has been translated into other languages far less often than the Kalevala. Of the latter, translations into approximately sixty languages are known (Piela et al. 2008: 536–41), whilst there are only roughly a dozen of translations of the entire Kalevipoeg into foreign languages. (For an initial overview, see Ariste 1957; more recent material can be found in the relevant bibliographies mentioned at the beginning.)

The first full published translation into a language other than German, albeit in prose, was in Russian (Truusmann 1886–9), followed by numerous later editions, including new translations, also in verse, in that language. The next to come was the English prose version by Kirby (1895) and then the translations into Latvian (Zālīte 1929) and Hungarian (Bán 1929). Hungarian is – with German, Russian and English – one of the four languages with more than one complete translation, as in 1985 a new translation of the entire epic was published (Rab 1985). Then followed translations into Czech (Lukáš 1959), Lithuanian (Marcinkevičius 1963), Romanian (Calaïs 1978), English (Kurman 1982, and Kartus 2011), Ukrainian (Räppo 1981), Swedish (Milits 1999), French (Chalvin 2004), Finnish (Kettunen 2005), Hindi (Khare 2012) and finally a Spanish version based on Kirby 1895 (González Campo 2015) – which makes a total of fourteen translations of the entire epic.

There have been several shortened versions or rewritten prose accounts, some of them quite early, such as those in Danish (1878 – which is actually a translation of Israël 1873), Swedish (1884) or Finnish (1884). With respect to Finnish it is interesting that it took some time before the first full translation appeared, as the first publication was based on a shortened Estonian version (Winter 1957, see above 3.2.1). Later, the linguist Heikki Ojansuu promised to provide a complete Finnish translation (see Ojansuu 1911); however, he did not succeed in completing it and published only some samples in the journal Virittäjä in 1911 (Annist 1958: 305).

In 1922, some parts were published in Yiddish, printed in Kiev and based on the German version by Reinthal-Schultz (see Berg 1926), and a shortened French prose version (1930) served for an Italian version (1931). Some samples have also been published in Polish (1937), Slovak (1956) and Esperanto (1975).

But to be honest, this is not very impressive if we compare it to the success of the Finnish epic. The Kalevala definitely forms an element of world literature and has reached the consciousness of very broad circles interested in literature, and that is still not the case with the Kalevipoeg. An indication is also given by the numbers of Wikipedia languages in which the respective epics are discussed: at the time of preparing this book, the Kalevala has Wikipedia entries in sixty-one languages, the Kalevipoeg in thirty-one, i.e. almost exactly half as many (checked 24 March 2015). But on the other hand, this present book may show the potential of the Estonian Kalevipoeg. The potential is still developing and sometimes yields surprising results, as we can see in the following section.

The principle of self-correction

We have seen in the previous chapters that the Kalevipoeg as it was written by Kreutzwald has mostly been – and has had to be – characterised as a work of literary art rather than a piece of “authentic” folklore. But we have also seen that the sharp dichotomy between folklore and literature, between authentic and fictional cannot be maintained. This is also stressed in a recent essay by Valdimar Hafstein, where he challenges this dichotomy. He argues that most of the texts around us arise from creative processes “that are collaborative, incremental, and distributed in space and time” (Hafstein 2014: 36). In his concept of “creative agency”, “the author and the folk [are] peripheral concepts, [. . .] exceptions rather than norms, [. . .] labels on either end of the spectrum, with most texts falling not at either end but somewhere in between” (Hafstein 2014: 37). From this it follows that this “in between” is more important than the periphery. Hafstein labels this central area the domain of the “collector-editor”. This concept, however, is not – or at least does not sound – completely new. This was exactly how Kreutzwald characterised his own position one and a half centuries ago in the preface to the first edition (Kreutzwald 1857: xv–xvi, using the words “Herausgeber” (editor) and “Zusammenstellung” (compilation)).

Keeping this in mind I would like to demonstrate the oscillation between the two genres in the foreign reception of the epic: sometimes it is regarded as a work of art from the nineteenth century, sometimes as folkloric material from ancient times; and sometimes a strange mixture of both can be detected, as will be discussed here. Again, I would like to stress that my point is not to mark out the boundary between folklore and literature, which seems to me an impossible task, and for the problem in hand unnecessary. (Cf., however, the interesting contribution to this discussion in Kuismin & Driscoll 2013, where emerging literacy and the transition from oral to written traditions in the Nordic Countries are treated.) On the contrary, the following section will try to find evidence and support for Hafstein’s point.

The traditional view of the Kalevipoeg would state that the point of departure is (or was) folklore material – which varies by definition (see Honko 2013: 36). Then, the printed version is a literary text, which seems to be fixed and stable. When this text is received or translated into another language, we deal with the reception of literature, not folklore. However, the interesting thing is that, in this process of reception, sometimes traces of folkloristic mechanisms resembling the passing down from generation to generation can be observed. In other words, what seemed to be characteristic of folklore – variation – may also be a feature of written literature.

This convergence, however, is in fact less surprising than it sounds, for the characteristic feature of written texts – stability – also holds for folklore, as has been shown by Walter Anderson and his “Law of self-correction”. This theory was developed as early as 1923 in order to explain the fact that folkloric material passed down from generation to generation does not change in such a considerable way that the latest version shows no elements of the original once told centuries ago. Anderson’s formulation of the theory can be considered an ideal model, which appears in some respects naïve owing to its formulation nearly a century ago, while Anderson’s “experiments” for testing it were methodologically problematic. This has been convincingly shown by Dégh and Vázsonyi (1975, cf. also Frog 2013). However, the point here is not to reconstruct any Urform, as this is given in the printed text, but to show a typological convergence between folklore transmission principles and forms of literary reception. Therefore, I believe it is wrong to label Anderson’s theory as generally outdated in some of its basic principles.1 It is surely still plausible with respect to certain questions (see also Seljamaa 2007, Chesnutt 1996, Laugaste 1964, and Webermann 1963). For the phenomenon treated here it may at least serve as a framework for illustration.

The following scheme has been developed to illustrate the mechanisms of oral tradition (see Anderson 1923: 397–403, generally for the method also Krohn 1926). Each upper-case letter represents a generation and the arrow indicates the direction from narrator to listener. A double slash means a time difference between two (or more) presentations by the same individual (generation), indicated by an apostrophe:

A → {B1, B2, B3. . . Bn} // A’ (= new presentation by A) → {B1, B2, B3. . . Bn} // A’’ → {B1, B2, B3. . . Bn} . . .

B1 → {C1, C2, C3. . . Cn} // B1’ → {C1, C2, C3. . . Cn} // B1’’ → {C1, C2, C3. . . Cn} . . .

B2 → {C1, C2, C3. . . Cn} // B2’ → {C1, C2, C3. . . Cn} // B2’’ → {C1, C2, C3. . . Cn} . . .

B3 → {C1, C2, C3. . . Cn} // B3’ → {C1, C2, C3. . . Cn} // B3’’ → {C1, C2, C3. . . Cn} . . .

This has to be read as follows: A is the “original”, the first narrator who delivers the material to a number of listeners, indicated as B1, B2 etc. The narrator repeats the performance several times, here indicated as A’ and A’’, respectively. When, in the next generation, the former listeners change into narrators themselves, the multiplication starts. Now, B1 is a narrator, and several Cs are his audience. The same Cs, however, also listen to another B, here indicated as B2. And so forth. This mechanism of multiple narrating or repeated performances and multiple listening automatically leads to constant comparison of the various versions. The consequence is regular self-correction, which leads to the preservation of the core elements. The result is a certain stability which schematically can be displayed as follows:

N ≈ A

N is the version we see (hear) today and thanks to the principle of self-correction we assume that it resembles the original, A, to a considerable extent. This is the main point of Anderson’s “Law of self-correction”. Without the multiple narrating and listening, the result would be different and resemble the game of “Chinese whispers” (or “Russian scandal”, etc.), where the final result is something completely different:

A → B → C → D → E → F → . . . → N: N ≠ A

The transfer to literary reception

The following step is an attempt to transfer this principle to the world of written and printed texts. This sounds completely arbitrary at first sight – why should the same principle work in decidedly different circumstances? As we have seen in the previous chapters and as intertextual experience teaches us, authors also “listen” to various “narrators”, i.e. provide themselves with material from different sources. With respect to the Kalevipoeg, it is interesting to see that many of the early reception products contained a summary of the contents of the epic. In other words, they all displayed their own summary with their own emphases and omissions. This shows a clear parallel with oral transmission. The variation, however, takes place between genres and between languages. That is why I have tentatively called it metamorphosis. Nonetheless, my hypothesis is that the result is the same: a topic (theme) is preserved more than it is distorted.

As shown above (section 5.2) one of the first prose accounts of Kreutzwald’s text was the treatise by Wilhelm Schott (1863). A third of this text formed a summary of the epic. As it was written in a world language of that time, the treatise could moreover simply be used as a source of information about the epic. It does not matter that the original edition was already bilingual, for it is certainly easier to read a twenty-five-page summary than all 19,000 lines. Secondly, Schott’s paper was published in an internationally acknowledged periodical. The proceedings of the Berlin Academy certainly had a larger circulation than those of the Learned Estonian Society.

Some years later, a French treatise was published (Büchner 1865), which was largely based on Schott. Von Tettau (1873) and Comparetti (1892) also used Schott (1863). Likewise the prose rearrangement by Israël (1873) was based on Schott, whilst the rhymed version by Grosse (1875) was for its part based on Israël. Still, the material reached the English-speaking world before the end of the century through the publication of William Forsell Kirby’s two volumes on Estonian folklore (Kirby 1895). With this, the three major languages of Western Europe had their own treatment of the Estonian epic.

In the case of Kirby, it is important to keep in mind that his work is obviously based primarily on German sources. That is what Pille Kippar (1968: 713) assumes, and Kurman (1983: 62) also states that Kirby is mostly based on German language sources. Kirby himself, on the contrary, states in his bibliography (Kirby 1895, II: 301) that he used above all the 1862 edition and not the bilingual first edition of the Kalevipoeg. We know that Kirby knew Finnish and to some extent he will also have known Estonian, but it is obvious that, in his comprehensive account of Estonian folklore, he relied heavily on German sources.

We thus have a considerable number of texts on the ancient hero Kalevipoeg already in the nineteenth century alone. This makes it interesting to apply Anderson’s scheme to these texts, or at least to take principles from his scheme and try to transfer them to our situation. The notion of “generation”, however, has to be somewhat reinterpreted, as the time difference between Kreutzwald’s publication and the following texts is smaller than normally exists between two generations. Moreover, different “generations” remain “contemporaries”, as earlier publications do not vanish but remain available. Therefore the term “redaction” instead of “generation” might be more appropriate. In this sense, any translation is also a new generation/redaction if one regards a translation as a “reformulation of the message”, as a modern definition of translation runs (by Justa Holz-Mänttäri, quoted in Vermeer 1994: 36).

Be this as it may, the original, in this case the text by Kreutzwald, can be called generation/redaction A, and all following texts are indicated with a B. This leads to the following scheme:

A = Kreutzwald 1857–61

B1 = Schott 1862

B2 = Büchner 1865

B3 = Israël 1873

B4 = Grosse 1875

B5 = Kirby 1895

Transferred into an Anderson-like scheme one could say:

A → {B1, B2, B3, B4, B5}

which indicates that all the Bs are influenced by A. But this is not all; we also get the following picture:

B1 → {B2, B3, B4, B5}

which means that Schott (B1) has influenced all the following ones because Büchner (B2) has read Schott (B1) and so have Israël (B3), Grosse (B4) and possibly also Kirby (B5). And so on: all the previous versions have had influence on those that follow. Sometimes this is even made explicit, as we can see from the preface by Grosse, who wrote that he is the “fifth hand” to deal with the epic material: “as I joined, not including the first author2 of the ancient epic, the later compilers Fählmann, Kreutzwald, Reinthal and Israel” (Grosse 1875: XVII–XVIII).

In the nineteenth century, it is even quite probable that someone, let us say Kirby, used all the previous versions to compile his own account of the Estonian epic material. To illustrate this, we can reverse the arrow of the schemes given above to indicate the sources a certain work of art used. Kirby mentions the versions of Israël and Grosse as “condensed abstracts” of the epic (Kirby 1895: xix) and may have known Schott’s text, although he mentions only his later treatment of Finnish and Estonian tales (Schott 1866). Kirby quotes Schiefner (1860), too, but this text is not included in the scheme above because it appeared before the Kalevipoeg was completed. Büchner (1865), in contrast, cannot be found in Kirby’s bibliography. The scheme for Kirby, viewed from his perspective, would look like this:

B5 (Kirby 1895) ← {B1?, B3, B4, A}

which has to be read as follows: Kirby (1895) is based on – possibly – Schott (1863), but certainly on Israël (1873), Grosse (1875) and the original edition by Kreutzwald (1857–61). A comparable scheme can now be construed for every text. From a survey of the different versions discussed here, a general equation emerges: the larger the number of texts (samples) between the curved brackets is, the nearer the text in question seems to be to the original or so-called “normal form” (see, for “normal form”, Anderson 1923; Seljamaa 2007: 897). For the nineteenth century, with its richness of retellings, adaptations and tradition of free rendering, this might serve as a plausible model.

The case of Lou Goble

In the twentieth century, more and more publications appeared in more and more languages, with the consequence that it was no longer possible for any one individual to embrace all the texts related to the Kalevipoeg. The time of the romantic nineteenth century was over. While translations of fairy tales were being published continuously, the Kalevipoeg seems to have been forgotten. But still, now and then, something happened.

In 1982, almost a century after Kirby, the American Lou Goble – born in 1942, later a professor of philosophy – published his first and only book of fiction, titled The Kalevide (Goble 1982). It appeared in a series labelled Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, which already tells a lot about the changed outfit of the Estonian hero. The entire material was displaced, which is best exemplified in the maps in the beginning of the book. The map provided by Kirby (1895: [ii]) is more or less topographically exact and realistic, depicting the central part of the Baltic Sea with Gotland, the Gulf of Riga and the Gulf of Finland. Goble (1982: vi–ix), on the other hand, provides three maps and switched – more or less – into fantasy, although the shape of Estonia and the Gulf of Finland might still be recognised. The names, however, are fantasy-like and merely have some resemblance to existing forms: Saksaland, Poolu, Lati, Viru – using contaminations, incorrect spellings or archaic provincial names to indicate respectively Germany, Poland, Latvia and Estonia.

This step gave the author all the freedom that he needed: he could do anything with his material. The realistic approach of Kirby is replaced by what I would call the exoticising approach of Goble. We no longer find the romantic quest for prehistoric events. According to the requirements of the time, it was the world of fantasy that formed the background:

At the time I was reading a lot of fantasy novels (post-Tolkien and all that) but was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with what was available. So one begins to imagine one can do it for oneself. Then I chanced upon a novel that did please me, The Island of the Mighty, by Evangeline Walton, that was a retelling of part of the Welsh cycle of the Mabinogion done in the form of a fantasy. (This book was first published in the 1930s and then reissued in the 1970s.) This gave me the idea of reworking a tale from ancient lore. As I considered stories to tell, I first thought to take up the Finnish Kalevala, but I found that too perfect just as it was. I could add nothing to it. While researching the Kalevala, however, I chanced upon reference to the Estonian Kalevipoeg (perhaps a footnote in Kirby’s translation of the Kalevala (Everyman edition)). Fortunately, the local university library had a copy of Kirby’s translation of that. As I read it, I thought that this was a story I could work with. And so I did. (Goble 2011, p.c.)

In his preface, Goble refers explicitly to Kirby (1895) and only to one other source, Abercromby (1898). What is not taken from these sources is based on his “own fancy” (Goble 1982: xi). This is an important facet we should not forget. If we now try to put this into an Anderson-like scheme, we would get the following:

C ← {B5, Y, X}

which has to be read as follows: Goble’s text (C) is based on Kirby (1895), and two other sources whch are indicated as Y and X. These are newly introduced symbols. With X, I label the individual fancy of the author, as this is explicitly mentioned in the preface. With Y, on the other hand, Abercromby (1898) is indicated because this is only partly a source on Kalevipoeg, as it touches it peripherally; Kalevipoeg is not the core item of the book, which actually does not contain very much Estonian material at all. Goble obviously equated Finns with Estonians and took some of the numerous Finnish songs from Abercromby’s work as an inspiration for his fantasy novel.

The letter C for Goble’s book seems plausible because Goble certainly forms a different redaction from his predecessors from the nineteenth century. With respect to terminology one might think of the tripartition proposed by Matthew James Driscoll: he speaks of the three concepts “work”, “text” and “artefact”, explaining them as follows: “To take a simple example: Hamlet is a ‘work’. The New Swan Shakespeare Advanced Series edition of Hamlet by Bernard Lott, M.A. Ph.D., published by Longman in 1968, is, or presents, a ‘text’. My copy of Lott’s edition, bought from Blackwell’s in Oxford in 1979 and containing my copious annotations, is an ‘artefact’” (Driscoll 2010: 93). In this sense, the original tales about the Kalevipoeg would be called the “work” and the editions provided by Kreutzwald “texts”. Instead of “artefact” for the third layer, I would, however, prefer “reading”. Here, the differences between folklore and literary transmission nevertheless seem to be quite considerable.

The difference between Kirby (1895) and Goble (1982) seems, on the basis of the two schemes, quite large. However, one question arises: why does element X, the fantasy of the author, suddenly come into the picture? Why does it not already appear with the authors from the nineteenth century? The fact that Goble makes it explicit in his preface while the others do not cannot be considered a sufficient explanation. Actually, all previous authors also used their fancy. Perhaps – or probably – Büchner and Schott did this to a lesser degree than Israël and Grosse, but this is a matter of degree, not of kind. The primary distinction is that the role of fantasy in Goble is made explicit. To make this personal or fantasy element visible in other versions, one could rewrite the previous scheme on Kirby (1895) as follows:

B5 (Kirby 1895) ← {BX1?+BX3+BX4, AX, X}

which has to be understood to mean that all the works were not only based on previous texts but always also involved the fantasy of the respective author.

For Goble (1982) it would run as follows:

C ← {BX5+YX, X}

This means that the differences between Goble, Kirby and Kreutzwald are still quite considerable, but they have become smaller. The central elements of Kreutzwald’s epic are preserved. Only the emphasis has shifted from one point or interpretation to another.

This can be illustrated with Kalevipoeg’s voyage to the end of the world, which is a prominent episode in the epic. It does not matter that this episode has little basis in folklore traditions, being instead largely based on Kreutzwald’s fantasy and the tales from one particular informant (Kreutzwald 1961: 485–6). In Kreutzwald’s original version, this episode comprises exactly one of the twenty tales (tale 16) and is not very tightly connected to the rest of the story. That is perhaps the reason why Israël (1873: 96, note 30) thought some ten years later that he could retell the story in another order (see section 6.2). The mere fact that Ulysses entered Hades after a long voyage and on the other side of the Okeanos was enough for Israël to let the Estonian hero do the same. No further argumentation was needed. This is an example of a rearrangement of the material during the process of reception. The same was done by Grosse (1875, see 6.3 above), who combined the voyage with the visit to the underworld. This was rendered down from a much longer treatment of the topic, and equally extreme was Goble’s treatment: he expanded the story over more than five chapters, taking over forty pages and far more than 10 per cent of the whole book (which has some 390 pages of text). And he, too (and obviously independently of Israël and Grosse, whom he scarcely knew about) combined the voyage to the end of the world with the entrance to Põrgu or the underworld.

The following chart displays the difference in quantity of the episode:

Kreutzwald: tale 16, 1,126 lines

(5.9 % of the entire epic)

Israël 1873: 8 pages

(9.2 %)

Grosse 1875: canto 8, 528 lines

(14.6 %)

Kirby 1895: canto 16, 9 pages

(6.5 %)

Goble 1982: 41 pages

(10.5 %)

Where Kirby’s prose summary is proportionately almost the same length as the episode in Kreutzwald’s original, Israël’s rearrangement attributed more importance to the voyage to the end of the world. This is increased still more with Grosse and Goble.

To return to Goble, it is interesting to notice that the American fantasy version of the Estonian national hero was not condemned, but instead received friendly reviews. In Soviet Estonia, a short review presented the contents of the fantasy version, not concealing the great differences and the somewhat high-handed treatment by the author, who drew quite significantly on his own fancy. The reviewer asked whether one should be annoyed by such “pseudo-interpretation”, but finally came to a positive verdict, concluding that it could obviously be a page turner for those not familiar with the original Kalevipoeg (Ussisoo 1984: 63).

In exile circles, the book received, as one might expect, greater notice. First of all, George Kurman, who had recently published his English translation of Kreutzwald’s epic, wrote a review in Mana, one of the leading exile magazines. In his review, Kurman is positive about the circulation of approximately 20,000 copies (without giving a source for this information), although according to him, this is in fact proportionately less than the two hundred originals sold in Kreutzwald’s times, if one takes into account that the English-speaking world is 500 times larger than the Estonian. Except for criticising some minor formal oddities such as some versifications, which resemble Kirby more than Goble’s prose style, Kurman generally praises Goble’s faithfulness to the original tale and calls his treatment “mostly fortunate”. Most astonishingly, he recalls in his conclusion a film by Sergei Eisenstein and expresses his hope that Goble’s Kalevide-story might find a film adaptation in Hollywood (Kurman 1983: 64). Although this did not happen, it shows that the treatment by Goble at least led to metamorphic considerations (if we regard a film adaptation of a text metamorphic).

The second review is a longish, elegant essay by Toomas Hendrik Ilves. It was reprinted in a “substantially revised” version in Kartus (2011: 494–503) and will therefore be quoted here according to the original. The essay combines a general sketch of the significance of the national hero Kalevipoeg and Kreutzwald’s epic Kalevipoeg with the presentation of both the Kurman translation and Goble’s adaptation of the epic. This is no surprise as the books appeared in the same year and certainly filled a gap in the book market, as the younger generation of exile Estonians would hardly have read the epic as Kreutzwald had written it: “unless one is prepared to devote untold hours to it, it is essentially unreadable. It’s written in an archaic Estonian that would be a problem even for those of us second-generation Estonians who retain more than the functional ‘kitchen Estonian’ domestic life has left us with after forty years amidst English-speaking society” (Ilves 1984, 5 April).

Ilves also concedes at the beginning: “Goble is fairly faithful to the action of the tale. [. . .] To my mind, the degree to which Goble faithfully retells the story is rather remarkable” (Ilves 1984, no May: p. 5). He thus seems to welcome the book, but when it comes to the language of the book, his verdict is devastating: in Ilves’s eyes, the author did not succeed in transforming the lyrical epic language of Kreutzwald or Kirby into readable prose:

In the hands of a good writer, even the epic tone could be pulled off; what I fear is that in The Kalevide, it masks bad writing. The pseudoarchaic diction as it’s rendered doesn’t create a sense of distant past enshrouded in a mythological mist; it’s simply awkward and stiff. The tone is embarrassingly ponderous. [. . .] So yes, in one sense The Kalevide does fail in its fidelity to the original, not for what is left out or added, but for how it’s written. The tale written by a man with an ear so finely tuned to the music of his language has been rendered in English by a writer tone-deaf to the music of his own. And that is a shame. (Ilves 1984, no May: p. 6)

In other words: we can really speak of a metamorphosis, albeit in a negative sense. The contents survived, perhaps thanks to the law of self-correction described by Anderson, but the tune was lost.

The case of Lou Goble, once more

Finally, the reception took an interesting turn via translation. Goble’s book was noticed by a German publisher – and then as a representative of modern American fantasy literature, not as a version of the Estonian epic. In 1986, a German translation appeared, for some reason in three paperback volumes (Goble 1986). This could have been another step in bringing the Estonian epic material nearer to the German reader, but the attempt obviously has to be classified as a “failure”, mainly for two reasons: firstly, the publisher held a low status in the German literary arena, and secondly, the translation was extremely weak, full of Anglicisms and anachronistic wordings (see Hasselblatt 1989). Where the original runs “Some of the men made signs against evil” (Goble 1982: 281), the German translator made of it “Ein paar Männer schlugen ein Kreuz” (“A couple of men crossed themselves”) (Goble 1986: III, 25), thus introducing a Christian symbol which is clearly out of place here. The mention of an “Eisenbahnbrücke” (“railway bridge”, Goble 1986: III, 80) where the original had an “iron bridge” (Goble 1982: 320) is simply ridiculous. Even the country where the action is situated was not recognised as such because the slightly archaic or obsolete English Esthonia became in German the non-existent Estnien (Goble 1986: I, 11). These are, of course, only a few illustrative examples. Unfortunately, one has to say that the German translation meant a clear shift from highbrow epic literature into pulp fiction. Nevertheless, some elements are preserved and communicated to the reader even in this new guise. It is therefore questionable whether one really has to label this attempt a failure. The reception of this pocket book was quite meagre, as far as I could detect (see Hasselblatt 2011: 288–90), but that the book, the text, is available, is a fact.

If we put this new German edition into our scheme, we would in the first step get the following:

D ← C

where D symbolises the translation as a new redaction (see above). However, as C also has its own history, we can reformulate the scheme as follows:

D ← C ← {BX5[← {BX1?+BX3+BX4, A}], Y, X}

This could illustrate once more that some elements of the original story are nevertheless preserved, even in this extreme distortion. It is arbitrary, of course, whether we apply Anderson’s law of self-correction to this or any other theory of intertextuality. The result is the same. Or, to put it more cautiously: it would be worthwhile to discuss the (possible) relationship between Anderson’s law of self-correction, Dégh & Vázsonyi’s hypothesis of Multi-Conduit Transmission and the different concepts of intertextuality. But this discussion would be beyond the scope of this book.

The attractive point of Anderson’s law is that it offers a frame for considering why, in the metamorphoses of the Estonian epic material across 125 years, even the most extreme variations can be viewed as participating in the preservation and continuity of the epic. Although the system of oral self-correction as designed by Anderson does not work the same way for written transmission, the model can be applied as an effective tool to this type of material.

1  Note also that the fundamental criticism by Dégh and Vázsonyi included a new concept which still is based on the notion of stability: “The maintenance of the ‘extraordinary stability’ of the tales as messages passed from generation to generation can be explainend with the multi-conduit system: the communicative-chain of congenial individuals.” (Dégh & Vázsonyi 1975: 248)

2  Grosse here obviously had in mind the hypothetical first poet whose work everyone is attempting to reconstruct.

8. Conclusion

A century and a half ago, on 3 August 1865, Kreutzwald wrote in a letter to his friend and supporter Anton Schiefner in St Petersburg: “Don’t worry about the Kalewi wastepaper, you can let them go mouldy. If the distribution of the books is in the hand of Pastor Laaland, he will hardly care about secular books” (Walravens 2013: 281). The author of the first long genuine Estonian literary text, which would eventually develop into the Estonian epic and become one of the best-known texts of Estonian letters generally, was not optimistic when it came to his Kalevipoeg. Most of his fellow countrymen did not take notice of the poem, hardly anyone purchased it and the stocks of the popular edition from 1862 were threatened by mice. Today we know better: the 19,033-line-long verse epic has developed into the core text of Estonian literature and few would regard a sheet of the Kalevipoeg as wastepaper or let it rot. It was one aim of this book to show how this change was possible and what has happened in the last century and a half.

In the course of this book we have seen how a literary text has been created, changed, published and received. It remains fascinating to follow the evolution of a work of art from its inception (chapter 2) to its almost uncontrolled proliferation (chapter 7). A text starts to live its own life and keeps on living it (chapter 3), regardless of what readers or researchers do with it or think about it. This also means that the whole discussion over which passages are so-called original folklore verse, which are folklore-based fiction by Kreutzwald and what is based on Kreutzwald’s fancy alone (see chapter 2) hardly had any effect on the significance of the text. The text made its way into Estonian letters anyway (see chapter 3), notwithstanding various criticism and vacillating classifications as folklore or literature. Having gone through different treatments of the Kalevipoeg it has become clear (I hope) that the question of whether Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg belongs to folklore or to literature is unsolvable or irrelevant – at least in terms of the approach to the text adopted here. But perhaps my treatment of the text has also shown that the question turns out to be simply wrong: there is no dichotomy between these fields, they belong together and both form inseparable elements of certain cultural manifestations.

Hence various research approaches that would enable us to take into account the specific cultural situation in Estonia needed combining. The notion of “cleansing” a text from indecent passages, for instance, as described in chapter 4, might be recognised from numerous other cultures and eras, but in this case it also served as an illustration of the different status German and Estonian had in the society of the time. Thus, at one and the same time, the case of the epic could illustrate the diglossia which was characteristic of Estonian society in the nineteenth century. Moreover, this diglossia, in connection with the ubiquitous censorship by the tsarist empire, as embodied specifically in the actions and approach of the German nobility, provided peculiar conditions for the publication of the epic, as was shown in chapter 2.

A result of these extraordinary circumstances was a lively reception of the Kalevipoeg in Germany (see chapter 5). It is not by accident that chapter 5 is the longest in the book. Numerous essays, articles and reviews have been published in German, as well as the first extensive scholarly study on the epic (Schott 1862). In the nineteenth century the German reception clearly exceeded the domestic response, and this was certainly noticed in Estonia, too. It took another generation before the Kalevipoeg reached Estonian students, literary circles and schoolbooks.

On the other hand, this seeming delay in cultural development turned into a lead (see chapter 6). The existence of a bilingual version, initially opposed by the author, created unexpected new possibilities. This “advantage of the disadvantage”, as I have called it, was one of the reasons for the wave of reactions, essays and criticism in Germany, and it led to transformations and new treatments of the text. A creative genre of rewritings was born and became a source for further treatments in other languages. It was shown in chapter 7 how different authors benefited from previous rewritings and treatments. With this chapter the circle is closed and we are back at folkloristics, where everything started. This, once more, has shown that the sharp distinction between the disciplines should be abandoned, at least for certain research questions and investigations. What should also have become clear is that if any text has shown us that it is never finished, but is constantly on the move, then surely that text is the Kalevipoeg. In this sense, folkloric elements are preserved in literature, too.

The new research which has been proffered in the present study will, I hope, help us to a better understanding of the Kalevipoeg. Furthermore, it has hopefully revealed some mechanisms of the (emerging) literary field in Estonia in the nineteenth century, as well as some general features of literary reception. In the interaction of these two elements, the specific role of the foreign reception was evident. Perhaps one could even speak of “rescue by reception”, i.e. the Estonian literature survived because it was received in foreign countries and languages. This is certainly an exaggeration, but sometimes one finds new insights only with the help of provocative exaggerations. Foreign reception is certainly important and, in my opinion, sometimes underestimated.

The aim of this study was also to wrest some fascinating texts and findings of the nineteenth century from oblivion, especially with respect to the German reception. In times where anything older than a decade tends to be discarded as “outdated”, some earlier findings and research results need pointing out. I am deeply convinced that my bibliography of early teatments of the Kalevipoeg is far from being complete (like any bibliography), and I hope that we find many more examples of early reception. For this historical perspective should enhance our understanding of the text and help us to grasp its impact. It was this desire that has guided me and finally led to the results I venture to present here.

In the course of the research, new discoveries were made that were not treated in any detail but may lead to new research. By accident, for instance, I found out that the Danish prose version (Rasmussen 1878), which can be found in the relevant bibliographies (Laidvee 1964: no 1001), seems to be nothing other than a translation of Israël 1873 (without mentioning its source). So maybe the dissemination of Israël’s book was even more intensive than assumed? And who, after all, was this Mr Israël? These and probably many other questions could not be treated here, owing to lack of material or simply because they were beyond the scope of this book. This is why, once more, Kalevipoeg Studies was chosen as a title for this monograph: this book only forms a small stone in the building called Kalevipoeg.

I hope that my findings will stimulate new research and that many more studies will follow. The foreign reception of this core text of Estonian literature in particular deserves more attention. Except for the Finnish context (see Kuldsepp 1986: 26–32; see also Kurman 1972), hardly any other foreign literary field has been scrutinised with respect to the reception of Kalevipoeg. But also within the Estonian context, I am sure, enough open questions remain to keep research on the epic alive.

Less than a year after the gloomy words of Kreutzwald quoted at the beginning, Carl Robert Jakobson wrote in a newspaper the words quoted earlier (section 2.3): “If we had nothing else, we could be proud of our Kalevipoeg-song, with which we can appear before all people” (Eesti Postimees, no. 26/1866, 29 June, page 207). At that moment, the Estonians already had appeared with their Kalevipoeg before at least the German reader, if not yet before all peoples, and this German reader did not “put it down giggling”, as Jakobson added. Neither did the German reader “expect a nightingale’s song from a beetle!”, which are again Jakobson’s words from the same text. The German reader saw, on the contrary, a “gallery of noble pictures surrounded by a black ribbon”, and he welcomed the Kalevipoeg on “the stage of the great European world” and hoped to receive “a refreshing stream of air into the sultry and oppressive atmosphere of our present times” (Schott 1857: 457, cf. above section 5.1). It was also this contrast between the statements of Kreutzwald, Jakobson and Schott that made me, more than one hundred and fifty years later, curious about the Kalevipoeg. And this curiosity will never come to an end.

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Kalewipoeg. Zweite Lieferung. Verhandlungen der Gelehrten Estnischen Gesellschaft. Vierter Band. Zweites Heft. Dorpat 1858. Pp. 1–145 [= tales 4–6].

Kalewipoeg. Dritte Lieferung. Verhandlungen der Gelehrten Estnischen Gesellschaft. Vierter Band. Drittes Heft. Dorpat, 1859. Gedruckt bei Heinrich Laakmann. Pp. 1–197, I–II [= tales 7–10].

Kalewipoeg. Vierte Lieferung. Verhandlungen der Gelehrten Estnischen Gesellschaft. Vierter Band. Viertes Heft. Dorpat, 1859. Gedruckt bei Heinrich Laakmann. Pp. 199–359, I–II [= tales 11–13].

Kalewipoeg. Fünfte Lieferung. Verhandlungen der Gelehrten Estnischen Gesellschaft. Fünfter Band. Erstes Heft. Dorpat, 1860. Gedruckt bei Heinrich Laakmann. Pp. 361–527 [= tales 14–16].

Kalewipoeg. Sechste und siebente Lieferung. Verhandlungen der Gelehrten Estnischen Gesellschaft . Fünfter Band. Zweites und drittes Heft. Dorpat, 1861. Gedruckt bei Heinrich Laakmann. Pp. 529–735, I–IV [= tales 17–20].

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Abstract

Cornelius Hasselblatt

Kalevipoeg Studies

The Creation and Reception of an Epic

The poem Kalevipoeg, over 19,000 lines in length, was composed by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882) on the basis on folklore material. It was published in an Estonian-German bilingual edition in six instalments between 1857 and 1861; it went on to become the Estonian national epic. This first English-language monograph on the Kalevipoeg sheds light on various aspects of the emergence, creation and reception of the text.

The first chapter sketches the objectives of the book and gives a short summary of the contents of the twenty tales of the epic, while the second chapter treats the significance of the epic against the cultural background of nineteenth-century Estonia.

The third chapter scrutinizes the emergence of the text in more detail and, in its second part, takes a closer look at the many intertextual connections and the traces the epic material has left in Estonian literature up to the present time. The fourth chapter is a detailed case study of one debated passage of the fifteenth tale.

The fifth and the six chapters deal with the German reception of the epic, which partly took place earlier than the reception in Estonia. In the fifth chapter, the first reviews and an early treatise by the German scholar Wilhelm Schott (1863) are discussed. The sixth chapter presents the new genre of ‘rewritings’ of the epic – texts which cannot be labelled as translations but are rather new creations on the basis of Kreutzwald’s text.

In the seventh chapter several versions of these retellings and adaptations are compared in order to show the stability of some core material conveyed by various authors. A concluding chapter stresses the significance of foreign reception in the canonization process of the Kalevipoeg. At the end, a comprehensive bibliography and an index are added.