Kalevala, the Finnish national epic and one of the great heroic poems of world literature, took its definitive shape in 1849, but it is directly based on oral poetry that mainly came into being during the first millennium of the Christian era. The work was compiled by the great philologist Elias Lonnrot (1802-1884) from the best and most complete variants of ancient folk songs that he himself and other pioneers of Finnish folklore had collected...