Kanteletar
Also known as: Kanteletar: taikka Suomen kansan vanhoja lauluja ja virsiä, Kanteletar — Old Songs and Hymns of the Finnish People, Kanteletar: Poems of the Finnish People
A 19th-century compilation of Finnish and Karelian lyric runo-songs, Kanteletar gathers love songs, laments, charms, and household poetry in Kalevala-metre, preserving voices of everyday singers alongside mythic invocations.
Description
Kanteletar is Elias Lönnrot’s collection of Finnish and Karelian lyric folk poetry, arranged into three books and cast largely in the traditional trochaic tetrameter known as the Kalevala metre. Unlike the epic narratives of the Kalevala, these texts foreground intimate experience—courtship, marriage, orphanhood, seasonal labor, and the rhythms of household and village life—while also invoking deities and nature spirits in charms and prayers. Drawing on variants sung across eastern Finland and Karelia, the collection preserves a rich register of women’s songs, men’s work songs, lullabies, wedding and funeral laments, and short mythic hymns. Many pieces address Ukko, Tapio, Mielikki, Ahti, and other figures, revealing a lived religious-poetic world where the forest, waters, and sky are personalized powers. The kantele itself becomes an emblem of song, memory, and communal feeling.
Historiography
Based on field collecting trips in the 1820s–1830s, Lönnrot transcribed and edited lyric runo-songs into a literary sequence, regularizing dialects, metre, and orthography. Scholars debate the degree of editorial stitching versus faithful transcription, and how the shift from oral performance to print altered function and voice. Later folklorists (e.g., SKVR) documented broader variants, refining views of regional style, gendered performance, and the interplay between epic and lyric traditions.
Date Notes
Compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish and Karelian runo-songs collected chiefly in the 1830s; published in three books (1840).
Archetypes
Major Characters
- The Singer
- The Mother
- The Maiden
- The Bridegroom
Myths
- Mythic Charms and Laments
- Ballads of Maidens and Orphans
- Incantatory Songs of Everyday Magic
Facts
- The collection emphasizes lyric and domestic genres rather than epic narrative.
- Most poems use Kalevala-metre (trochaic tetrameter) with alliteration and parallelism.
- Lönnrot sourced material from singers across eastern Finland and Karelia.
- Kanteletar complements the Kalevala by preserving women’s songs and laments.
- Editorial normalization by Lönnrot affects dialect, metre, and sequence.
- Nature deities (Tapio, Mielikki, Ahti, Ukko) are frequently invoked in charms.
- The kantele instrument functions as a symbolic center of song and memory.
- Subsequent SKVR publications expanded the comparative corpus of runo-songs.
- Kanteletar influenced later Finnish music and literary modernism.
- The work remains a key source for ritual, seasonal, and life-cycle poetry.