The Kalevala | Page 2

is made to the "cleansing
and healing virtues of the vapors of the heated bathroom."
The skull of the Finn belongs to the brachycephalic (short-headed) class of Retzius.
Indeed the Finn-organization has generally been regarded as Mongol, though Mongol of
a modified type. His color is swarthy, and his eyes are gray. He is not inhospitable, but
not over-easy of access; nor is he a friend of new fashions. Steady, careful, laborious, he
is valuable in the mine, valuable in the field, valuable oil shipboard, and, withal, a brave
soldier on land.
The Finns are a very ancient people. It is claimed, too, that they began earlier than any
other European nation to collect and preserve their ancient folk-lore. Tacitus, writing in
the very beginning of the second century of the Christian era, mentions the Fenni, as he
calls them, in the 46th chapter of his De Moribus Germanoram. He says of them: "The
Finns are extremely wild, and live in abject poverty. They have no arms, no horses, no
dwellings; they live on herbs, they clothe themselves in skins, and they sleep on the
ground. Their only resources are their arrows, which for the lack of iron are tipped with
bone." Strabo and the great geographer, Ptolemy, also mention this curious people. There
is evidence that at one time they were spread over large portions of Europe and western
Asia.

Perhaps it should be stated here that the copper, so often mentioned in The Kalevala,
when taken literally, was probably bronze, or "hardened copper," the amount and quality
of the alloy used being not now known. The prehistoric races of Europe were acquainted
with bronze implements.
It may be interesting to note in this connection that Canon Isaac Taylor, and Professor
Sayce have but very recently awakened great interest in this question, in Europe
especially, by the reading of papers before the British Philological Association, in which
they argue in favor of the Finnic origin of the Aryans. For this new theory these scholars
present exceedingly strong evidence, and they conclude that the time of the separation of
the Aryan from the Finnic stock must have been more than five thousand years ago.
The Finnish nation has one of the most sonorous and flexible of languages. Of the
cultivated tongues of Europe, the Magyar, or Hungarian, bears the most positive signs of
a deep-rooted similarity to the Finnish. Both belong to the Ugrian stock of agglutinative
languages, i.e., those which preserve the root most carefully, and effect all changes of
grammar by suffixes attached to the original stein. Grimin has shown that both Gothic
and Icelandic present traces of Finnish influence.
The musical element of a language, the vowels, are well developed in Finnish, and their
due sequence is subject to strict rules of euphony. The dotted o; (equivalent to the French
eu) of the first syllable must be followed by an e or an i. The Finnish, like all Ugrian
tongues, admits rhyme, but with reluctance, and prefers alliteration. Their alphabet
consists of but nineteen letters, and of these, b, c, d, f, g, are found only in a few foreign
words, and many others are never found initial.
One of the characteristic features of this language, and one that is likewise characteristic
of the Magyar, Turkish, Mordvin, and other kindred tongues, consists in the frequent use
of endearing diminutives. By a series of suffixes to the names of human beings, birds,
fishes, trees, plants, stones, metals, and even actions, events, and feelings, diminutives are
obtained, which by their form, present the names so made in different colors; they
become more naive, more childlike, eventually more roguish, or humorous, or pungent.
These traits can scarcely be rendered in English; for, as Robert Ferguson remarks: "The
English language is not strong in diminutives, and therefore it lacks some of the most
effective means for the expression of affectionate, tender, and familiar relations." In this
respect all translations from the Finnish into English necessarily must fall short of the
original. The same might be said of the many emotional interjections in which the
Finnish, in common with all Ugrian dialects, abounds. With the exception of these two
characteristics of the Ugrian languages, the chief beauties of the Finnish verse admit of
an apt rendering into English. The structure of the sentences is very simple indeed, and
adverbs and adjectives are used sparingly.
Finnish is the language of a people who live pre-eminently close to nature, and are at
home amongst the animals of the wilderness, beasts and birds, winds, and woods, and
waters, falling snows, and flying sands, and rolling rocks, and these are carefully
distinguished by corresponding verbs of ever-changing acoustic import. Conscious of the
fact that, in a people like the Finns where nature and nature-worship form the centre