Heaven and Home

When I asked if he would mind if I recorded him singing, he looked me in the eye and said “yes, I do mind”. It was an abrupt refusal and I was embarrassed by it. So I put my telephone away, feeling silly for having made the suggestion as Tero began to sing a verse from Miksi en laulaisi? (Why not sing?) by the bard Mateli Kuivalatar. A warm breeze passed through the budding birches overhead, and he sang with his head turned away from us, nodding to keep time on a stuttering, balancey pulse. You’d call it alliterative verse; a cluster of P-words, joined across Hs and Ts in a chant, with only two or three notes to slide up and down like the steps on a ladder. The unrecorded sound continued for less than two minutes, then it was over and Tero put his hat back on.

Afterwards, he explained that much of this oral poetry is too heavy to share with the likes of passing tourists. Miksi en laulaisi is more like a ditty; a happy song to be sung lightly. Outsiders can listen if they like, but recording the song would cross a line. Karelian songs and poetry have been noisily purloined by western audiences over the years; their epic “Kalevala” is a treasure trove of epic folk poetry, but it has been warped and distorted by modern writers to suit a range of creative and political objectives. It’s no surprise that modern Karelians feel a little defensive,  but in Tero’s refusal, I found an equal mix of touchiness and bemusement. Because from his perspective, Karelian poetry is for Karelians – and I’m from Scotland. It’s got nothing to do with me.

If I was embarrassed by Tero’s refusal to be recorded, I was rattled too. A hard-wired Westerner, I’m used to moving with glib, appropriative ease through a world of cultural diversity. It pleases me to believe that I’m open-minded and willing to engage with anything the world can throw at me – but that’s a fascinatingly pompous and self-centred mindset. When it came to the Kalevala, not everything is being laid out for the interest of passing tourists. Cultural dialogue depends upon consent and reciprocal interest. Tero was under no obligation to explain himself simply because I was curious.

Karelian culture has been deliberately hamstrung over many centuries, suppressed and despised by mainstream western thought. The old bards were burnt as witches by the Lutheran church in the days when Keralia was part of Sweden; their drums were smashed and Karelian children made to feel ashamed of their ancestors. Oppressed and shut down, it’s no surprise that these people grew suspicious of curious outsiders. When Karelian literary traditions were later appropriated and distorted by Western writers (including JRR Tolkein), it’s perfectly obvious why oral poets turned their back on gawping intruders. 

The story of the Karelians is only partly explained by a visit to the Museum of North Karelia in Joensuu. It’s a strangely empty, general place. The Karelians never produced any great works of art or monuments to mark their rise or fall. They didn’t pursue any normal strand of material culture, but the Museum contains countless tiny artefacts which follow a handful of functional, pragmatic themes. There are fish hooks and bowls; embroidered scarves and spears for killing bears, because when it came to exploring and imagining the world, all their hats were hung upon a system of recitation and verse which emerged hundreds of generations ago. The Kalevala is their monument, so tread carefully upon it.

Fans of modern fantasy fiction are inclined to cluster around the magical aspects of Karelian poetry. The Kalevala is laced with witches and epic heroes on legendary quests, but the poems are far more three dimensional than anything we might describe as “fantasy”. It feels more like a cluster of perspectives and happenings which include creation myths, Just So stories, wedding songs and adventure tales, and they don’t hang together neatly in a single narrative. Even when the Kalevala was compiled into something like clarity by the 19th Century folklorist Elias Lönrott, it still feels more like a scrapbook than a single, stand-up story. Lönrott deliberately set out to create an epic tradition for Finland in a tradition of Western romanticism, so it’s no surprise to find that the verses were bent to fit his objectives. The result of his work is not the Kalevala but a product of it; a pattern of oral poetry which predates modern understandings of storytelling. Whenever modern outsiders have focussed only upon the strands which appeal to them, we’ve skewed the original balance still further.

Besides, Tero believes the Kalevala is based on literal truth. If he cared enough about what I thought, he would argue that bards in the Old Society were so accomplished as creators and thinkers, they could calm a wind by talking to it, or staunch the bleeding from a terrible wound with a single, sudden spell. Tero knows that magic was real, but he also understands that it has gone today – we’re only left with fragments and echoes of the old power, and these are woven into a wider celebration of life itself. His Kalevala is a direct reflection of human experience; a pattern of observations, philosophies and reflections which rise out of Keralia with the same resilient logic as the swell of a new year’s grass. That’s where its value lies; as a manual for life in the boreal forest – faded, tattered and diluted by years of manipulation, but still too important to be tossed around as a plaything for passers-by.

Reflecting on Seamus Heaney’s distinction between the sacred and the profane, it’s clear that nation-builders like Lönrott used old ingredients to make something new; Finland with a clear sense of itself. But Finland would go on to crush and subsume Karelia, and the ancient Karelian culture is now divided by a Twentieth Century border which has fallen between Russia and Finland. For a people so closely connected to their landscape and sense of place, they have no coherent home; they exist as a small minority on the fringes of two nations. The sacred has become the functional and profane, but it’s notable that the Keralian language is currently enjoying a revival. At an exhibition in the Museum of North Karelia, a young artist explained why she found it so important to speak Karelian as a continuation of traditions laid down by her grandparents. People in eastern Finland are more likely to identify as Keralian nowadays, and the transition from sacred to profane is churning up new eddies which imply that the modern world is only partly able to cater for deeper, more human needs to belong and relate. I chafed at Tero’s rejection because it reminded me that I am a stranger in Karelia, and perhaps that’s as it should be.

Picture: A monument to Elias Lönrott in Kampinmalmi, Helsinki. At his knee, a Keralian bard recites the ancient verses of the Kalevala. (photographed 18.5.23)