Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/131

Rh of new ideas it contains, the translation might advantageously have appeared at an earlier date; but in this country in such matters we move but slowly. Though the volume touches on many folklore topics, its primary object is a literary one. It aims at annihilating the theories of all those learned but misguided men who maintain that the works of Homer are mere patchwork, and not the result of a single creative brain. And in fact it seems effectually to have torpedoed the enemies' arguments. To execute his task thoroughly, Professor Comparetti has exhaustively analysed the form and contents of the Kalevala, has shown how the poem arose, the number of pieces of which it was composed, and how Lonnrot managed to unite them together in a way that gave the similitude of a national epic, but without reaching the goal. All this is very well and carefully done, but as it is not folklore we may pass on to those parts of the volume which deal more nearly with that subject.

Comparetti was the first to point out that the epic and narrative poetry of the Finns is the direct issue of their magic songs. These, when narrative, easily become epic, and are so unstable in their form that they readily lend themselves to a process of remoulding and incorporation with others of more or less similar character. This being so, he everywhere finds traces of the modes of thought proper to a wizard or shaman in the narrative portions of the Kalevala. The singer was so steeped in shamanistic ideas that he could not conceive a hero in any other form than as an ideal thaumaturge who works almost entirely by magic, and whose heroism is never shown on the field of battle. His range of view was so contracted and he was so insensible to external influences that his mind was never affected by any historical sentiment. Consequently, the narrative poetry of the Finns contains no kernel of history, no reminiscences of historical facts in the past, and the heroes it portrays, being the result of pure imagination and personification, are not to be explained by any euhemeristic process. To seek for any profound symbolism or allegory in the Kalevala, as some have done, is equally futile, for such ideas could never enter the head of a simple-minded Finnish singer.

Starting from such premises, which on the whole seem to be well founded, Comparetti argues that the heroes Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen were originally ideal and anonymous wizards, conceived from two points of view, to whom names were subsequently