Greece has its Iliad and Odyssey, Italy its Aeneid, Portugal its Lusiads, Iceland its Eddas, Germany its Nibelungenlied, Britain its Beowulf and Le Morte d’Arthur, and India its Mahabarata and Ramayana. I am talking of course about national folk-epics, those literary masterpieces that were originally an oral canon of folk-stories percolated down through the mists of time and later written down and integrated into the worldview of its people.
Well, Finland’s was the epic poetry collection known as the Kalevala, which was developed quite late – during the 19th century – but still from ancient traditional folk-tales. The Kalevala was an integral part of the Finns’ national awakening in the era of the Grand Duchy of Finland when they were under the yoke of the Russian empire, and it was instrumental in the development of the Finnish national identity, ultimately leading to independence from Russia in 1917.
This national awakening coincided with the so-called Golden Age of Finnish Art roughly spanning the period 1880 to 1910. The Kalevala provided the artistic inspiration for numerous themes at the time in literature (J. L. Runeberg’s The Tales of Ensign Stål; Aleksis Kivi’s The Seven Brothers), music (Jean Sibelius), architecture (Eliel Saarinen), and of course the visual arts, the most notable of which were provided by one Akseli Gallen-Kallela.
Born Axél Waldemar Gallén in Pori, Finland, to a Swedish-speaking family (he Finnicised his name in 1907), Gallen-Kallela first attended drawing classes at the Finnish Art Society before studying at the Académie Julian in Paris. He married Mary Slöör in 1890 and on their honeymoon to East Karelia, he started collecting material for his depictions of the Kalevala. He would soon be inextricably linked with the independence movement as he produced his scenes from the old stories.
The most extensive paintings that Gallen-Kallela made of the Kalevala were his frescoes, originally for the Finnish Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, but painted again in 1928 in the lobby of the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki where they can be seen to this day. However, many standalone works exist too; here’s a flavour of his art, though if you want to know what they depict you’ll have to read the Kalevala!
