itle,
'popular,' to early epic poetry. Ballads are short; a long ballad, as
Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, creeps and halts. A true epic, on the
other hand, is long, and its tone is grand, noble, and sustained.
Ballads are not artistic; while the form of the epic, whether we take
the hexameter or the rougher _laisse_ of the French _chansons de
geste_, is full of conscious and admirable art. Lastly, popular
ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in vague places;
while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite station, _whose
descendants are still in the land_, whose home is a recognisable
place, Ithaca, or Argos. Now, though these two kinds of early
poetry--the ballad, the song of the people; the epic, the song of the
chiefs of the people, of the ruling race--are distinct in kind, it
does not follow that they have no connection, that the nobler may not
have been developed out of the materials of the lower form of
expression. And the value of the 'Kalevala' is partly this, that it
combines the continuity and unison of the epic with the simplicity and
popularity of the ballad, and so forms a kind of link in the history
of the development of poetry. This may become clearer as we proceed to
explain the literary history of the Finnish national poem.

Sixty years ago, it may be said, no one was aware that Finland
possessed a national poem at all. Her people--who claim affinity with
the Magyars of Hungary, but are possibly a back-wave of an earlier
tide of population--had remained untouched by foreign influences since
their conquest by Sweden, and their somewhat lax and wholesale
conversion to Christianity: events which took place gradually between
the middle of the twelfth and the end of the thirteenth centuries.
Under the rule of Sweden, the Finns were left to their quiet life and
undisturbed imaginings, among the forests and lakes of the region
which they aptly called Pohja, 'the ends of things'; while their
educated classes took no very keen interest in the native poetry and
mythology of their race. At length the annexation of Finland by
Russia, in 1809, awakened national feeling, and stimulated research
into songs and customs which were the heirlooms of the people.

It was the policy of Russia to encourage, rather than to check, this
return on a distant past; and from the north of Norway to the slopes
of the Altai, ardent explorers sought out the fragments of unwritten
early poetry. These runes, or _R