unots_, were chiefly sung by old men
called _Runoias_, to beguile the weariness of the long dark winters.
The custom was for two champions to engage in a contest of memory,
clasping each other's hands, and reciting in turn till he whose
memory first gave in slackened his hold. The 'Kalevala' contains an
instance of this practice, where it is said that no one was so hardy
as to clasp hands with Waeinaemoeinen, who is at once the Orpheus and the
Prometheus of Finnish mythology. These Runoias, or rhapsodists,
complain, of course, of the degeneracy of human memory; they notice
how any foreign influence, in religion or politics, is destructive to
the native songs of a race.[174] 'As for the lays of old time, a
thousand have been scattered to the wind, a thousand buried in the
snow; ... as for those which the Munks (the Teutonic knights) swept
away and the prayer of the priests overwhelmed, a thousand tongues
were not able to recount them.' In spite of the losses thus caused,
and in spite of the suspicious character of the Finns, which often
made the task of collection a dangerous one, enough materials remained
to furnish Dr. Loennrot, the most noted explorer, with thirty-five
_Runots_, or cantos. These were published in 1835, but later research
produced the fifteen cantos which make up the symmetrical fifty of the
'Kalevala.' In the task of arranging and uniting these, Dr. Loennrot
played the part traditionally ascribed to the commission of
Pisistratus in relation to the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Dr. Loennrot cut
about and altered at pleasure the materials which come before us as
one poem. They have little unity now, and originally had none.

It cannot be doubted that, at whatever period the Homeric poems took
shape in Greece, they were believed to record the feats of the
supposed ancestors of existing families. Thus, for example,
Pisistratus, as a descendant of the Nelidae, had an interest in
securing certain parts, at least, of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_
from oblivion. The same family pride embellished and preserved the
epic poetry of early France. There were in France but three heroic
houses, or _gestes_; and three corresponding cycles of _epopees_. Now,
in the 'Kalevala,' there is no trace of the influence of family
feeling; it was no one's peculiar care and pride to watch over the
records of the fame of this or that hero. The poem begins with a
cosmogony as wild as any Indian dream of creation; and the human
characters