rovince of Wuokiniem, who was by far the most renowned
minstrel of the country, and with whose closely impending death,
numerous very precious runes would have been irrevocably lost.

The happy result of his travels throughout Finland, Dr. Lonnrot now
commenced to arrange under the central idea of a great epic, called
Kalevala, and in February, 1835, the manuscript was transmitted to the
Finnish Literary Society, which had it published in two parts.
Lonnrot, however, did not stop here; he went on searching and
collecting, and, in 1840, had brought together more than one thousand
fragments of epical poetry, national ballads, and proverbs. These he
published in two works, respectively entitled, Kanteletar (Lyre-charm),
and The Proverbs of the Suomi People, the latter containing over 1700
proverbs, adages, gnomic sentences, and songs.

His example was followed by many of his enthusiastic countrymen, the
more prominent of whom are Castren, Europaeus, Polen and Reniholm.
Through the collections of these scholars so many additional parts of
the epical treasure of Finland were made public that a new edition of
the Kalevala soon became an imperative necessity. The task of sifting,
arranging, and organizing the extensive material, was again allotted to
Dr. Lonnrot, and in his second editions of the Kalevala, which appeared
in 1849, the epic, embracing fifty runes and 22,793 lines, had reached
its mature form. The Kalevala was no sooner published than it
attracted the attention of the leading scholars of Europe. Men of such
world-wide fame as Jacob Grimm, Steinthal, Uhland, Carriere and Max Mueller
hastened to acknowledge its surpassing value and intrinsic beauty.
Jacob Grimm, in a separate treatise, published in his Kleinere
Schriften, said that the genuineness and extraordinary value of the
Kalevala is easily proved by the fact that from its mythological ideas
we can frequently interpret the mythological conceptions of the ancient
Germans, whereas the poems of Ossian manifest their modern origin by
their inability to clear up questions of old Saxon or German mythology.
Grimm, furthermore, shows that both the Gothic and Icelandic
literatures display unmistakable features of Finnish influence.

Max Mueller places the Kalevala on a level with the greatest epics of the
world. These are his words:

"From the mouths of the aged an epic poem has been collected equalling
the Iliad in length and completeness; nay, if we can f