The mythology now called Finnish belongs, in the record that actually survives, to Karelia more than to Finland proper. By the nineteenth century Lutheran Finland west of the border had largely lost the old oral poetry to church teaching and literacy, while the villages of Russian Karelia, Orthodox and more remote from the machinery of a modern state, still had singers who could perform the runo, the alliterative trochaic verse that carries the mythology.
Elias Lonnrot, a country doctor, made repeated collecting journeys into Karelia between 1828 and the early 1840s, wrote down variants of the same episodes from many singers, and wove them into a continuous narrative he published in 1835 and expanded in 1849 as the Kalevala. The epic shape is his: no singer possessed or performed the whole sequence he assembled, and the same episode often survives in several incompatible tellings that Lonnrot had to choose among or blend. This matters for how the atlas reads the material. The Kalevala is a literary epic built from genuine oral sources, not a scripture that existed before Lonnrot touched it, and the gods and heroes inside it, Ukko, Vainamoinen, Tapio and the rest, are better understood through the wider body of collected charms, wedding laments and bear songs than through the epic alone. Later scholars, Juha Pentikainen among them, have worked to set the epic back against that fuller record. The Kalevala carried Finnic mythology to the world; the singers of Karelia are why there was a mythology to carry.