Ukko, and the Making of the Kalevala

Almost everything popularly "known" about the old Finnish gods reaches modern readers through the Kalevala, the national epic that Elias Lonnrot assembled from oral runo-songs he collected in Karelia and published in 1835 and, enlarged, in 1849. This is a crucial qualification. Lonnrot did not transcribe a single inherited poem; he stitched together thousands of separately sung lines, smoothing and connecting them into a continuous narrative, so the Kalevala is at once a genuine repository of Finnic oral tradition and a nineteenth-century literary composition. Ukko, "old man," is invoked in that tradition as the highest god, the ylijumala, lord of sky and weather, but the epic's Ukko and the Ukko of pre-Christian cult are not simply the same thing, and scholars such as Pentikainen read the songs precisely to separate archaic belief from Lonnrot's shaping hand.

Among Lonnrot's most important sources was the Archangel Karelian singer Arhippa Perttunen, met on a collecting journey in 1834, whose repertoire supplied some of the fullest surviving versions of the poems Lonnrot later wove together, a reminder that behind the printed epic stand named individual singers rather than an anonymous folk voice. Kalevala Day, marking Lonnrot's signing of the 1835 preface on 28 February, is still kept in Finland as an official flag day.