Finland's National Epos was born in Russia
Hародный эпос Финляндии родился в России
L'epos nazionale finlandese è nato in Russia.
L'epique nationale finlandaise nacquit en Russie
Das finnische Nationalepos wurde in Russland geboren
Present-day Finland became habitable in about 8,000 BC, following the northward retreat of the Ice Age glaciers, and at about that time Neolithic peoples migrated into the country. According to the legends found in the Finnish folk epic, the Kalevala, those early inhabitants included the people of the mythical land Pohjola, against whom the Kalevala people -- identified with the Finns-- struggled; however, archaeological and linguistic evidence of the prehistory of the region is fragmentary.
According to the traditional view of Finnish prehistory, ancestors of the Finns migrated westward and northward from their ancestral home in the Volga River basin during the second millennium B.C., arriving on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea some time during the next millennium. According to this folk history, the early Finns began a migration from present-day Estonia into Finland in the first century A.D. and settled along the northern coast of the Gulf of Finland. Recent research, suggesting that the Finns arrived in the region at a much earlier date, perhaps by 3,000 B.C., has questioned this traditional view, however.
In the early Iron Age a word similar to Finns appeared for the first time in a written document when Tacitusmentions Fenni in his Germania. However, it is unclear if these have anything to do with the present Finnish people. The first Scandinavian documents mentioning a "land of the Finns" are two runestones in Sweden, at Soederby , with the inscription Finlont , and in Gotland, with the inscription Finlandi dating from the 11th century.
It is common opinion that Ugro-Finns (who, still today, inhabit a large part of Northern Russia and who have their own independent Republics ,like Komi, Mari El, Karelia, Udmurtia, Chuvashia, Mordostan and Bashkortostan) were since many centuries a constituent part of the Russian State.
Present days' Finland and Estonia were occupied in the Middle Ages by Vikings, Danes, German Knights, Hansa and Swedes. An autonomous finnish culture started to develop only with the Lutheran Reform , which pleaded the utilisation in church of the people's language
The Finnish aristocracy, which was of Swedish descent and language, distanciated herself from the Kingdom of Sweden during the XVII Century, when it, with a typcal "Aristocratic Revolution" reclaimed a written constitution apt to safeguard the noblesmen privileges. This aim was achieved at the Estates of Borga. Later on , when , during the Napoleonic wars, Napoleon imposed to Sweden a French monarch, count Bernadotte, the Finnish aristocracy revolted against Sweden, and allied itself with Russia, which promised to respect the privileges granted by the King of Sweden at the Estates of Borga.
A treaty acknowledged the alliance of Finland with Russia. In 1809, Finland was transformed into an autonomous Duchy of Finland under Russian Sovereignty, governed according to the aristocratic constitution granted at the Estates of Borga.
At that moment, the Duchy of Finland felt the need to create its own culture.
So, the writer Loennroth travelled long time across the Russian Province of Karelia, where the local Finnish population had preserved, better than in Swedish Finland, the traditional Finnish culture.
Loennroth collected the traditional Karelian popular sagas, and reunited them into the Kalevala, which became Finland's national epos, and also a model for Estonian Kalevi Poeg.
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