Mieleni minun tekevi, aivoni ajattelevi... (Мной желанье овладело, мне на ум явилась дума.../MASTERED by desire impulsive, By a mighty inward urging...))

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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VEDAS ARCTIC HOMELAND

Defrost

Was (and will be again) Arctic a friendly environment? 

Была ли ( и будут ли) Арктика  гостеприимная среда?

L'Arctique fut-elle jadis (et sera-t-elle un jour)un milieu amical pour l'homme? 
L'Artico è stato un giorno (e tornerà ad essere) un ambiente ospitale?

War Arktikum ein Menschenfreundliches Milieu (und wird es wieder dies sein?)

According to the most ancient historic documents of the Aryan peoples, the Hindu Veda and the Persian Avesta (Bundahishn), the original fatherland of all Aryans was on the Arctic Circle, which, at that time, was not covered by ice. When (following to the sins of humankind) Gods displaced the North Pole and condemned the Arctic to permanent frost, the Aryans migrated southwards, with a trip which ended in today’s Persia and India.By the way, the Pole is shifting again. We are puzzled by the meaning that we may give to this new shift.

Similar to this Aryan legend is the one of the Hyperboraei, a perfect people which ancient Greek historians and poets reported to have inhabited the Arctic Circle. Some present-day Russian traditionalists pretend that the right of Russia to be considered as the bulwark of the most ancient traditions derives from their descent from these Hyperboreans. Present-days de-frosting of the Arctic Circle, as well as the current displacement of the North Pole, and the connected historical, geological and palaeontologic researches, have shown that the Arctic myth of the Vedas and of Avesta have a scientific ground.

XX Century’s archeologists, including Marija Gimbutas, Ivanov and Gamkrelidze, have also focused their attention on the remnants of an ancient civilisation, the “People of Kurgans”, which was characterized by the fact of burying its princes under artificial hills (“Kurgans”), built in the middle of the steppes. Such civilization had its center in Russia, where most “Kurgans” are, but some of them may be found also in Japan, in Georgia, in Lithuania, Poland and Germany. According to Marija Gimbutas, the Peoples of Kurgans were Aryan warriors, which, having domesticated the horse, had acquired an overwhelming military superiority over their foes, thank to which they were able to expand, from their original Russian territories, into a much broader area, including Europe, where they entered, among other, the Balkan Peninsula, previously settled by the Danube Civilization, devoted to the cult of Mother Goddess.

The encounter of the “military” civilization of Kurgans and the civilizations of the South is  echoed in several characters of Greek tragedies, such as The Amazons, Phædra, Ariadne, Cassandra, Calypso, Cyrce, Iphigenia, and, especially, Europe. The Myth of Europe comes, thus, on the foreground of the encounter of the two largest proto-historical civilizations of Eastern Europe.

Most recent searches in the Kurgans show that the picture given of them by Marija Gimbutas may result only partially true.On the other hand, the finding of  chariots in Chinese burials of the first Dynasties seems to show that Kurgans civilization was not limited to the “Aryan” area.

The Cult of Mother Goddess will have a resonance on several aspects and movements over the whole cultural history of Europe, up to the ideas of a primitive Slavonic communism, linked to the social forms of zadruga, mir and obšćina, with the corresponding debates in European political thinking.

At later stages, other steppes populations which should have settled in Europe, lived, for a certain period, in Russia, such as the Huns, the Goths, the Bulgarians, the Avars and the Magyars.