One of J. R. R. Tolkien’s earliest writings has been published this week in England. (It will be released in the U.S.A. in April.) It’s called The Story of Kullervo, a retelling of a dark episode from the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. Hannah Sander of the BBC tells about the influence of this epic and of the Finnish language and mythology on Tolkien’s imagination. In addition to direct parallels, Tolkien’s descriptions of Middle Earth owe much to the Finnish landscape and the Finnish language seems to have been a model for Elvish.
From Hannah Sander, Kullervo: Tolkien’s fascination with Finland – BBC News:
On Thursday JRR Tolkien’s early story The Story of Kullervo will be published for the first time. The dark tale reveals that Tolkien’s Middle Earth was inspired not only by England and Wales… but also by Finland.
“Hapless Kullervo,” Tolkien called him. Kullervo, an orphan boy raised into slavery, a tragic hero who commits incest in the dark forests of Karelia and hurls himself on his own blade.
JRR Tolkien first discovered the tale as a schoolboy in Birmingham. His father had died when he was a young child, and his mother passed away when he was 12, so he had been an orphan himself for some years when he came across the Finnish epic Kalevala – and within it the tale of Kullervo – during his final year at school.
It had a huge impact.
“He was very much taken by the whole mythology,” says Prof Verlyn Flieger of the University of Maryland, who edited the manuscript of The Story of Kullervo for publication. “In his letters he enthuses about this ‘very great story’.”
Arriving at Oxford University a year later, Tolkien began to write his own version of the Finnish myth. But after a few months he suddenly gave up.
“The manuscript runs to about 26 pages, but it breaks off in the middle of a sentence,” Flieger explains. “He had just got to the climax, the most dramatic scene, and it stops. There is no full stop, no continuation of any kind. Only the words ‘so terrible his haste’…”
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