Karelia Taiga

Inner White Karelia is a country of forest, lakes and marshes west of the White Sea. Its wooded interior contained inhabited villages and a rich oral culture. A particularly well-documented encounter came in 1834, when Elias Lönnrot visited Latvajärvi and listened to the Karelian singer Arhippa Perttunen. The songs preserved in such communities became important material for Lönnrot's literary work.

In the autumn of that year he travelled to Repola in search of further additions to his manuscript. The Finnish Literature Society published the first Kalevala in 1835, drawing on the collecting journeys of its secretary. Lönnrot returned to White Sea Karelia that spring and gathered another 103 songs, amounting to approximately 4,500 lines. These journeys reveal a forest region connected through singers, travellers and the transmission of verse. The epic was an edited literary composition based on oral poetry; its mythical events cannot be read as a dated chronicle of the surrounding taiga.