Finnish literature
Encyclopedia
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
. Earliest texts in Finland were written in Swedish or Latin during the Finnish Middle Age (ca. 1200 - 1523). Finnish-language literature was slowly developing from the 16th century onwards. First artistic heyday of the Finnish literature was the mid-19th century era of National Romanticism. Most of the significant works of the era, written in Swedish or increasingly in Finnish, revolved around achieving or maintaining a strong Finnish identity (see Karelianism
Karelianism
Karelianism was a late 19th century cultural phenomenon in the Grand Duchy of Finland and involved writers, painters, poets and sculptors. Since the publishing of the Finnish national epic Kalevala in 1835, compiled from Karelian folk lore, culture spheres in Finland became increasingly curious...
).
Pre-Nineteenth Century
Since Finnish is a relatively new written language there is almost no literature from the Middle AgesMiddle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
or earlier. Important books such as The Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
and Code of Laws were only available in Latin, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
or a few other European languages such as French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
or German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
.
See Finland's language strife
Finland's language strife
The language strife was one of the major conflicts of Finland's national history and domestic politics. It revolved around the question of what status Swedish—the language which since the Middle Ages had been the main language of administration and high culture in Finland—and, on the other hand,...
.
Written Finnish was essentially established by the Bishop and Finnish Lutheran reformer Mikael Agricola
Mikael Agricola
Mikael Agricola was a clergyman who became the de facto founder of written Finnish and a prominent proponent of the Protestant Reformation in Sweden . He is often called the "father of the Finnish written language". Agricola was consecrated as the bishop of Turku in 1554, without papal approval...
(1510—1557) who mainly based it on western dialects. His main works were a translation of the New Testament
New Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
into Finnish, a task completed in 1548, and a primer in Finnish.
Nineteenth Century
Since the Middle Ages Finnish has been rich in folkloreFolklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
. Hundreds of old folk poems, stories and their like have been collected since the 1820s into a collection that might be the largest in world. Many of these have since been published as The Ancient Poems of the Finnish People. It is a colossal collection consisting of 27,000 pages in 33 volumes. The morphology of stories was first prepared by Antti Aarne (Aarne-Thompson, The Types of the Folk Tale), used widely in e.g. the United States until recent times.
The most famous collection of folk poetry is by far the Kalevala
Kalevala
The Kalevala is a 19th century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish and Karelian oral folklore and mythology.It is regarded as the national epic of Finland and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature...
. Referred to as the Finnish "national epic" it is mainly credited to Elias Lönnrot
Elias Lönnrot
Elias Lönnrot was a Finnish philologist and collector of traditional Finnish oral poetry. He is best known for compiling the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic compiled from national folklore.-Education and early life:...
who compiled the volume. It was first published in 1835 and quickly became a symbol of Finnish nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
. Finland was then politically controlled by Russia and had previously been part of Sweden. The Kalevala was therefore an important part of early Finnish identity. Beside the collection of lyric poems Kanteletar
Kanteletar
Kanteletar is a collection of Finnish folk poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot. It is considered to be a sister collection to the Finnish national epic Kalevala...
it has been and still is a major influence in art and music, like Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period whose music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity. His mastery of the orchestra has been described as "prodigious."...
. It is a common misconception that Lönnrot merely "collected" pre-existing poetry. It is now widely accepted that the Kalevala represents an amalgam of loosely connected source materials, freely altered by Lönnrot to present the appearance of a unified whole.
See History of Finland
History of Finland
The land area that now makes up Finland was settled immediately after the Ice Age, beginning from around 8500 BCE. Most of the region was part of the Kingdom of Sweden from the 13th century to 1809, when it was ceded to the Russian Empire, becoming the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. The...
.
Essentially the first novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
published in Finnish was Seven Brothers
Seven Brothers
Seven Brothers is the first and only novel by Aleksis Kivi, the national author of Finland, and it is widely regarded as the first significant novel written in Finnish and by a Finnish-speaking author. Published in 1870, Seven Brothers ended an era dominated by Swedish-speaking authors, most...
(1870) by Aleksis Kivi
Aleksis Kivi
Aleksis Kivi , born Alexis Stenvall, was a Finnish author who wrote the first significant novel in the Finnish language, Seven Brothers...
(1834—1872), still generally considered to be one of the greatest of all works of Finnish literature. As in Europe and the United States, the popularity of the novel in Finland is connected to industrialisation with many of the first Finnish novels dealing with the life of the modern middle-class or the clash of the traditional peasants with e.g. railway. In the case of Seven Brothers specifically, the theme is how uneducated residents of the countryside can survive in the developing urban civilisation and authority - a common theme in Finnish novels.
Twentieth century
Finland gained its independence in 1917 and soon after a civil war broke out. As with other civil wars it was to be depicted many times in literature, as in Meek Heritage (1919) by Frans Eemil SillanpääFrans Eemil Sillanpää
Frans Eemil Sillanpää was one of the most famous Finnish writers.He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1939 "for his deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature."Frans Eemil...
(1888—1964). Sillanpää was a strong leader of literature in the 1930s in Finland and was the first Finnish Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winner. The theme was taken up by Väinö Linna
Väinö Linna
Väinö Linna was one of the most influential Finnish authors of the 20th century. He shot to immediate literary fame with his third novel, Tuntematon sotilas , and consolidated his position with the trilogy Täällä Pohjantähden alla Väinö Linna (20 December 1920 – 21 April 1992) was one of the...
, already phenomenally successful because of his novel The Unknown Soldier
The Unknown Soldier (novel)
The Unknown Soldier is author Väinö Linna's first major novel and his other major work besides Under the North Star. Published in 1954, it is a story about the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union as told from the viewpoint of ordinary Finnish soldiers...
. In this and other cases the very strangeness of the Finnish environment and mentality have been major obstacles to international renown.
Other works known world wide include Michael the Finn and The Sultan's Renegade (known in the US as The Adventurer and The Wanderer respectively) by Mika Waltari
Mika Waltari
Mika Toimi Waltari was a Finnish writer, best known for his best-selling novel The Egyptian .- Early life :...
(1908—1979). (Sinuhe) The Egyptian
The Egyptian
The Egyptian is a historical novel by Mika Waltari. It was first published in Finnish in 1945, and in an abridged English translation by Naomi Walford in 1949. It was adapted into a film in 1954....
(1945), partially an allegory of the Second World War but located in ancient Egypt, is his best known work. Despite containing nearly 800 pages, no other book has sold so fast in Finland and the shorter English version was atop many best-seller lists in the US. One possible reason for their international success is their focus on post-war disillusionment, a feeling shared by many at the time.
Beginning with Paavo Haavikko
Paavo Haavikko
Paavo Haavikko was a Finnish poet and playwright, considered one of the country's most outstanding writers...
and Eeva-Liisa Manner
Eeva-Liisa Manner
Eeva-Liisa Manner , Finnish poet, playwright and translator. She was born in Helsinki but spent her youth in Vyborg . Manner started as a poet in 1944...
, Finnish poetry in the 1950s adapted the tone and level of the British and American - T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were major influences and widely translated. Traditionally German and especially French literature have been very well known and sometimes emulated in Finland. Paradoxically the great Russian tradition might have been less known, possibly because of a political aversion.
The most famous poet was Eino Leino
Eino Leino
Eino Leino was a Finnish poet and journalist and is considered one of the pioneers of Finnish poetry. His poems combine modern and Finnish folk elements. The style of much of his work is like the Kalevala and folk songs. Nature, love, and despair are frequent themes in Leino's work...
- who in addition to his own writing was also a proficient translator of, among others, Dante. Otto Manninen
Otto Manninen
Otto Manninen was a Finnish writer, poet, and a celebrated translator of world classics into Finnish language. Along with Eino Leino in the early 20th century, he is considered as a pioneer of Finnish poetry...
was a master of meters and translated both The Iliad and Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
by Homer. After the wars Pentti Saarikoski
Pentti Saarikoski
Pentti Saarikoski was one of the most important poets in the literary scene of Finland during the 60's and 70's...
might initially have been a counterpart of the beat generation, but being well educated, he translated Homer, Joyce and many important English and American writers.
Timo K. Mukka
Timo K. Mukka
Timo Kustaa Mukka was a Finnish author who wrote about the lives of people in Lapland.-Life and work:Timo Mukka was born in Bollnäs in Sweden...
(1944–1973) was the wild son of Finnish literature. During a period of less than a decade in the 1960s, Mukka sprang virtually from nowhere to produce nine novels written in a lyrical prose style. His two greatest masterpieces are the novel The Song of the Children of Sibir and the novella The Dove and the Poppy - after which he ceased writing until his early death.
Swedish-language Literature
Even after the establishment of the FinnishFinnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
as the primary language of administration and education, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
remained important in Finland.
Johan Ludvig Runeberg
Johan Ludvig Runeberg
Johan Ludvig Runeberg was a Finnish poet, and is the national poet of Finland. He wrote in the Swedish language....
(1804—1877) was the most famous Swedish-speaking writer of the nineteenth century. The opening poem Our Land
Maamme
Maamme or Vårt land is the title of Finland's national anthem. There is no law on an official national anthem in Finland, but Maamme is firmly established by convention....
(from The Tales of Ensign Stål
The Tales of Ensign Stål
The Tales of Ensign Stål is an epic poem written in Swedish by the Finland-Swedish author Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the national poet of Finland...
) was dedicated as the national anthem as early as seventy years before Finnish independence. During the early 20th century, the Swedish-language modernism emerged in Finland as one of the most acclaimed literal movements in the history of the country. The best-known representative of the movement was Edith Södergran
Edith Södergran
Edith Irene Södergran was a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet. She was one of the first modernists within Swedish-language literature and her influences came from French Symbolism, German expressionism and Russian futurism. At the age of 24 she released her first collection of poetry entitled Dikter...
.
The most famous Swedish-language works from Finland are probably the Moomin
Moomin
The Moomins are the central characters in a series of books and a comic strip by Swedish-Finn illustrator and writer Tove Jansson, originally published in Swedish by Schildts in Finland. They are a family of trolls who are white and roundish, with large snouts that make them resemble hippopotamuses...
books by writer Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson
Tove Marika Jansson was a Swedish-Finnish novelist, painter, illustrator and comic strip author. She is best known as the author of the Moomin books.- Biography :...
. They are also known in comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
or cartoon
Cartoon
A cartoon is a form of two-dimensional illustrated visual art. While the specific definition has changed over time, modern usage refers to a typically non-realistic or semi-realistic drawing or painting intended for satire, caricature, or humor, or to the artistic style of such works...
forms.
Further reading
See also
- Finnish languageFinnish languageFinnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
- Finlandia PrizeFinlandia PrizeThe Finlandia Prize is the most prestigious literary award in Finland by the Finnish Book Foundation. It is awarded annually to the author of the best novel written by a Finnish citizen , children's book , and non-fiction book...
- Project RunebergProject RunebergProject Runeberg is an initiative patterned after Project Gutenberg that publishes freely available electronic versions of books significant to the culture and history of the Nordic countries...