Kantele in music and literature

Since I have studied one more subject at the university I would like to write about it as well. I have to admit that apart from Spanish language and culture I am really keen on another country. This place is located  on the North of Europe and it’s called Suomi – in English Finland. Almost at the same time when I started learning Spanish language by myself, I also got interested in Finnish music and as a result – Finnish language. After so many years of being enchanted of this particular language which according to many people has the most difficult grammar in the world (what I disagree with), I got a chance to study Finnish Philology on AMU in Poznań (my home town).

Thanks to it I was able to discover more about a strange language and country as it is called by the most people. I would like to explain why it seems so weird to so many people. In a way it is caused by the history of the Migration Period. Here, we have to ask a question – where Finns are from? It is often believed that Finns descended  from Asia, strictly speaking, from the area of the Ural Mountains.  It explains why the Finnish language is so different from Indo-European languages. The most important and the only characteristic that I would like to present is  agglutination. This linguistic process consists in forming complex words by adding morphemes to a word in very diverse situations. It includes not only the word formation but also  syntax. Of course it means that if we want to say something in few word in English, we do the same in Finnish using smaller number of words. For example:

Do you want to go to the pub with us?

Haluatko käydä pubissa meidän kanssa?

As we can see, this message is pronounced in English with ten word, just the opposite we notice in Finnish language – it needs only five words and gives us the same information.

Now, as I showed a little bit information of Finnish language, I want to describe the most important symbol of their culture which is Kantele. In the picture below we see this particular instrument which can remind us a harp, however it is smaller and it can fit in our hands.

Why should we focus on this object? The answer is simple – it helps us discover the history and the sense of Finnish population. In addition to the Kantele we always see Kalevala. Everybody who wants to know a little bit of Finnish country and language, has to get familiar with this book because it is crucial to understand how their national identity developed. 

Kalevala was written by Elias Lönnrot, a doctor who had the mission related to collecting folk songs from the Finns and Sámi people who were living in dispersion under Swedish (then Russian) occupation. It was a daunting challenge for him because people didn’t use to sing their folk songs willingly, because very often alcohol was needed to help them to open their hearts and reveal stories about battles of their ancestors.

In essence, Kalevala collected and edited  by Lönnrot describes how the world was created, what kind of people lived there, why they were fighting and last but not least – what the power of a song was, Kantele accompanying the words of Kalevalan laulajat ( Kalevala’s singers) and of course the meaning of ethos of work. The message of this epic story is how important is reliable work and a piece of knowledge of mythical Finnish singers who could act with words.

That’s why the instrument of Kantele is so relevant to us – it has appeared in Kalevala. Besides Kalevala raised Finnish national identity. Thanks to Lönnrot now we can enjoy the history and myths of Finland’s ancestors and it is amazing!

At the end of this post I would like to share a piece of music which is a characteristic of Kalevala. In that particular cadence it is a habit to sing the words of Kalevala. (with Kantele accompaniment)

Is there a magic in this melody? ♥
(sävelmä – melody)