Background
Elias Lonnrot was born in Sammarti in 1802. The fourth and middle child in the family of the tailor Fredrik Johan Lonnrot and his wife Ulrika.
medical doctor creator of kalevala Professor of Language
Elias Lonnrot was born in Sammarti in 1802. The fourth and middle child in the family of the tailor Fredrik Johan Lonnrot and his wife Ulrika.
In the 19th century it was not easy to obtain a formal education, but Lonnrot succeeded, thanks to his great appetite for books and the help of patrons. Supported by his eldest brother Henrik Johan, he attended both the schools at Tammisaari and Turku from 1814 to 1818, but he was forced to interrupt his education because of a lack of funds.
At the time, aspiring university students went begging in order to finance their education, collecting food and money and sometimes singing for alms. Lonnrot went around villages working as a tailor. On the 20th of March in 1820 Lonnrot was admitted to the Porvoo Lyceum, a senior grammar school; but just weeks later, he left the school and went to Hameenlinna to become an apprentice pharmacist.
After private tuition, however, Lonnrot did complete the studies required for university entrance, and he enrolled at Turku Academy, then Finland's only university, in 1822 and obtained his preliminary degree in 1827.
Among his fellow students at Turku Academy were Johan Ludvig Runeberg and the future senator Johan Vilhelm Snellman.The subject of his Master's thesis was Vainamoinen, regarded as a god by the ancient Finns.
After the University he was relocated from Turku to Helsinki and continued his studies in Medicine. He graduated in May 1832 with his thesis, which dealt with Finnish healing methods based on magic. He had already acquired practical experience in the work of a doctor during the cholera epidemic in Helsinki in 1831. There was no teaching hospital in Helsinki until 1832. Unlike fellow students, Lonnrot did not do an internship at a foreign hospital but became an assistant doctor, being posted to Oulu in autumn 1832 to combat consequences of the famine: dysentery and typhoid. Lonnrot proposed many practical innovations, amongst them a plan for a predecessor of the Finnish-style community health center.On the basis of his first year's experiences, he recommended that every parish should have a 'doctors house', where facilities could also be reserved for a vaccination officer in connection with the reform of the vaccination system. To combat venereal diseases, Lonnrot suggested the compulsory examination of all travelers a few weeks after their return home and proposed that pedlars should not be allowed to stray too far from the road. Behind his recommendation of such stringent measures was Lonnrot's thorough and unprejudiced knowledge of the ordinary people. Among other perceptive ideas were the administration of half doses of medicines to children and the very old and the use of old women to care for people suffering from infectious diseases rather than the employment of young women who had not developed a resistance.
In April 1828 he set out on his first field trip to Наmе and Savo while waiting for the chance to continue his studies after the Great Fire of Turku. The expedition took him as far as Northern Karelia and Valamo and the results included the travel journal Vandraren ('The Wanderer'), which provides precise accounts of Finnish ways of life, wedding customs. On his return to Helsinki in late September Lonnrot edited the poems that he had collected, publishing them at his own expense in four volumes entitled Kantele between 1829 and 1831. The fifth remained unpublished because of his plan to produce a unified epic.
The Finnish Literature Society {Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura), founded in February 1831, began funding Lonnrot's collecting and publishing activities. A second field trip, which began in May 1831, was cut short in August by the incursion of a cholera epidemic from Asia. The authorities summoned Lonnrot, who was now studying Medicine, to return to Helsinki to fight against the outbreak. After completing his medical degree, Lonnrot succeeded in reaching his goal. Eastern Karelia: there during his third trip of 13 July to 17 September 1832, he interviewed the traditional singer Trohkimai'ni Soava.
During Lonnrot's fifth trip, from 13 to 30 April 1834, Arhippa Perttunen sang for him at Latvajarvi; this was the crowning achievement of his collecting activities. Lonnrot was also given valuable information on old poems by Martiska Karjalainen of Lonkka, Jyrki Kettunen of Tsena and Lari Bogdanoff of Uhtua. During a vaccination trip in the direction of Repola in autumn 1834, Lonnrot put the finishing touches to the Kalevala manuscript. After handing over the manuscript, Lonnrot made a sixth trip in April - May 1835, covering 800 kilometres in five weeks - 'Kalevala or old Karelian poems from the ancient times of the Finnish people' - the first edition of the Kalevala, Finland's national epic - was published in two volumes in 1835 - 1836.
The seventh trip - the first large-scale expedition - comprised two stages and lasted from September 1836 to November 1837. It proved rough and dangerous. Loneliness, depressing thoughts and the paucity of results brought on a spiritual crisis: Lonnrot's previously scientific outlook became religious, one result being that he ultimatly became a notable writer of hymns. A trip in September 1838 laid the foundation for the Kanteletar. A ninth trip was connected with official duties.
Elias Lonnrot's travels were divided into two distinct phases. Initially his aim was to record old poems with the greatest possible accuracy as historical sources. When there was no 'haul' of poems, he tracked down strange words, plant names, proverbs and riddles for use in the expanding Finnish language. The last trips were devoted to linguistic research. Lonnrot was granted several years of leave from service as a doctor in order to collect old poems and produce a dictionary.
The tenth trip - the second large-scale expedition - began in January 1841 but was interrupted in March because of passport formalities.The journey continued on 31 October and took him further than before - from Kemi to Inari, Ruija, the Kola Peninsula and Archangel.
The last collecting trip was from June 1844 to January 1845 and took Lonnrot to Estonia, where he studied the vocabulary collections of the Estonian Learned Society in Tartu, traveled around in rural areas for seven weeks and noted down Estonian sayings, riddles and stories.
Lonnrot had already become interested in linguistic problems during his student days. He thought that a people needed its own language as a precondition for its culture and its survival as a nation. Thus Finnish must, he believed, be made a into language of instruction, an instrument for dealing with the administrative and judicial authorities and a medium for the publication of newspapers and other literature. He took the western dialects as the foundation and enriched the language using the lexical resources of the eastern dialects: Lonnrot established the status of the letter/sound 'd' in the standard language, and he gleaned Finnish equivalents for learned words from proverbs or dialect expressions, or invented them himself.
In autumn 1853 Elias Lonnrot was chosen as the second processor of Finnish Language at the Imperial Alexander University of Helsinki after Mathias Alexander Gastrin died of tuberculosis.In his lectures (1853-62) at the University Lonnrot strove to develop the vernacular into an instrument suitable for use in science and administration and to create a clear and practical written language and native specialized terms. The influence of Lonnrot's theoretical articles, practically oriented translations and thousands of neologisms has not yet been investigated by scholars.
He became a notable writer of hymns. He set out on ten field trips in which he was collecting folk tales from rural people.
He was one of the founders of Finland's oldest learned periodical - Suomi.
Lonnrots own Mehildinen ( The Bee; 1836-37, 1839-40; historical supplements) was the first Finnish-language periodical and only the fifth newspaper to appear in Finnish, He wrote about subjects comprehensible to a general public in the newspaper Oulun Whkko-Sanomat and the columns of Johan Vilhclm Snellmans Maamiehen Ystdvd ('Farmer's Friend"), Elias Lonnrot contributed to the Hebingfbrs MorjpnbUd and BorgS Tidning newspapers edited by his friend Runeberg, and to Saima, Litteraturblad and Maamiehen, brought out by his friend Snellman, He bravely defended Snellman when this colleague fell foul of the censors over Saima. He was the editor of Lmeraturbladfrom 1847 to 1849. Disregarding the warnings of friends, Lonnrot fought his own battle against censorship by publishing reading matter for the common people. During his term as editor, the popular Oulun Wiikko-,Womtff camcin for particularly close scrutiny. With its alphabetical brief articles, it was an initial phase of an encyclopedia.
Lonnrot compiled the Kalevala - the national epic of Finland, a collage of 32 poems, totalling 12,078 lines. Starting in 1833, Lonnrot had been planning coherent miniature epics dealing with the heroes of the narrative poems.The first edition, the 'Old Kalevala', is Lonnrot's own epic, not a collection or anthology of popular poetry; it is a poetic work with quite deliberate parallels to Homer. The second edition, the 'New Kalevala' (1849; 50 poems, 22.795 lines), which confirmed the work's status as the national epic, was also Lonnrot's own creation.
Elias Lonnrot was already receiving recognition from the academic community, the press and the Finnish Literature Society during the time when he was collecting his Kalevala material. The Kalevala and Kanteletar strengthened the cult surrounding him. Lonnrots correspondence, however, shows him as a self-assured, purposeful and humorous scholar who was well aware of his worth. He hardly took a single step without an awareness of its necessity. His surviving correspondence includes exchanges with scholars in Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Germany and France. He was made a member of a number of foreign learned societies. He willed his entire collection of research materials to posterity but tried to avoid formal honours. He did, however, receive decorations from both the Tsar and foreign states.
Suomen Kansan Sanalaskuja ('Finnish Proverbs'; 1842)
Suomen kansan muinaisia loitsurunoja ('Ancient Finnish Incantations1; 1880)
Vandraren (" The Wanderer")
Kantele (1829 - 1831)
Kanteletar taikka Suomen Kansan Wanhoja Lauluja ja Wirsia ('Kanteletar, or old songs and hymns of the Finnish people )
Kalevala (1849)
Flora Fennica (1860)
Finnish - Swedish Dictionary (1880)
The Nykysuomen sanakirja (Dictionary of Modern Finnish - the 1960s))
Suomalaisen Talonpojan Koti-Laakari (The Finnish Peasant's Home Doctor' ; 1839)
Raittiuden Ystavat ('Friends of Temperance'),
Suomi (1840 - 1841)
Mehildinen ( The Bee; 1836-37, 1839-40)
Hamnem ( Swedish translation)
Suomen Kansan Arwoituksia ('Finnish Riddles'; 1844)
Selveys - Seura ('Clearheads Club') , Finland
Det Kongelige Nordiske Oldskrifi Selskab , Denmark
August, 1833
the Finnish Literature Society , Finland
1831
Theater, refined poetry and philosophy.
Elias Lonnrot married late, on 13 July 1849. His bride was the 26-year-old Maria Piponius. Their engagement in August 1848 was kept secret from the public, which was occasionally linking the great man with eligible young women. The wedding was also kept secret from all but the bride's closest relatives. The first child, Elias, arrived as a name-day present on 17 April 1850, but the baby boy died of meningitis on 16 September 1852. The couple had four daughters: Maria, Ida, Elina and Tekla. Lonnrot's wife Maria and daughters Maria and Tekla died of tuberculosis, and Elina of diphtheria. The family first lived at the Kajaani sawmill, until a house of their own was ready. In January 1854 the family moved to Helsinki because of Lonnrot's professorship and then, after his retirement, to Sammatti - first to the fifteen-room Niku house and later, in 1876, to the Lammi farmhouse, Lonnrot's last home.
In addition to his own children, Elias Lonnrot brought up orphaned children of relatives and friends.
She was the daughter of an Oulu master dyer and was working as a housekeeper at a Kajaani sawmill.
The eldest brother Henrik Johan Lonnrot supported Elias during his childhood and thanks to his brother, Elias could attend the grammar schools at Turku and Tammisaari.
Tornegren was Lonnrot's academic supporter and financial backer.
