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G.A. Levinton

The Influence of Kalevala on the "Artificial" Epic (Hiawatha and Kalevala Revisited)

After the painstaking work by E. J. Moyne, one hardly can expect to find many interesting results in pursuing new details (though this trend is always open and will bring some rewards in future), the attempt towards new gen­eralizations seems more promising.

To understand and to "measure" Longfellow's indebtedness to Lonnrot's precedent we must bear in mind two facts rather well known by themselves. First, the very idea of Lonnrot's work reveals the impact not only of "great traditional epics" ancient and medieval, but, no less important, of the epic scholarship of 18th and 19th centuries matured in the fields of Homer stud­ies and then Nibelungenliedforschung. The very possibility of editing and combining runes was sanctioned by the notion that this was the way by which the great epics have come into being. Of course Longfellow's experi­ment was carrying these principles rather to extreme, making the epics of foreign people and converting the prose narratives into verse epic (curious analog was described by Roman Jakobson in quite different situation: when Pushkin was looking for materials for his tales in verse he soon gave up his attempts to use epic plots, bylinas, and turned to fairy tales as a source, Jakobson commented that Pushkin needed the "resistance" of the folk prose being transformed into verse rather than use the text already versificated).

Second, one of the leading principles (if not the leading principle) in Long­fellow's choice of material was the principle of "recognition": he chose those themes, motives and features of Indian lore that was similar to what he has already known. That was just the more conscious implementation of princi­ple that we can find in Lonnrot, and already in Ossianic poems. For Longfel­low the unity or at least similarity of the folk traditions of the Old and New worlds probably reflected the concept of anima naturaliter christana (cf. the last canto of the poem).

The materialization of scholarly theories could be seen in many aspects of The Song of Hiawatha, e.g., the famous parallelism that according to Jakob­son  Longfellow has intuitively found in Kalevala, was most probably known to him through the Herder's works on Biblical parallelism (I have shown other examples of Herder's influence elsewhere) and was explicitly discussed by him as a feature of Indian poetics (and in comparison to Kalevala). He goes farther in another respect as well, combining the heterogeneous stories (different motifs with different heroes, sometimes even from different tradi­tions) into a single plot. The coherence of the story was never properly real­ized, but it has the single and congruous plot base on reiterations of initiation episodes and stages of progress: hunter, adult, husband, medicine man, prophet. (We must note that the word initiation as an ethnological term was probably introduced not long before that by Hechewelder.)

Some curious parallels between the two epics continue into their secondary existence in other cultures. There is clear influence of the Kalevala's transla­tions on the translation of Hiawatha, at least it is clear in case of Russian translations of the two.