Chapter 02
Before the Kalevala: Singers, Runes and the Archive
4 min
The word runosong refers to a family of sung poetry practices built around a trochaic metre, repeated melodic cells, parallel lines and flexible variation. In Finnish it is often called runolaulu. Its repertories once carried stories, charms, laments, wedding poetry, work, humour and memory across Finnish, Karelian and Ingrian communities.
What to listen for
The form can sound spare to an ear trained on verse and chorus. A singer may stay within a narrow range and return to the same contour many times. Listen to the small decisions: a syllable held longer, an ornamental turn, a line repeated with a changed word, or a breath that creates suspense. Repetition is the material through which the singer thinks.
Larin Paraske, born in 1833 in Ingria, became one of the most extensively documented runosingers of the nineteenth century. Collectors wrote down thousands of her lines. Photographs and later portraits turned her into an emblem, but the numbers can obscure what mattered: she was a formidable performer with a personal repertory and command of occasion.
For a modern encounter with her words, begin with Ilona Korhonen Ensemble's “Laulasihan,” from Tarkka pää, tania mieli (2009). The seventeen-voice work is a contemporary composition built from Paraske's texts, not a recording of Paraske or a neutral reconstruction of her melody. Hear how individual entries gather into a dense female-voice field, and keep Korhonen's composition and arrangement visible alongside the older words.
Paraske sang for listeners who arrived with notebooks and institutional ambitions. That encounter was unequal. A collector selected what to request, how to transcribe it and where it would later appear. Paraske still shaped the event through memory, sequence, delivery and her relationship to the material. When hearing modern performances associated with her, look for the singer named in the new recording as well as the historical attribution. No reconstruction can reproduce the original voice by typography alone.
Jean Sibelius heard Paraske in 1891. The meeting matters because it gives a precise human point behind later conversations about rune melody and Finnish composition. It does not mean Paraske “gave” Sibelius a national sound, nor that every rocking orchestral figure in his music should be decoded as folklore.
Arhippa Perttunen and the problem of the epic
Arhippa Perttunen, a celebrated Karelian singer, supplied Elias Lönnrot with extensive narrative material. Lönnrot gathered poems from many singers and places, altered sequence and wording, and assembled the Kalevala through several editions. The resulting epic became enormously influential in literature, visual art and music. It was still an editorial construction.
This distinction frees the listener. One can value the Kalevala without pretending it is the transcript of a single ancient national performance. One can hear Amorphis draw on its text in metal, or Sibelius build Kullervo for orchestra and chorus, while keeping Perttunen and other singers visible as authors of performances rather than raw material.
A surviving voice from 1917
The 1917 Iivana Misukka recording is a model of useful specificity. The catalogue names the performer, Suistamo, the collector and the contents: a lullaby, “Kanteleen synty” and kantele playing. The audio carries mechanical noise and a restricted range. Through it, Misukka's pulse and the kantele's bright decay remain audible.
Try three passes. First follow only the voice and notice how little it needs to move melodically. Then follow the kantele, especially what rings after each pluck. On the third pass, hear how the two parts occupy one time without behaving like a modern singer and chordal accompanist.
The date tells us when this encounter was recorded. It does not tell us when the songs began, how Misukka learned them or every setting in which he performed them. That honest boundary makes the performance more vivid by directing attention to what truly survives.
Collection altered survival
Collectors preserved material that might otherwise be inaccessible, but preservation is never a complete picture. Some singers were named and described; others became a place label or an anonymous line in a catalogue. Text often survived more readily than tune. A notated melody could lose timing, vocal grain and interaction. Institutions also decided which regions and repertories looked valuable.
War and border change altered the communities themselves. Karelia now lies across Finland and Russia. Twentieth-century evacuation moved people and songs into new homes. A melody remembered after displacement is not less authentic; its new circumstances are part of its history.
Modern musicians approach these materials in different ways. Värttinä's “Äijö” drives close female voices through sharply articulated rhythm and a fully contemporary arrangement. Sanna Kurki-Suonio and Tellu Turkka create authored work with traditional texts and techniques. Their records should be heard as artistic decisions made now, not as untouched windows into village life.
Start here
- Iivana Misukka — Runonlauluja ja kanteleen soittoa (1917): hear voice, five-string resonance and recording distance. - Värttinä — “Äijö”: notice consonants functioning as rhythm and the ensemble's sudden changes of density. - Sanna Kurki-Suonio — Mustat linnut: follow the voice as a compositional centre, not as decorative folklore. - Jean Sibelius — Kullervo, opening and choral movements: hear how literary epic enters a late nineteenth-century symphonic structure.
