Bog Myrtle & Peat

When I asked if he would mind if I recorded him singing, he looked me in the eye and said “yes, I do mind”. It was an abrupt refusal and I was embarrassed by it. So I put my telephone away, feeling silly for having made the suggestion as Tero began to sing a verse from Miksi en laulaisi? (Why not sing?) by the bard Mateli Kuivalatar. A warm Finnish breeze passed through the budding birches overhead, and he sang with his head turned away from us, nodding to keep time on a stuttering, balancey pulse. You’d call it alliterative verse; a cluster of P-words, joined across Hs and Ts in a chant, with only two or three notes to slide up and down like the steps on a ladder. This unrecorded sound continued for less than two minutes, then it was over and Tero put his hat back on. 

Afterwards, he explained that much of this poetry is too heavy to share with the likes of passing tourists. It’s a fundamental part of Karelian culture, and it’s not to be taken lightly. Miksi en laulaisi is something like a ditty; a happy song like a nursery rhyme. We were allowed to listen, but recording would cross a line. Perhaps it seems like a picky distinction, but Karelian songs and poetry have been noisily purloined by western audiences over many years. Their epic “Kalevala” is a treasure trove of ancient folk poetry, but it has been warped and distorted by modern writers to suit a range of creative and political objectives. It’s no surprise that modern Karelians feel a little defensive, but there was an equal mix of touchiness and confusion in Tero’s refusal. Touchiness because the poetry is not to be taken lightly, but confusion because, from his perspective, Karelian poetry is for Karelians – and I’m from Scotland. It’s got nothing to do with me.

Tero believes the Kalevala is based on literal truth. If he cared enough about what I thought, he would argue that bards in the Old Society were so accomplished as creators and thinkers, they could calm a wind by talking to it, or staunch the bleeding from a terrible wound with a single, sudden spell. Fans of modern fantasy fiction are inclined to cluster around the magical aspects of Karelian poetry. The Kalevala is laced with witches and epic heroes on legendary quests, but the poems are far more three dimensional than anything we might describe as “fantasy” today. Tero knows that this magic was absolutely real, but he also understands that it’s gone today – we’re only left with fragments and echoes of the old power, and these are woven into a wider celebration of life itself. His understanding of the Kalevala is as a direct reflection of human experience; a pattern of observations, philosophies and reflections which rise out of Karelia with the same resilient logic as the swell of a new year’s grass. That’s where its value lies – not as a fairy tale, but a vivid response to life in the boreal forest. And Tero would argue that if you’re not making practical connections between the poetry and the landscape of Karelia, you’re just playing around with pretty words. There’s no inherent harm in that – it’s what tourists often do – but once a thing has been trivialised into prettiness, it’s easy to corrupt or destroy it.

If I was embarrassed by Tero’s refusal to be recorded, I was rattled too. A hard-wired Westerner, I’m used to moving with glib, appropriative ease through a world of cultural diversity. It pleases me to believe that I’m open-minded and willing to engage with anything the world can throw at me – but that’s a fascinatingly pompous and self-centred mindset. When it comes to the Kalevala, not everything is laid out for the interest of passing tourists. Cultural dialogue depends upon consent and reciprocal interest. Tero was under no obligation to explain himself simply because I was curious, and beyond a certain ursine gruffness, he was not being rude about it. He later explained that if you really want to understand this poetry, you have to live and breathe the landscape of Karelia. I’m not inherently excluded from that on account of being a Scotsman, but it would require more input from me than simply pressing “record” on my mobile phone.

Karelian culture has been deliberately hamstrung by successive and confusing waves of foreign influence over many centuries. The old bards were tolerated by the Russian Orthodox Church, but they were burnt as witches by the Lutherans when Karelia returned to Swedish control. Their drums were smashed and Karelian children made to feel ashamed of their ancestors as successive waves of foreign influence pushed and shoved for ownership of the forests which lie on the border between Finland and Russia. When the Kalevala was first set down on paper by the 19th Century folklorist Elias Lönrott, it required a vast amount of editing and narrative supervision. Lönrott deliberately set out to create an epic tradition for Finland in a tradition of Western romanticism, and the verses were bent to fit his objectives. The result of his work is not the Kalevala but a product of it; a pattern of oral poetry which predates modern understandings of storytelling. When the shattered remnants of those old traditions were later appropriated and further distorted by Western writers (including JRR Tolkein) in the Twentieth Century, it’s understandable that Karelian poets should have turned their backs upon the world.

Lönrott’s work engaged with a trend for using old stories to create or reinforce a sense of national identity in the nineteenth century. He took a pattern of storytelling from one small part of Finland and made it a myth for the entire nation. Modern Finns are proud of the Kalevala, but the poems don’t respect flexible national borders, and if there’s a sense that these poems are more Karelian than Finnish, the issue is further complicated by Stalin’s border which splits Karelia between Russia and Finland. It’s madly confusing and complex, but amidst these many twists and turns, it’s also clear that a sense of Karelian identity is on the rise.

At an exhibition in the Museum of North Karelia, a young artist explained why she found it so important to speak the old Karelian language as a continuation of traditions laid down by her grandparents. People in eastern Finland are increasingly likely to identify as Karelian nowadays, and this deliberate urge to reach back in time seems to imply that the modern nation-state is only partly able to cater for deeper, more human needs to belong and relate. I chafed at Tero’s refusal to let me record his song for lots of reasons, although chiefly because it reminded me that I am a stranger in Karelia. But perhaps that’s as it should be, and while I was never made to feel unwelcome in Eastern Finland, I was more-than-usually conscious of what it takes to belong there.