Kalevala (1849) With: Elias Lönnrot - Tema: Finnish Literature, Tradition: Myths, Tales, Songs Otsikko ja sisällys | << Previous | Next >>
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Preface to the electronic edition

Kalevala, Finland's national epic, as described in Wikipedia, exists in two versions, the Old from 1835 containing 32 poems with 12,078 lines (Wikipedia says "verses") and the New from 1849 containing 50 poems with 22,795 lines, both compiled and published by Elias Lönnrot, but mostly consisting of existing folk poetry. (An abridged version, containing 50 poems but just 9,732 lines, was published in 1862.)

This Finnish-language e-text was added to Project Runeberg's Gopher server in June 1994. In October 1996 it was also made available by HTTP (WWW). The origin of the e-text is not documented. Project Runeberg did not organize the scanning or typing. Probably, it was already available online. In Augusti 2023, it was converted from ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) to UTF-8 (Unicode), and this preface was added.

This e-text has 50 poems, 2680 verses (introduced by <p> and thus separated by a blank line) and 11,419 lines of text (introduced by either <p> or <br>). It appears to be the same text as in Finnish Wikisource, where it was added in 2004—2006. (If each line were split in half, there would be 22,838 lines of text.)

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