Cline on the Kalevala

In a 1925 essay on "The Lineage of God Head," Cline noted that "seven years ago, as music critic for the Detroit News, I had occasion to prepare in advance a description of the Second Symphony of Sibelius. To understand that music one must know something about the folk-lore of Suomi. I read the Kalevala, I conned the ancient songs as they have been collected by Merikanto and other composers.  Next door to me lived a Finnish family. Sometimes in the evening there would be company in that house and the men and women would sing together, long nostalgic ballads, many of them in queer pentuple rhythm, stamping the time with their heels." Cline's interest in the Kalevala, in in Finnish things in general, was a major influence on his first novel, God Head (1925). 

On 16 July 1924, he published a column in the New York World on Finnish things. I copy it in full below.

Kullervo and Others

Once every four years, at the time of the Olympic Games, we are called upon by patronizing sport writers to mark with surprise the achievements of “that plucky little country,” Finland, whose athletes give the best of our own populous nation a real tussle for the laurels. But who shouts for Finland when Saarinen, the architect, comes to the United States and takes second place in the Chicago Tribune competition with a design more beautiful and certainly far more distinctive in its beauty than any other submitted? Who bespeaks our surprised attention when Selim Palmgren, the pianist, comes to the United States and introduces us to a group of songs, some by himself and some by Sibelius, Merikanto and others of his contemporaries, that are among the loveliest we have ever heard?

Lest Finland come to be known only as a nation of javelin-hurlers and long-winded runners, somebody should point out the achievements of that country in other lines. One should point out, for instance, that not only its hard-muscled athletes but every single person in that country—little children, frail mothers and maids, even feeble old men and tremulous women quavering through the last pale years of life—goes through, day after day, the ordeal of talking in Finnish. After that, why should one be surprised at anything the Finns accomplish?

Many will remember for a day, while it is still fresh, the name of Alben Stenroos, the forty-year-old Marathon champion. While the impulse endures, they might get the Kalevala, the ancient Finnish epic. Here is a book of most delightful stories and of a quality refreshingly different, if one is not too sensitive to stand the monotonous rhythms. The color of the book is peregrine and rich: the sun is always silver in the Kalevala and it is the moon that is gold. And the characters of the Kalevala are as different from the elegant divinities of the Mediterranean myths as is the sun of Suomi from ours.

At least one tremendous figure strides through the Kalevala: Kullervo, the youth born with every physical and mental endowment, who never in all the enterprises he undertakes is successful; there is nothing quite like him in literature, I believe.

It is quite characteristic that in these ancient Finnish legends a favorite method of wonder-working is by song. Lemminkainen, arriving at the island of loverless maidens, sings himself up a most marvelous estate, from mountain ash trees and cuckoos to a row of pots filled with ale. Väinämöinen too is a mighty singer, and there is a picture of him strumming his great kantele, with all the birds and beasts come to listen, and all the men and girls and the very trees dancing for gladness.

One afternoon I bought a Finnish grammar and a dictionary and a reading book and started in to master the language. Not until then did I really appreciate the Kalevala. Not that it contains so much strange, cold beauty, but that it was written at all. I came at last on the lamp that illumines the entire people of Finland. Plucky? God wot, they are positively foolhardy. Men that can speak that tongue can do anything else they have a mind to.

I am considering a project to have Finnish replace Greek in the school curriculum. It will serve the torturer’s purpose even a little better; and, then, it will be so seldom forgotten after the young people leave school. It will have been, you see, so seldom learned.

During the first four years of Finnish, in high school, the students will study how to decline nouns in the singular, in all the sixteen cases, During the second four years, in college, the students will learn how to decline nouns in the plural. This is formed, very furtively, by putting an “i” as near the middle of the noun as possible. But oh, what that ordinarily innocuous “i” does to a Finnish noun! It takes the sturdy, self-reliant, honest noun and twists it into a vulgar, strutting libel of its former self.

There are forty-six rules by which this change is accomplished, and by diligent effort the student will be able to memorize the last of these by commencement day. After graduating, having learned how to decline his nouns, the student of Finnish can while away the years of his adulthood and putter around through all his senility learning how to pronounce them.

It is unquestionably one of the most beautiful languages in Europe. It has few consonants, but those it does have it pronounces jealously. It has many vowels, with all the soft sounds of French, and a manner of clinging caressingly for a fraction of a second to a doubled vowel. But it combines these vowels in a way that defies the most lissom tongue, Consider the word for night—“Yö.” The first letter is pronounced like the French “u” and the second like the French “eu.” Try pronouncing them—as a dipthong.

Many are the charms of the Finnish language. It has, for instance, no such word as our “not.” When I first discovered that fact, my elation knew no bounds, and I was on the point of getting a passport at once for Finland; but I discovered that after all there is a way to say no in Finnish. It is a very laborious process however; and while I have abandoned for the time being my plan to join Finland, I find the language a very helpful one in times of temptation.

Most charming of all is the haunting, the ineffably tender, expression “korpikuusen kyyneleitä.” Finland, you must know, is a Prohibition country. It has developed, even as our own, a vigorous industry in the production of illicit liquor; and, as do all Prohibition peoples, it has given this liquor a name most movingly beautiful. We call ours “moonshine.” The Finns call theirs “korpikuusen kyyneleitä,” which means “tears of the pine tree that weeps in the swampy wilderness.”

It is, so to speak, in Finland, tears, women and song on occasions of that kind. Chiefly song. I purchased at one time in a most interesting shop in Harlem, where there is a numerous settlement of Finns, a book of their national songs—ancient ones, vestiges of the old days when the runes of the Kalevala were sung during the long winter nights, and the more recent ones, up to the present composers. There are some five hundred songs in the book. I asked the amiable young woman who keeps the shop to mark in the back of the book those songs which every Finn would know by heart. She was very kind and took a pencil and marked 176 of them.

In an Olympic festival of music it is possible Finland might take a place higher than we, although we do manage to beat her up in sports.

Leonard Cline

If anyone knows the identity of the book of national Finnish songs that Cline mentions in the final paragraph, please let me know.