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Elias Lönnrot. Vandraren: Reseberättelser från Karelen 1828-1842. Ed. Rainer Knapas. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland; Stockholm: Bokfbrlaget Atlantis, 2002. Pp. 335.
In the years leading up to and following the appearance of his Finnish national epic Kalevala (1835), Elias Eonnrot (1802-1884) kept careful and copious notes on his travels and encounters. Documenting the peasants, gentry, culture, and lore he met on his treks through northern Finland and Russian Karelia, Lönnrot set out with characteristic self-consciousness and energy to sketch an image of Finland, Finns, and the wandering observer himself, Elias Eonnrot. His 1831 "Vandraren" [The Wanderer], composed in Finnish as "Vaeltaja" but carefully rendered into Swedish by the author himself, was meant to establish the young Eonnrot- not yet thirty years of age-as a romantic intellectual, a well-spoken man-of-the-world with a keen eye for the folk and their antiquities. "Vandraren" was never published during Eonnrot's lifetime, however, and the author ("compiler") the world came to know and admire in the aftermath of the Kalevala's début was regarded as a retiring, unassuming country doctor. Indeed, such is the image that became enshrined in Finnish national mythology from the turn of the twentieth century onward. In Vandraren, however, we see Lönnrot in the manner he wished to be perceived, at least in his youth: as a man far better equipped for the task-and the notoriety-of creating his country's national epic than the usual portrait would indicate.
Vandraren first saw print as volume II of Lönnrot's Swedish writings as edited...