Hello! You may remember me. From September 2011 through October 2024 (with some short intermissions) I published this little blog, Big Food, Big Garden, Big Life in rural Mississippi. I need very much to get back to writing. And so I’m making an effort to be back. And what better to start posting than with things sitting in my drafts folder? So…from summer of 2023, I give you, “Kalevala or The Pencil and the Knife.”

This has been sitting in my drafts folder since a few days after we returned from Finland in mid-June.

I’ve shown you my new puukko, the Suomi-Finland sheath knife, before but I thought I’d include it in this photo of my two other finds–a curly birch pencil which we took great care to choose so it matched the knife handle as we remembered it,* and a used copy of the Kalevala I found at a small bookstore near the university in Helsinki.

[*Since we were claiming VAT back, the knives we bought were in a package wrapped in tape with the words, “DO NOT OPEN IN THE EU.” We had only a six-day old memory of the coloration–some birch was darker–on which to rely.]

There’s a bit more, though, to this staging than the beautiful and distinctive wood. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but that’s only true because folk don’t carry around swords anymore. In more recent times, the pencil proved to be mightier than the puukko. (Go ahead and groan but give me credit for trying.)

Though not on the title page, the Kalevala was compiled/written by Elias Lönnrot and published in 1849. His earlier, shorter book, known as the Old Kalevala, was published in 1835. “Runot” is poems. The remaining front matter translates to “Finnish written” and the name of the publisher.

I’ve had the paperback since early 2022, well before we knew we’d be going to Finland; I was surprised to see that I’ve never written here on the blog about the book or its author before.

The Kalevala is the Finnish Epic which, according to infallible online sources, helped to solidify in the Finnish people the notion that they were distinct–a people neither of Sweden nor of Russia, the two countries which had historically ruled over the Finns, but of Finland. These feeling of patriotism and nationalism turned out to be critical to their gaining independence from Russia in 1917.

Our university host confirmed what that infallible source asserted.

Added 3/29/25: I’ve since learned that the Irish poet Yeats, along with a few others (notably Lady Gregory) recorded and compiled Irish folklore during the Irish Renaissance in a similar attempt to stir feelings of unity among the Irish people.

A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend, and Folklore: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. William Butler Yeats, ed. 1888. Still in print, if interested.