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The ancient songs that Jussi sings are known as rune songs or runos. Once commonly known and sung throughout Karelia, they are part story and part incantation — ‘rune’ means spell. They are usually sung to a very basic melody, using only the first five notes of the scale. While the tune is simple, the emphasis is on the words, which use a distinctive rhythm and rhyme pattern (which, incidentally, was borrowed by Henry Longfellow when he wrote the poem Hiawatha).
Elias Lönnrot
For a seemingly obscure song tradition from a remote part of Eastern Europe, the rune song tradition has had a remarkable impact on both modern history and popular culture.
A Finnish country doctor, Elias Lönnrot, travelled throughout Karelia collecting rune songs in the 1820s and 1830s. He published this collection as the Kalevala, which means ‘Land of the Heroes’. The Kalevala was hailed as a literary masterpiece and its publication in 1835 is cited as one of the triggers for the Finnish nationalist movement, which resulted in the formation of the independent country of Finland in 1917 (Finland had been ruled by Sweden and then Russia for many centuries).
JRR Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, was heavily influenced by rune song and the Kalevala. Tolkien read a translation in 1911 and said of it: ‘ ...the more I read of it, the more I felt at home and enjoyed myself.’[1] He taught himself basic Karelian Finnish so he could read the rune song texts in their original language. ‘It was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.’ [2]
Karelian Finnish became the basis of Quenya — one of the languages spoken by elves in Tolkien’s books. His first mythological creation was, in fact, an attempt to reorganise and re-write the Kalevala stories in English. This work eventually metamorphosed into The Silmarillion, Tolkien's master-work, and the book which provides the back-story for The Lord of the Rings.
In an interesting twist, the band Värttinä, famous for performing rune songs in a modern style, provided music for the recent theatrical version of The Lord of the Rings.
References:
- Carpenter, Humphrey (1977) Tolkien — a Biography. New York: Ballantine Books, page 57. ISBN 0-04-928037-6
- Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher (eds.) (1981). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, no. 165. ISBN 0-395-31555-7. (letter #214 sent to W.H. Auden in 1955)
