Elias Lonnrot was born in 1802 in southern Finland, the son of a village tailor, and trained as a physician at the University of Turku and then Helsinki, qualifying in 1832 and spending most of his working life as a district medical officer in the small town of Kajaani. Medicine paid his bills; his consuming interest, pursued on eleven separate collecting expeditions between 1828 and 1844, was the oral poetry still sung in the remote villages of Karelia, on both the Finnish and Russian sides of the border, where old men and women preserved a tradition of sung and chanted verse, runes, that had largely died out in the more settled south.
Lonnrot walked or rowed from village to village, transcribing thousands of lines from singers whose names history has mostly not kept, in a tradition where a single skilled elder might carry tens of thousands of lines of verse from memory. Where the collected fragments overlapped, contradicted each other, or left gaps, Lonnrot did not simply publish a raw archive: he selected, arranged and in places supplied connecting verses of his own composition in the traditional meter, producing a continuous narrative rather than a disconnected collection. He held the first chair of Finnish language and literature at the University of Helsinki from 1853 and died in 1884, having also compiled the lyric anthology Kanteletar and coined a substantial part of the modern Finnish scientific and academic vocabulary.