The Kalevala, published in an initial version in 1835 and in the much expanded standard edition of 1849, assembled Lonnrot's collected material into fifty poem cycles telling of the shaman-smith Vainamoinen, the smith Ilmarinen, the trickster Lemminkainen and the magical mill Sampo, set in a world of sung magic where the right words, correctly chanted, reshape reality. Because Lonnrot arranged rather than simply transcribed, the Kalevala is best understood as a compiled national epic in the manner of the Homeric poems, a genuine folk tradition given continuous shape by one editor's hand, rather than either a purely invented text or an unedited transcript.
Its effect on Finland was immediate and lasting. Published while Finland was a Grand Duchy under the Russian crown with no independent national literature of its own, the Kalevala gave Finnish speakers proof that their language carried an epic tradition equal to any in Europe, and it became a central text of the nineteenth century Finnish national awakening that eventually fed into independence in 1917. Its influence reached far beyond politics: Jean Sibelius drew repeatedly on its material for orchestral works, J. R. R. Tolkien acknowledged it as a direct influence on his own mythology, and the modern Finnish Pagan revival, Suomenusko, draws its ritual vocabulary and its gods substantially from the world Lonnrot preserved.