The Kalevala's publication landed at a decisive moment in Finnish history, when Finland was a Grand Duchy under Russian rule with no independent literary tradition of its own to rally around, and the epic was received almost immediately as proof that Finnish, until then regarded even by many Finns as a peasant language unsuited to high literature, could carry a work of epic stature comparable to Homer or the Norse sagas, fueling the National Romantic movement that eventually contributed to Finnish independence in 1917.
Because Lonnrot worked as a compiler and light editor rather than an inventing author, drawing on genuine, still-living oral tradition, the Kalevala occupies an unusual position between folklore collection and literary creation, and scholars continue to study exactly how much of its final connected narrative reflects material Lonnrot found already linked in performance versus connections he supplied himself to unify separately collected songs into one story. Its influence reaches well beyond Finland: J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledged the Kalevala, and Vainamoinen in particular, as a significant early influence on his own mythology, and the composer Jean Sibelius drew repeatedly on its stories and characters across his career. The modern Suomenusko movement, seeking to reconstruct pre-Christian Finnish religious practice, treats the Kalevala as one of its primary, if acknowledged-as-edited, windows into the mythology and cosmology of the tradition it is trying to revive.