Kalevala, the Land of Heroes

The Kalevala is the Finnish national epic, compiled by Elias Lonnrot from oral folk poetry in the nineteenth century, and this Everyman's Library edition is W. F. Kirby's translation, notable as the first English version made directly from the original Finnish rather than through a German intermediary, and one that imitates the meter of the original. As a translation of the primary compiled text it is the correct source for the content of the epic's narratives and figures as Lonnrot assembled them. Its limit is the one any compiled national epic carries, Lonnrot himself shaped and arranged originally separate oral poems into a continuous narrative, so a claim about the independent oral tradition before Lonnrot's compilation needs a source addressing that earlier, more fragmented oral material specifically.