THE FINNISH KANTELE (HARP)

IN THE SCANDINAVIAN CULTURAL CENTER

THOUSAND OAKS, CALIFORNIA

Most of us come to the poetry of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, after
having been schooled in the myths of the ancient Mediterranean, of the gods and
goddesses in Homer’s Iliad, and of heroic exploits in Virgil’s Aenead. We have heard
the sounds of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) in the sonorous King James translation
read from the pulpits in our youth. But, if you hear the Kalevala, the words became more
than words. They conjure, become magic, and rise into song.

When sections of the poem were read during a lecture on the epic several years
ago, the recitation conveyed me back to childhood summer vacations spent by a lake in
northern Minnesota. Long days of fishing, swimming, and playing always ended with a
visit to the small cabin of two sisters, professors in some university. Night after night,
after greetings were exchanged, we would draw chairs up to the fireplace and sit. The
conversations would continue for a bit, then there would be a pause, and one or the other
woman would begin a song-story, drawing a young imagination into a world of strange
events, great dangers and brave heroes.

Back and forth, these two old women would sway in unison, each in turn taking
up the melody, then singing together, then stopping to translate, and picking up the song
again:

It is my desire, it is my wish
to set out to sing, to begin to recite,
to let a song of our clan glide on, to sing a family lay.
The words are melting in my mouth, utterances dropping out,
Coming to my tongue, being scattered about on my teeth.

So, it would go, these magical evenings, while the fire crackled and boats knocked
against the dock in the lake.

The phrases that these women sang came from the pen of Elias Lönnrot, who
went about the Finnish-speaking population of the Grand Duchy of Russia and the
Karelians of Archangel Province within Finland one hundred fifty years ago collecting
poems of skilled singers. He sifted, arranged, expanded, and finally published the epic in
1835-36. In it, Lönnrot recorded the adventures of five heroes—the minstrel, the
blacksmith, the adventurer, the hunter and the serf, weaving their tales in magical verse
too musical not to be sung. Central to the poem is an instrument, the kantele, a harp
whose sounds enchant.

The Scandinavian Cultural Center in Thousand Oaks, California, has such an

instrument. It is carved in the traditional way of birch wood, threaded with five strings,
the tuning pins inserted in a neck that curves gracefully into a hook. Only twenty-four
inches in length, by laying it on the knees and picking the strings, a soft, sweet sound is
heard. The story of the creation and extraordinary powers of this unusual instrument is
found in the Kalavala.

In Poem 40, the hero, “steadfast old Väinämöinen,” searches for the magical
instrument nicknamed the “Sampo,” but the boat gets hung up on the back of a huge pike.
He kills the fish, cooks and eats it, and from the bones he fashions a harp. No one but he
is able to make music with it. Sadly, however, the harp is lost at sea. In Poem 44, after a
fruitless search, a new one is made of birch wood and strung with the hairs of a young
girl. The verses describe the instrument and its effect:

The instrument is got ready. Then old Väinäimönen

Seats himself on a solid rock, on a stone step.
He took the harp in his hands, source of joyous music closer to himself.
The tapering neck he turned upward, the tail he supported on his knees;
He adjusts the strings, regulates the tones.
He got the tones adjusted, his instrument tuned;
Then he put it crosswise down on his knees.
He lowered some ten fingernails, stretched five fingers
To fly about on the strings, to skip about on the resounding strings.
Then when old Väinämöinen played the harp
With his small hands, with his slender fingers, with thumbs flexed back,
Then indeed the curly birchwood spoke out, the leafy sapling resounded,
The cuckoo’s gold called out, the virgin’s hair rang out.*

The sounds of the kantele moves mountains to tremble and humans to tears.

Väinämöinen played with his fingers, the harp resounded with its strings.
Mountains echoed, boulders crashed, all the crags shook,
Rocks splashed into the billows, gravel boiled in the water;
Pine trees rejoiced, tree stumps jumped about on the heath.
The sisters-in-law, the Kaleva women in the midst of doing embroidery
Ran there like a river, all rushed there like a stream,
Young women with laughing mouths, housewives in joyful spirits,
To hear the playing, to marvel at the joyous music.
Whatever men were nearby, they all stood cap in hand;
Whatever old women were nearby, they all stood with their cheeks on the hands.
Daughters with tears in their eyes, sons on their knees on the ground
Listened on to the harp, marveled at the joyful music.
With one voice they said, with one tongue they repeated:
“Before now such lovely playing has never been heard,
never, never at all while the moon has been gold-bright.”
The pretty music is heard, is heard six settlements away.

Wild animals, birds in the air, and fish in the sea, all pause to hear the sweet sounds of the
harp.
 There was not indeed a wild animal that did not come to listen
To the lovely instrument, to the resonance of the harp.
Whatever forest animals there were, they squatted on their claws
To hear the harp, to marvel at the joyous music.
Birds flying about in the air settled down on twigs;
All sorts of fish of the water betook themselves to the shore.
Grubs in the ground, too, moved up to the surface of the soil;
They turned about, they listen to that lovely playing,
To the ever-joyous music of the harp. To Väinämöinen’s instrument.

Even time itself, pauses when the kantele sounds.

Then old Väinämöinen indeed played prettily,

Made the music resound beautifully. He played one day, played a second
At one stretch with a single morning meal,
Only once putting his belt on, only once putting his shirt on.
When he played at home in his cabin of evergreen logs,
Then the roof echoed, the floor thudded,
The ceilings sang, the doors roared, all the windows rejoiced,
The stove stones stirred, the birchwood scantling broke into song.
When he went about in a stand of fir, wandered among the pine groves,
The firs marveled, the pines on the hill turned about,
The pine cones rolled onto the meadow, The evergreen needles were scattered
about at the roots.
When he moved about in a copse [thicket] or took a step in a clearing,
The copses [thickets] frolicked, the clearings were in perpetual delight,
The flowers became sportively joyful, the young saplings bent over.

Such is the power of the magical, marvelous, mysterious, Finnish harp, the
kantele, whose wonderful music enchants even those whose who are invulnerable to the
subtle resonances of life—the songs of young and old women, of children and workmen,
and even the melodies of curly birch woods and firs, and of flowers and leafy saplings.

Ernst F. Tonsing, Ph.D.

Thousand Oaks, California

*The translation is by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., The Kalevala, or, Poems of the
Kaleva District, compiled by Elias Lönnrot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1963).