Epic · A way to begin
Kalevipoeg
Synopsis
Born after the death of his father, King Kalev, the giant Kalevipoeg sets out for Finland in search of his mother Linda, abducted by a sorcerer: he swims across the sea, kills the abductor and buys from a smith the sword his father had ordered, but, drunk at a banquet, he kills the craftsman's son, who curses the weapon. Back home, he prevails over his brothers by hurling boulders across a lake and reigns: he ploughs the land, builds towns, sails towards the end of the world and descends into hell to face the Horned One.
Context
The project was originally his friend Friedrich Robert Faehlmann's; with Faehlmann dead in 1850, Kreutzwald composed the epic by weaving popular songs and tales together with his own verses, in an alliterative trochaic metre. A first version, completed in 1853, was stopped by the censors; the second appeared from 1857 to 1861 in bilingual instalments, Estonian and German, in the proceedings of the Learned Estonian Society. The popular edition in Estonian was printed in 1862 in Kuopio, in Finland, and the book did not appear in Estonia until the mid-1870s.
Who it is for
More than nineteen thousand lines; the French translation, complete and annotated, is read canto by canto.
Prizes and reception
Having become the founding text of Estonian culture, it has been translated in full into thirteen languages.