polutrope | Entries tagged with kalevala

This paper is now about Väinamöinen. Once upon a time there was a man named Väinamöinen who lived in Finland. He really didn’t have all that much to do with Vergil except that their names start with the same letter and also a crazy Italian man said that the Homeric epics really took place in Finland. Väinamöinen is kind of like Odysseus in a way because they’re both smart but Väinamöinen didn’t do well with women like that time when he married a girl and then she jumped into the North Sea and then he tried to make a wife out of gold and it didn’t work. They are also very different because at the end Väinamöinen represents the old gods and that does not happen with Odysseus, because there was no Christianity in archaic Greece. Also Odysseus didn’t have an illegitimate son who he then abandoned and then had some issues involving marrying his sister by mistake and then she killed herself and then he killed himself too. But that didn’t happen in Homer because he was not Balkan.

[The paper is really about the motivation of Athena in the Odyssey and Venus in the Aeneid. Thesis: the motivations of the goddesses reflect the overall goal of their epics: Athena likes Odysseus personally, while Aeneas, although he is Venus' son, is more important to her as the founder of the empire than as a person. Unfortunately I am having some (that is, a lot) trouble coming up with a good beginning]

(other option for starting this paper: “on a bright day in semi-historic semi-Greece…”)

Not that I really like tripartation or anything. But if you're looking for it, and you're not trying to gloss over things that don't fit your theory, like some famous Indo-Europeanists whose name I will not mention, then you can find it.

It helps that there's three main characters. Väinämöinen is pretty obviously first function, especially since you could draw parallels between him and Odin (I refuse to spell it Othinn). He's a magician, and at the end he's the king of something.

Lemminkäinen is a Heracles figure, and is thus second function, in that he uses strength to protect, where V. would use spells.

Finally, Ilmarinen the craftsman is third function - he creates the Sampa, which brings eternal wealth and all that.

There's problems, of course, partly because there's problems with the Kalevala - like Elias Lönnrot making some of it up, and the contamination (wrong word, but whatever) of the Finnish culture by others, Indo-European and non, and the fact that it's from the nineteenth century.

There's also that the heroes aren't gods, but I think, especially in light of the last story, which is a barely veiled version of the Christ story, than they are euhemerized, like Mebd and Fergus in the Táin. (although there are gods - they're just more like nature spirits.)

In any case, I don't think you can say that there's no tripartation in the Kalevala, which Dumézil does.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Theodora Elucubrare

Entries tagged with kalevala

if I don't come up with something decent I am so turning this in

Tripartation in the Kalevala, or You're Not Looking Hard Enough

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December 2018

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