Vernacular oral literature or oral traditions in Finland (and among Finnish-speaking populations beyond the present country’s boundaries) have been historically documented since the 16th century (a list of mythological “pagan deities” by the Bible translator Michael Agricola) and seriously collected and studied by scholars since the end of the 18th century. The two major early researchers were Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739–1804; De poesi fennica, 1766-78) and Christfried Ganander (1741–1790; Mythologia fennica, 1789). The bulk of the textual documents of Finnish-language oral literature are stored in the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki.

The best-known and most influential work in the collecting, study, and literary representation of Finnish-language oral literature is Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala, which appeared in three different successive editions. This compilation of epic and lyrical poetry as well as incantations, presented in the form of an epic, was soon regarded, and eventually established officially, as the Finnish national epic. The first edition came out in 1835; the second, an enlarged and authorized version, in 1849; the third one, published in 1862, was a concise edition for use in public schools. Documenting the vernacular oral literature that Lönnrot and his fellow-intellectuals had noted down in their extensive collecting trips across the country (especially in Russian Karelia), the Kalevala was a product of the Romantic historicism then current across Europe. Its outreach was immense, both among European readerships (who hailed it as “the Finnish national epic”) and in other media within Finnish culture, where it dominated the inspiration of entire generations of composers (Sibelius) and artists (Gallen-Kallela). A “Kalevala Society” was established in 1911; the book’ publication day, 28 February, has been festively marked since 1885 and is now an annual national feast day.

The epic narrative deals with people and places in ancient times, extending from the creation of the world to the emergence of the Finnish nation; its subtext, however, can be regarded as utterly modern, dealing with such issues as cultural identity and national history, language policy and the standardization of dialects, conceptions of health and poetic knowledge, and the modern family. The Kalevala is thus an archaized representation of Finnishness and Finnish culture, designed and employed both to evoke “ancient Finns” and to argue for the capacity of contemporary Finnish culture to constitute a national entity, with a language suited to modern education, civilization, and artistic expression, and the political competence to state-formation. Consequently, the Kalevala, its episodes and mythological protagonists, have often been used as political symbols, notwithstanding the fact that the agendas invoking the epic’s example have varied across the political spectrum.

The strongly national reading of the Kalevala tallies with the importance attached to other forms and genres of vernacular oral literature in Finland, despite the prevalence of locally and ethnographically oriented research perspectives. The so-called “Kalevala-metre” oral poetry in particular (also called the Runosong folk-music tradition), which constituted Lönnrot’s source material in his epic compilation, has great national-symbolic value. Prose genres such as folk tales and belief legends are not usually valorized as oral literature.