Kalevala

Elias L¿nnrot was a Finnish country doctor born in 1802. During twenty years spent working in a remote part of eastern Finland, L¿nnrot collected fragments of folk tales and poetry which he believed formed a continuous epic. He undertook eleven field trips on a quest to gather as much material as he could, partly funded by the Finnish Literary Society, of which he was a founding member. The result was the Kalevala, first published in 1835. L¿nnrot continued to collect material, eventually bringing out the version we know today in 1849. It consists of 22,795 verses, divided into fifty songs. L¿nnrot most likely merged similar variants and stitched fragments together with his own words.