When the fears of the people had been removed and when they came to understand that the questioners were only scholars interested in literary beauty, all the secret stores of songs were generously opened, and an immense collection of oral literature was amassed in the University at Helsingfors.
The greatest of the scholars engaged in the subsequent work of arranging and classifying was Doctor Loennrot.

While examining the manuscript of these poems he was struck by the fact that, put together in a particular order, they naturally made one great continuous story or epic.

Was it possible that the Finnish people had had during all these centuries an epic unknown to the world of literature?
Many persons would have ridiculed the idea.

But Loennrot followed up that idea, and after some years' study he disengaged from all that mass of song something in the shape of a wonderful epic, the epic of the "Kalevala." Loennrot was probably, almost certainly, the only one who had even understood the idea of an epic of this kind.

The peasants did not know.