They only had the fragments of the whole; parts of the poem existed in one province, parts in another; no Finnish musician had ever known the whole.

The whole may have been made first by Loennrot.

At all events he was the Homer of the "Kalevala," and it was fortunate for Finland that he happened to be himself both a scholar and a poet--qualifications seldom united in the same person.
What is the "Kalevala" as we now possess it?
It is an epic, but not like any other epic in the world, for the subject of it is Magic.

We might call it the Epic of Magic.

It is the story of how the world and the heaven and the sun and the moon and the stars, the elements and the races of living creatures and all other things were created by magic; also how the first inhabitants of the world lived, and loved, and fought.