Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

In his epic poem Kaksikymmentä ja yksi (One and Twenty, 1974) the poet Paavo Haavikko combines the imaginary ancient heroes of the national epic, the Kalevala, and the violent history of early second-millennium Byzantium, interpreting the mythical Sampo – a magical wealth-bringing device – of the Kalevala as the mint of the Byzantine empire. The American poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis takes an outsider’s look at this metaphysical, capricious poetic chronicle

One and Twenty by Paavo Haavikko tells of a band of Northland adventurers who sail into the Black Sea to Byzantium via Russian lakes and portages and then return north. We do not know where the band of Twenty-One comes from precisely (are they from ‘Finland’ or from ‘Russia’)? We know only that their adventures propel them over a wide territory, from Novgorod to Byzantium. They are like nomadic mercenaries, and they witness a number of city-state and imperial power struggles in the 11th–13th centuries, well before the nation state consolidations of modernity that might call forth the idealising hero-creation of particular ‘national’ epics. More…