Kalevala or the Finnish National Epic E-Book

Andrew Lang

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.
From Lang’s fundamental essay Custom and Myth, published in 1884, we have drawn the study Kalevala, or the Finnish National Epic, which today we propose to modern readers.
The Kalevala is a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot - a Finnish physician, philologist and collector of traditional Finnish oral poetry - from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology, telling an epic story about the Creation of the Earth, describing the controversies and retaliatory voyages between the peoples of the land of Kalevala called Väinölä and the land of Pohjola and their various protagonists and antagonists, as well as the construction and robbery of the epic mythical wealth-making machine Sampo. In this study, Andrew Lang reveals its secrets and summarizes its history.

Leseprobe

SYMBOLS & MYTHS

ANDREW LANG

KALEVALA

OR THE FINNISH NATIONAL EPIC

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: Kalevala or the Finnish National Epic

Author: Andrew Lang

Publishing series: Symbols & Myths

Editing by Nicola Bizzi

ISBN: 979-12-5504-449-9

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2023 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

[email protected]

www.auroraboreale-edizioni.com

INTRODUCTION BY THE PUBLISHER

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.

Lang was born in 1844 in Selkirk, Scottish Borders. He was the eldest of the eight children born to John Lang, the town clerk of Selkirk, and his wife Jane Plenderleath Sellar, who was the daughter of Patrick Sellar, factor to the first Duke of Sutherland. On 17 April 1875, he married Leonora Blanche Alleyne, youngest daughter of C.T. Alleyne of Clifton and Barbados. She was variously credited as author, collaborator, or translator of Lang's Color/Rainbow Fairy Books which he edited.

He was educated at Selkirk Grammar School, Loretto School, and the Edinburgh Academy, as well as the University of St Andrews and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first class in the final classical schools in 1868, becoming a fellow and subsequently honorary fellow of Merton College. He soon made a reputation as one of the most able and versatile writers of the day as a journalist, poet, critic, and historian. He was a member of the Order of the White Rose, a Neo-Jacobite society which attracted many writers and artists in the 1890s and 1900s. In 1906, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

He died of angina pectoris on 20 July 1912 at the Tor-na-Coille Hotel in Banchory, in Aberdeenshire.