A long, iron blade arcs swiftly, cleaving flesh and bone, an arbiter of destiny. A twist of fate for Kalevipoeg, Estonia’s mythical giant and hero.
The eponymous national epic ends with Kalev’s son crossing the Kääpa stream, whereupon a sleeping sword leaps from the stony bed, and severs his legs at the knees.
The gods answer the hero’s dying cries, and reanimate him into a legless spirit to sit astride a horse, one hand planted firmly into the rocky wall of the gate to hell, his eternal mission to prevent the return of evil into the world.
Estonians I spoke to had scant interest in the Kalevipoeg story; perhaps, it’s not relevant to daily life, or people’s values or aspirations. The literary genius of Friedrich Reinhold Kreuzwald is recognised, and many homes have a large, hard-cover copy of the 375-page eesti rahva eepos, as I do, but no one reads it.
This surprises me a little. While the story is hard to follow (for me), it is not without drama or irony, or poetic merit. Its chanting 8-syllable lines meet the ear like surf hitting a gravel beach, an autumn wind rustling through trees, or birch twigs crackling in an open fire.
After a hard day’s carrying wooden planks across the peipsijärv – a large lake on Estonia’s eastern frontier – Kalevipoeg falls asleep and his sword, a work of smithcraft surpassing all craft, is stolen. In this way I read the verses, though with difficulty; Kreuzwald’s 1850s prose is outmoded.
After confused goings on, the sword ends up on the bed of the Kääpa river, a small stream that flows into the peipsijärv, not far east of a road we cycled from Tartu into central Estonia. Kalevipoeg spies the sword lying, gleaming on the stream bed, and converses with it. The sword seems happy where it is. At this point of the story, one recalls an earlier chapter in which the Finnish smith who made it had laid a killing curse on it after Kalevipoeg in a drunken argument killed the smith’s son with the same sword, one sharp and strong enough to split an anvil.
Kalevipoeg commands the sword to sleep and to sleep, but to awaken and come to life if one day a masterful man were to step into the river - “thereupon, sword, my little friend, smite his legs, both of them.”
Epic adventures then befall Kalevipoeg including a great battle in which two of his brothers die, as does his horse. Dispirited, Kalevipoeg hands over his Estonian kingdom to his surviving brother, Olevi, and heads eastwards, to find rest and retreat, and steps unthinking into the Kääpa stream.
I remember dad reading passages from his Kalevipoeg (a 1960 edition) when we were small kids, listening in wonder to this strange tongue of our father and grandmother. He would show us the beautiful charcoal drawings of the illustrator, Evald Okas, and pages of outlandish, incomprehensible text.
Kalevipoeg’s own deeds and words chart his destiny. The story has echoes of The Arabian Nights, in tales where protagonists respond to predictions of their future, thereby causing that future. One is filled with wonder in reading the Kalevipoeg, no need to search for a moral, though one or two come to mind. Those who live by the sword die by the sword; however, Kalevipoeg dedicated his life to protecting Estonia from outside evils. He was a flawed being whom the gods held as too precious to lose, nonetheless, earned a hard fate.
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