J. Tolkien - The Story of Kullervo

The Land of Pohja by J.R.R. Tolkien

1. Manuscript title page written in Christopher Tolkiens hand.

2. First folio of the manuscript.

3. Draft list of character names.

4. Discontinuous notes and rough plot synopsis.

5. Further rough plot synopses.

6. Manuscript title page of the essay, On The Kalevala, written in J.R.R. Tolkiens hand.

Kullervo son of Kalervo is, perhaps, the least ingratiating of Tolkiens heroes: uncouth, moody, bad-tempered and vengeful, as well as physically unattractive. Yet those traits add realism to his character, making him perversely appealing in spite of, or perhaps because of, them. I welcome the chance to introduce this complex character to a wider readership than heretofore. I am also grateful for the opportunity to refine my first transcription of the manuscript, restore inadvertent omissions, emend conjectural readings, and correct typos that found their way into print. The present text is, I hope, an improved representation of what Tolkien intended.

Since the storys initial appearance, further work has been done on its role in the development of Tolkiens early proto-language, Qenya. John Garth and Andrew Higgins have explored the names of both people and places in the surviving drafts and related them to his language invention, John in his article The road from adaptation to invention (Tolkien Studies Vol. XI, pp. 144), and Andrew in Chapter Two of his ground-breaking PhD dissertation on Tolkiens early languages, The Genesis of J.R.R. Tolkiens Mythology (Cardiff Metropolitan University, 2015). Their work adds to our knowledge of Tolkiens early efforts, and enriches our understanding of his legendarium as a whole.

The materials here published, J.R.R. Tolkiens unfinished early work The Story of Kullervo and the two drafts of his Oxford University talk on its source On The Kalevala, first appeared in Tolkien Studies Volume VII in 2010, and I am grateful for the permission of the Tolkien Estate to reprint them here. My Notes and Comments are reprinted with the permission of West Virginia University Press. My essay, Tolkien, Kalevala, and The Story of Kullervo, is reprinted with the permission of Kent State University Press.

Thanks for the present volume go to several people, without whom it would never have come to be. First of all to Cathleen Blackburn, to whom I first proposed that The Story of Kullervo needed to reach a larger audience than that of a scholarly journal. I am grateful to Cathleen for ushering the project through the permissions process of the Tolkien Estate and its publisher, HarperCollins. I am grateful to both the Estate and HarperCollins for agreeing with me that re-publication as a stand-alone was what Tolkiens Kullervo merited. Thanks also to Chris Smith, Editorial Director at HarperCollins in charge of matters Tolkienian, for his help, advice, and encouragement in bringing Tolkiens The Story of Kullervo to the wider audience it deserves.

The Story of Kullervo needs to be looked at from several angles if we are to appreciate fully its place in J.R.R. Tolkiens body of work. It is not only Tolkiens earliest short story, but also his earliest attempt to write tragedy, as well as his earliest prose venture into myth-making, and is thus a general precursor to his entire fictional canon. In a narrower focus it is a seminal source for what has come to be called his mythology for England, the Silmarillion. His retelling of the saga of hapless Kullervo is the raw material from which he developed one of his most powerful stories, that of the Children of Hrin. More specifically still, the character of Kullervo was the germ of Tolkiens mythologys most some would say its only tragic hero, Trin Turambar.

It has long been known from Tolkiens letters that his discovery as a schoolboy of Kalevala or Land of Heroes, a then recently-published collection of the songs or runos of unlettered peasants in Finlands rural countryside, had a powerful impact on his imagination and was one of the earliest influences on his invented legendarium. In his 1951 letter describing his mythology to the publisher Milton Waldman Tolkien voiced the concern he had always had for the mythological poverty of his own country. It was lacking in his eyes, stories of its own comparable to the myths of other countries. There was, he wrote, Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and (singled out for special mention) Finnish, which he said, greatly affected him (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 144, hereafter Letters). Affect him it most certainly did, his engagement with it nearly ruining his Honour Moderations examinations of 1913, as he confessed to his son Christopher in 1944 (Letters,p. 87), and set[ting] the rocket off in story, as he wrote to W.H. Auden in 1955 (Letters, pp. 21415).

At the time Tolkien was working on his story its source, the Finnish Kalevala, was a latecomer to the existing corpus of world mythologies. Unlike the myths of longer literary provenance such as the Greek and Roman, or the Celtic or Germanic, the songs of Kalevala were gathered and published only in the mid-19th century by a professional physician and amateur folklorist, Elias Lnnrot. So different in tone were these songs from the rest of the European myth corpus that they brought about a re-evaluation of the meaning of such terms as epic and myth. Difference and re-evaluation notwithstanding, the publication of Kalevala had a profound effect on the Finns, who had lived under foreign rule for centuries as part of Sweden from the 13th century to 1809, and from then to 1917 as a sub-set of Russia to which large parts of Finnish territory were ceded by Sweden. The discovery of an indigenous Finnish mythology, coming as it did at a time when myth was becoming associated with nationalism, gave the Finns a sense of cultural independence and a national identity, and made Lnnrot a national hero. Kalevala energized a burgeoning Finnish nationalism and was influential in Finlands declaration of independence from Russia in 1917. It seems more than possible that Kalevalas impact on the Finns as a mythology for Finland might have made as deep an impression on Tolkien as the songs themselves, and played a major part in his expressed desire to create his so-called mythology for England, though what he actually described was a mythology that he could dedicate to England (Letters, p. 144). The fact that he would go on to absorb his Kullervo into the character of his own mythologys Trin Turambar is evidence of Kalevalas continuing influence on his creativity.

Tolkien had first read Kalevala in the 1907 English translation of W.F. Kirby while a student at King Edwards School in Birmingham in 1911. He thought Kirbys translation unsatisfactory, but found the material itself to be like an amazing wine (Letters, p. 214). Both his story and the accompanying two drafts of his college talk, On The Kalevala, give evidence of Tolkiens enthusiastic desire to communicate the taste of this new wine, its fresh and pagan flavour and the delicious exaggerations of what were to him wild uncivilized and primitive tales. These uncivilized and primitive tales so captured his imagination that when he went up to Oxford in the fall of 1911, he borrowed C.N.E. Eliots