ABSTRACT
Elias Lonnrot, born a peasant, returned to the countryside with the mind and education of a Romantic intellectual. His literary grounding shaped the ways he experienced the folk poems of his informants as well as the interpretations he made through his epic compilation. In each case, a brief, ambiguous, or less-delicate passage in the source poetry becomes restructured into a lengthy, sentimentalized scene, augmented with lyric lines and imbued with Romantic images. For Pentikainen, the poem speaks of suicide as a traditional option for women betrothed to undesirable bridegrooms, a custom recorded in a variety of Arctic cultures. At the same time, the scene’s water imagery can be viewed as symbolic of feminine consciousness, motherhood and rebirth. The interwoven images of nature, both comforting in their familiarity and disconcerting in their coldness, herald Aino’s eventual choice and offer the possibility of viewing it as sacramental: a submission to the divinity inherent in the Romantic landscape.
