How a national epic was assembled to prove a country existed

What the languages are

Finnish culture combines an indigenous heritage with common Nordic and European elements, and the clearest expression of the indigenous half is the language.

Finnish is Uralic, related to Estonian and distantly to Hungarian, and unrelated to the Indo-European languages spoken all around it. It has fifteen grammatical cases, no grammatical gender, no articles, and vowel harmony, and it builds long words by agglutination rather than by using prepositions. A Swedish or Russian speaker looking at Finnish has no purchase on it at all, and the difficulty runs both ways: Finns learn foreign languages from a starting position of no shared vocabulary.

Swedish is the other national language and it is Germanic, spoken by a minority concentrated on the western and southern coasts and in Åland, and it was the language of administration and of the educated class through the centuries of Swedish rule that ended in 1809.

That produces an unusual linguistic politics. The minority language was historically the language of power, the majority language had to be built up into a language of law and science during the nineteenth century, and both are now official with the state obliged to operate in either. Sámi languages hold their own status in the north, where the Sámi have constitutional recognition as an indigenous people.

Why the Kalevala mattered

Finland spent the nineteenth century as an autonomous grand duchy inside the Russian Empire, with its own institutions and no independent existence, and the case for being a nation had to be made culturally before it could be made politically.

The Kalevala is what that case was built on. Compiled from oral poetry collected in the Finnish and Karelian countryside, it gave the language a national epic of the kind that other European nations claimed, and it supplied a mythology, a cast of figures and a set of images that painters, composers and writers could work from.

In the 1890s Finnish nationalism based on the Kalevala spread widely, and Jean Sibelius became famous writing music connected to it. Painting, architecture and design moved in the same direction at the same time, producing a national romantic style that is visible in Helsinki buildings, in gallery collections and on the currency of the period.

The sequence is worth noticing because it runs the opposite way from most national histories. Finland had a culture arguing for a nation before it had a state, and when independence came in 1917 the cultural apparatus of a country, an epic, a music, a painting tradition, a design language, was already assembled and waiting.

What music and art did next

The first Finnish opera was written by the German composer Fredrik Pacius in 1852, and Pacius also wrote Maamme, which became the national anthem. A national musical tradition beginning with works by a foreigner is a fair indication of how thin the starting material was.

What followed was disproportionate. Sibelius established an international reputation, and Finland has since produced conductors and singers in numbers far beyond what a population this size would suggest, supported by a music education system that reaches into small towns and by a dense network of orchestras and summer festivals that would be remarkable in a country five times the size.

The same pattern holds in architecture and design. A modernist tradition emerged in the twentieth century whose buildings and glassware are known internationally, built on the same principles as the Nordic design described in the Danish and Swedish articles: function stated plainly, natural materials, and production at a price ordinary households could pay.

Contemporary literature runs across a wide range. Detective fiction and popular literature have found large audiences with authors such as Ilkka Remes and Juha Vuorinen, alongside a Finland-Swedish literature that operates as a minority tradition inside a minority language, and the children's writing that produced the Moomins, written in Swedish by a Finnish author, is the Finnish literary export with the widest reach of all.

What the sauna is

The sauna is named alongside the languages as the representative element of the indigenous inheritance, and treating it as a leisure facility misses what it is.

There are more saunas in Finland than there are people in some European countries, and they are in flats, houses, workplaces, summer cottages and public buildings. Going to one is a weekly domestic routine rather than an occasion, performed naked, usually with family or with the same friends, and historically the sauna was where people were born, washed, treated when ill and laid out when dead.

The social rules are specific and unwritten. Everyone is equal in a sauna, business and rank are set aside, silence is acceptable and conversation is quiet, and alternating heat with cold water or snow is the point of the exercise rather than an endurance test to be survived.

The reason it matters culturally is the reason most Finnish domestic institutions matter. A country with a long dark cold winter and a reserved social manner developed a setting in which people sit together, at length, without needing to perform, and the sauna does that better than anything else the culture has produced. It is also the one Finnish custom that visitors are reliably invited into rather than merely told about.

How the country lives through the year

Finnish life is organised around a very uneven year, and two institutions carry it.

The summer cottage is the first. Several hundred thousand exist for a population of five and a half million, most on a lake, most simple, and the July emptying of the cities into them is close to universal. What happens there is swimming, boating, sauna, berry and mushroom picking, and doing very little, and it is the setting Finns describe when asked what the country is actually like, rather than any of the cities a visitor would see.

Everyman's right is the legal condition that makes the second half of it possible. As in Sweden and Norway, people may walk, camp and pick berries and mushrooms on land they do not own, subject to leaving it undamaged and respecting homes and cultivation, which turns a country that is 69% forest into a country whose forest is effectively open to everyone in it.

Winter is the counterpart and it is used rather than endured. Skiing, ice swimming, ice fishing and the whole apparatus of a functioning cold-weather society mean the dark half of the year has its own set of activities rather than being a gap between summers.

Christmas and midsummer are the two fixed points of the calendar, and midsummer is the larger. The country closes, moves to the countryside, and marks the night that does not get dark, which is the single most Finnish thing in the year and the one occasion when the whole country is doing the same thing in the same place.

What the church did to literacy

Finland's regard for education has a specific institutional origin and it is older than the nation. The Lutheran church required reading ability as a condition of confirmation and therefore of marriage, which meant that from the seventeenth century onwards Finns had to demonstrate that they could read a catechism before they could set up a household.

That produced near-universal reading ability in a poor, rural, thinly settled country several centuries before compulsory schooling existed. It was reading rather than writing, and it was religious rather than general, and it nonetheless left a population accustomed to the idea that literacy was a normal adult attribute.

The nineteenth-century national movement then had something to work with. A collected epic, a language being standardised, a press and a rising literary culture all landed on a population that could already read them, which is a large part of why the cultural case for nationhood spread as fast as it did across a rural population that had no other route to it.

The modern system inherits both the reach and the assumption. Comprehensive schooling that does not select early, a teaching profession trained to master's level and trusted to work without close inspection, and free provision through university are the current institutional form of a very old idea about who education is for.

How religion sits now

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland holds a special position in law, a majority of Finns belong to it, and regular attendance is very low, which is the standard Nordic pattern.

Its practical function is the same as its Danish and Swedish counterparts': rites of passage, buildings in every settlement, and a calendar that structures the public year. Confirmation remains widely observed, and it is treated by a good many families as a social milestone rather than a religious one.

The Orthodox Church of Finland is the second church with a legal position, and it is the trace of the eastern half of the country's history. Karelia was Orthodox, the population displaced in 1944 brought the church west with them, and its presence is one of the few visible reminders in modern Finland of a border that has moved.

Departure from church membership is straightforward and has been rising steadily, and the church tax that funds the institution falls only on members. As elsewhere in the region, the argument about the church's legal position recurs without urgency, because the practical stakes for most people are low.

What is inscribed and what is taught

Finland holds 8 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, seven cultural and one natural, which is a modest count for a country of this size and reflects a built heritage that is mostly wooden and a landscape that is vast and uniform rather than spectacular.

The entries include a wooden church, a fortress island, an ironworks town, a Bronze Age burial site and an archipelago region, and the natural property is shared with Sweden. What that list describes is a country whose heritage is working buildings and worked landscape rather than palaces, because Finland had no native aristocracy of the kind that builds palaces, and what monumental building exists was put up by Swedish or Russian authorities for their own purposes.

Education is the modern cultural export with the widest reach. Comprehensive schooling with no early selection, a highly trained and trusted teaching profession, free provision through university, and very little standardised testing made the Finnish system a subject of international study for two decades.

The connection between the two halves of this article is closer than it looks. A country that built its national case out of a collected oral epic, that made literacy a condition of church membership centuries earlier, and that had to construct its own language into a vehicle for law and science, arrived at the twentieth century with an unusual regard for education as the thing that makes a nation possible. Finland: history takes up how that inheritance was assembled.