When we fit this period into the whole arc of Tolkien’s creative life, a pattern emerges of successive stages of development, all of them showing the same interests and methods but each having its own individual character. It is important to our understanding that The Story of Kullervo was written by a very young man – twenty or so when he may have started, twenty-two at the most when he broke off; The Lord of the Rings by a man in middle life – his forties and fifties; and his last short story, Smith of Wootton Major (1964–7) by man in his early seventies. A similar arc of changes over time marks the revisions of the ‘Silmarillion’ material from the earliest phase of ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’ to the middle period of ‘Akallabêth’, ‘The Notion Club Papers’ and ‘The Fall of Númenor’ to the late and deeply philosophical meditations of the ‘Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth’ and ‘Laws and Customs Among the Eldar’.
The Story of Kullervo belongs firmly to the pre-‘Silmarillion’ period. All the evidence suggests that it was written before Tolkien’s service in France in 1916, and three years before the 1917–18 creative burst after his return from France that led to the earliest versions of the Great Tales. Yet though it lacks the markers of ‘The Shores of Faëry’ or ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ – two poems from the same period which Tolkien later flagged as forerunners of his mythology – it should nevertheless be credited as an equally significant precursor of the greater work. Tolkien may not have had the ‘Silmarillion’ in mind when he wrote The Story of Kullervo, but he certainly had The Story of Kullervo in his head when he began the ‘Silmarillion’. This early narrative was an essential step in Tolkien’s progress as a writer. It contributed substantially to the 1917 ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ and later versions of that story, as well as to the 1917 ‘Tale of Tinúviel’ and its later versions, for which it somewhat surprisingly provided a significant character. It was a creative pivot, swinging between its Kalevala source and the legendarium for which it was itself a source.
But what was it about this particular story that so powerfully called to him that he wrote it not once but several times? Perhaps thinking of its explicitly pagan orientation ‘when magic was yet new’, John Garth calls it ‘a strange story to have captured the imagination of a fervent Catholic’ (Tolkien and the Great War, p. 26). Tolkien clearly did not find it strange (‘great’ and ‘tragic’ were his adjectives), and seems to have felt no conflict with his Catholicism, which at that point was apparently not very ‘fervent’ anyway. Carpenter cites Tolkien’s acknowledgment that his first terms at Oxford ‘had passed “with practically none or very little practice of religion”’ (Biography, p. 58), and notes his ‘lapses of the previous year [1912]’ (ibid., p. 66). Connecting Tolkien’s attraction to the Kullervo story to his guardian-enforced separation from Edith, Garth proposes that its appeal may have lain ‘partly in the brew of maverick heroism, young romance, and despair’ (Tolkien and the Great War, p. 26). Without discounting Garth’s connection of the story to Tolkien’s immediate situation, it seems possible that the story of Kullervo also resonated deeply with the circumstances of his very early life. Kullervo’s description of himself as ‘fatherless beneath the heavens’ and ‘from the first without a mother’ (Kirby vol. 2, p. 101, ll. 59–60) cannot be overlooked, still less two cancelled lines of verse, stark and explicit, transferred unchanged from the Kirby Kalevala wherein Kullervo bewails his fate to one of the ‘chunks of poetry’ in Tolkien’s own story:
I was small and lost my mother father
I was young (weak) and lost my mother.
(Tolkien MS B 64/6, fol. 11 verso)
The fact that he first included and then crossed out these lines is significant. They may have been at once right on the mark and too close for comfort to the tragedy of his own life. Like Kullervo, Tolkien had lost first his father, and then his mother. When he was small (a child of four) his father died; when he was young (a boy of twelve but surely feeling ‘weak’ at the loss) his mother died suddenly and unexpectedly, from untreated diabetes.
Let us look at the narrative that Tolkien called ‘most tragic’. Strife between brothers leads to the killing of Kullervo’s father Kalervo by his uncle Untamo, who lays waste to his family home and abducts Kullervo’s unnamed mother, identified in the poem only as ‘one girl, and she was pregnant’ (Kirby vol. 2, p. 70, l. 71). Kullervo is born into captivity, and as an infant swears revenge on Untamo, who, after three attempts to kill the precocious boy plus the failure to get any work out of him, sells him as a bondslave to the smith Ilmarinen. The smith’s wife sets him to herding the cattle, but cruelly and deliberately bakes a stone into his bread. When he cuts into the bread, his knife, his only memento of his father, strikes the stone and the point breaks. Kullervo’s revenge is to enchant bears and wolves into the shape of cows and drive them into the barnyard at milking-time. When the smith’s wife tries to milk these bogus cattle they attack and kill her. Kullervo then flees, but being told by the Blue-robed Lady of the Forest that his family is alive, decides to go home, vowing again to kill Untamo. He is deflected from his vengeance by a chance encounter with a girl whom he either seduces or rapes (the story is equivocal on this point). Upon disclosing their parentage to each other, the two discover that they are brother and sister. In despair, the girl throws herself over a waterfall. Consumed with guilt, Kullervo fulfils his vengeance, returning to Untamo’s homestead to kill him and burn all his farm buildings, then asks his sword if it will kill him. The sword agrees, and Kullervo finds ‘the death he sought for’ (Kirby vol. 2, p. 125, l. 341).
I do not propose a one-to-one equation between Kullervo and Tolkien; nor do I claim autobiographical intent on Tolkien’s part. Parallels there certainly are, but Father Francis Morgan, Tolkien’s guardian, was no murderous Untamo (though he did separate John Ronald from the girl he loved). Beatrice Suffield, the aunt in whose care Tolkien and his brother were temporarily put after their mother died, was not the malicious and sadistic smith’s wife – though Carpenter notes that she was ‘deficient in affection’ (Biography, p. 33). Tolkien was neither a cowherd nor a magician, though he did become a writer of fantasy. Nor did he engage in revenge-killing or commit incest. And though unlike Kullervo he was not mistreated and abused, like Kullervo he was not in control of his own life. There was undeniably something in Kullervo’s story which touched him deeply and made him want to ‘reorganize [it] into a form of [his] own.’ And that something stayed viable as his legendarium took shape.
Garth is right about one thing, however. It is a ‘strange story’, as even a cursory synopsis shows: a perplexing jumble of loosely connected episodes in which people do inexplicable things for unexplained reasons or for the wrong reason or for no reason at all. With the exception of Kullervo, the characters are one-dimensional – the wicked uncle, the cruel foster-mother, the wronged girl; and Kullervo himself, while more fleshed-out, is an enigma both to himself and to those he meets. The story is not so strange, however, in Tolkien’s version, which carefully connects cause, effect, motivation, and outcome. Already a certain modus operandi is in place, the effort to adapt a traditional story to his own liking, to fill in the gaps in an existing story and tidy up the loose ends. The best-known example is The Hobbit, in which Bilbo’s theft of a cup from the dragon’s hoard is a hard-to-miss (for those who’ve read Beowulf) reworking of a problem passage in that poem where, because the manuscript is damaged, the text is full of holes, with words, phrases and whole lines missing or indecipherable, rendering the entire episode an unsolvable puzzle.
In Beowulf (lines 2214–2231) an unidentified man driven by unknown necessity creeps into the dragon’s lair and steals a cup, which wakens the dragon and leads to the final confrontation that ends in Beowulf’s death. Too much is missing for us to know anything more about the circumstances. Though he denied any conscious intent, Tolkien fills in the holes and answers the questions in a major scene in The Hobbit. The unknown thief is Bilbo, his necessity is to prove himself as a ‘burglar’, he steals the c
up to demonstrate his prowess to Thorin and the dwarves, and flees up the tunnel, leaving behind him a wrathful Smaug who wreaks vengeance on Lake-town. Tolkien did much the same kind of thing, though more poetically, in his Sigurd and Gudrún poems, straightening out the tangle of Old Norse, Icelandic, and Germanic legends that make up the story of Sigurd and the Vólsungs (there are, for example – and for unexplained reasons – two Brynhilds, one a valkyrie, the other the very human daughter of King Buthli), and filling in the missing eight pages in the Eddic manuscript (for more on this see Tom Shippey’s discussion in his excellent review-article on The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in Tolkien Studies, vol. VII).
Returning now to Kalevala and The Story of Kullervo let us consider what Tolkien chose to keep, what he left out, what he changed and how he changed it in this earliest attempt at re-writing myth. The major items include:
1.Kullervo’s family.
2.His sister.
3.His personality.
4.His dog.
5.His weapons.
6.His incest.
7.His ending.
I’ll finish with a brief look (brief because it will be obvious to anyone who has read The Silmarillion) at the effect this transitional piece had on his subsequent work, contributing episodes and characters, and deepening the emotional level of his legendarium.
First, Kullervo’s family. One of the problem points in the Kalevala story is that Kullervo has two families and becomes an orphan twice. His first family is destroyed by Untamo in the raid that captures Kullervo’s mother. The narrative is clear at this early point in the story that this is a near-complete massacre, leaving the newborn boy with no home, no father, and no living relatives besides his mother, who like him is a slave and of little help or support. It is thus confusing to most readers when much later in the story a second family in a different household turns up, before the incest but after Kullervo kills the smith’s wife. He is at that point told, to his and the reader’s surprise, that his family is alive. The thematic justification for this second appearance is that it gives him a set of relatives – another father and a new-found brother and sister – whose job is to tell him in elaborate verse how much they don’t care whether he lives or dies, thus reinforcing the feelings of alienation and rejection he’s already got from Untamo and the smith’s wife. The plot function is to provide Kullervo with a sister that he has never seen and so set the stage for the incest.
According to Domenico Comparetti, one of the earliest scholars to write on Kalevala, the two-family mix-up is the result of Lönnrot’s combining into one sequence several songs originally independent of one another. Comparetti pointed out that, ‘Kullervo’s finding his family at home after they have been killed by Untamo, is a contradiction that betrays the joining together of several runes’ (Comparetti, p. 148), runos not even from the same localities, and with differing variants (ibid., p. 145). The confusion is not unlike the two Brynhilds mix-up in the Völsung story. Lönnrot may have been juggling his material, but he had precedents. In these earlier versions, the hero’s name is not always Kullervo; in Ingria it is Turo or Tuirikkinen, in Archangel and Karelia it is Tuiretuinen (Comparetti, pp. 147–48). There is no hard evidence that Tolkien had read Comparetti, though it seems probable given his fascination with Kalevala, and his discussion in the two College talks of the geographical range of Lönnrot’s collecting is most likely drawn from Comparetti. But it was the effect of Kalevala ‘as is,’ not its history of composition or its component parts which so engaged Tolkien. His quote from George Dasent that, ‘We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled’ (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 120), was as applicable to Finnish mythology as to fairy-stories.
Tolkien ignored the bones, eliminating the second family altogether and giving the first family those extra children, an older brother and sister already in place before Untamo’s raid. Their mother, pregnant again at the time Untamo attacks, gives birth to twins after she is abducted by Untamo. These are a boy whom she names Kullervo, or ‘Wrath’, and a girl she names Wanōna, or ‘Weeping’. The pre- and post-Untamo sets of children are not close in either age or temperament, and the older set is hostile to the younger, paving the way for their later rejection of Kullervo. When he is sold into slavery his older brother and sister both tell him – in long lines of verse – how much they won’t miss him. His exile separates him both geographically and emotionally from his mother and sister, so that when he meets Wanōna again we can accept it as reasonable that he fails to recognize her.
Second, Kullervo’s relationship with his sister. In Kalevala he has none, and because of the two-family combination he meets her for the first time on the occasion of the incest. Tolkien considerably expands and complicates this relationship, building up the childhood closeness of the twins and emphasizing their alienation from their older siblings and their consequent reliance on one another. Kullervo and Wanōna spend more time with each other than with anyone else. They are neglected ‘wild’ children who roam the woodlands, their only friend the hound Musti, a dog with supernatural powers who acts as both companion and protector. When Kullervo is sold into slavery by Untamo, he is followed by Musti, but cut off from his family. He declares that he will miss no one but Wanōna, yet in his exile he forgets her entirely, and fails to recognize her when by accident they meet again, with fatal consequences.
Third, Kullervo’s personality and appearance. Again, in Kalevala there is none, or very little. His characteristics in the Finnish epic are precocious strength and an aptitude for magic. Barely three days old, he kicks his cradle to splinters. Set to rock an infant not long afterward, he breaks the baby’s bones, gouges out his eyes, and burns his cradle. In addition, he is apparently indestructible, for Untamo has three tries at killing him, first by drowning, next by burning, and finally by hanging. Nothing works. He survives the drowning and ‘measures the sea.’ He escapes the burning and plays in the ashes. He is found on the hanging tree carving pictures in the bark. Set to clear a field he creates a wasteland; told to build a fence he makes an impenetrable enclosure with no way in or out; assigned to threshing grain he reduces it to dust. No reason or motive, except that he was rocked too hard as a baby, is given for this extreme behavior. It’s just the way he is. You can’t take him anywhere. Rather oddly, he is also handsome and a bit of a dandy, described as having ‘finest locks of yellow colour’, ‘blue-dyed stockings’, and ‘shoes of best of leather.’
Tolkien’s Kullervo is equally strong, but far from handsome or fashionable. He is ‘swart’ and ‘ill-favoured and crooked’, low in stature, and ‘broad and ill knit and knotty and unrestrained and unsoftened.’ Yet we come to understand him and even feel sympathy for him. The big difference between Tolkien’s Kullervo and the one in Kalevala is that while their actions are the same (both do all the weird things I’ve described), Tolkien’s Kullervo is clearly marked and motivated by early trauma. He is scarred by his father’s murder and embittered by his and his mother’s enslavement and cruel treatment by Untamo. He grows crooked for lack of a mother’s care. Tolkien portrays him as sullen, resentful, angry, and alienated, close only to his sister Wanōna and the hound Musti. ‘No tender feelings would he let his heart cherish for his folk afar.’ He nurses grudges, he’s lonely and a loner, a perpetual outsider, one of those people forever on the fringe of society unable or unwilling to fit in. Among Tolkien’s many characters Kullervo stands out for his emotional and psychological complexity, exceeded only by an equivalent or greater complexity in his direct literary descendant, Túrin Turambar.
Fourth, his dog. There is no such supernatural animal as the great hound Musti in this part of Kalevala, though there is a back dog called Musti (which simply means ‘Blackie’ in Finnish) who after the second family has all died follows Kullervo into the forest to the place where he kills himself. In contrast, Tolkien’s Musti is a significant character in
the story, and plays an active part in several episodes. He initially belongs to Kalervo, and on the occasion of Untamo’s raid, returns to the homestead to find it destroyed, his master killed and his wife, the lone survivor, captured. He follows her, but stays in the wild, where he becomes the friend and mentor of her two children Kullervo and Wanōna, and is associated with the dog of Tuoni, Lord of Death. Tolkien is tapping in to a standard mythological convention here, the connection between dogs and death and the underworld, which, although Musti is not the dog of Tuoni, nevertheless foreshadows by his presence the tragedy to come. While not of the underworld, Musti is described as ‘a dog of fell might and strength and of great knowledge’. He is a shape-changer and a practitioner of magic which he passes on to Kullervo, instructing him in ‘things darker and dimmer and farther back even ... before their magic days’.
Musti becomes a kind of tutelary figure to Kullervo, and gives him magic talismans, three hairs from his coat with which to summon or invoke him in time of danger. These hairs save Kullervo from Untamo’s three attempts to kill him, explicitly with the first (drowning), by implication in the second (burning), and again explicitly in the third (hanging), where the narrative is unequivocal that ‘this magic that had saved Kullervo’s life was the last hair of Musti’. Musti’s magic is ‘about’ Kullervo from then on. Musti follows him when he is sold into slavery, and teaches him the magic that later enables him to use the wolves and bears to kill the smith’s wife. In Tolkien’s notes for the uncompleted ending of the story Musti reappears twice, once when he is killed in Kullervo’s raid on Untamo’s homestead, and at the scene of the suicide where Kullervo stumbles over the ‘body of dead Musti’.
The Story of Kullervo Page 12
