Hasselblatt, Kalevipoeg Studies - The Creation and Reception of an Epic

This is the first English-language monograph on the poem Kalevipoeg (1857-1861), composed by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-1882). The poem is over 19,000 lines long, and is known today as the Estonian national epic. The epic was not a success story from the beginning, however. It took at least one generation before the text was received by the emerging Estonian intellectual class. In the meantime, immediately after the release of the bilingual Estonian-German edition, the text was...