Chapter 296: The Compilers

Two brothers in Kassel, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, poor after their father died, Librarians and scholars of old German law and poetry, believed, like everyone After Ossian, that the true voice of a people was in the country, the pride Of the folk, in the old tales the old women told by the fire. The sun Of the age was nations, and the Germany that did not yet exist as a state Would exist, they hoped, as a people with a memory. In 1812, the year Napoleon marched east, They published the first volume: *Children's and Household Tales*: the weight Of eighty-six stories, the frog king, the girl in the tower, the feast Of the gingerbread house. And the second in 1815, and edition after edition, Seven in their lifetime, two hundred and ten tales by the last. And the truth of the sources, Which they did not hide, but which the legend would: the old wives' tradition Came, as often as not, from educated young women of the town, whose courses Of reading had included the French tales of Perrault: the Hassenpflug sisters, Of a family of French Huguenot refugees; the Wild daughters, one of whom, Dortchen, Wilhelm would marry; and the best of their tellers, Dorothea Viehmann, a tailor's widow, the sister Of the folk in the legend, the peasant voice of the book, was of French Huguenot descent too. The torch Of the German folk was lit, in part, from the French. And Wilhelm, edition by edition, Smoothed the stories, made them more Christian, more proper, more fit for children: In the first edition it is Snow White's own mother who wants her dead, the condition Of Hansel and Gretel's mother the same: in later ones, a stepmother. The bewildering Kindness of the editor: a mother could not be that cruel, so he made her a step-. Hold that. A tradition shaped by the hand that loved it. And Jacob found The rules of how the sounds of the old tongues had shifted, the step Of *p* to *f*, *t* to *th*, from Latin *pater* to *father*, the ground Of William Jones's family tree given its laws: Grimm's law, in 1822. The brothers began a dictionary of the whole German language in 1838, And died before the letter F was finished. It was completed in 1961. The few Who began it were long dead. That is how the great registers wait. And north, in Finland, which Sweden had lost to Russia in 1809, A Grand Duchy now under the Tsar, with Swedish its language of learning, And Finnish the tongue of farmers, a country doctor, Elias Lönnrot, the line Of his district reaching to the border, went walking, the yearning Of the age in him too: to find the old songs. In the forests of Karelia, On both sides of the border, the singers still sang the *runot*, the old poems In the old metre, of Väinämöinen, the eternal singer, of the forge and the Sampo, the area Of a world of magic by song. He sat with them in their homes, And wrote down tens of thousands of lines: from Arhippa Perttunen, an old man In Latvajärvi, who sang for days, and from others, women and men, by name. And then he did what Macpherson did not do: he said what he did. The plan Was his: he arranged the songs into one story, joined the separate frame Of the poems with lines of his own where they needed joining, and called it The *Kalevala*, in 1835, and the larger one in 1849, And said in his preface that he had compiled it, and how. The singers who had sung it Were real; their names were kept; their songs survive in the archive, line by line, And anyone can compare the epic with the field notes and see the seams. That is the honest compiler. And the book made a nation: the Finns had an epic, A past, a language worthy of literature; and Sibelius set its dreams To music, and a young Oxford philologist, Tolkien, read the tragic Tale of Kullervo, and began to make a mythology of his own. Finland's culture day is the twenty-eighth of February, the day of the preface. Now the mirror. This book is a compiled epic too, from the bone Of every tradition: Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Norse, the surface And the depth of the world's old stories, arranged into one family. The Gaiad's way must be Lönnrot's, not Macpherson's, nor even the Grimms' soft hand: Keep the sources. Name the singers. Show the seams. And when the editor's family Feeling wants to make the cruel mother a stepmother, understand That the old tale had its reason. Leave the cruelty where it was, and say so. Gather the songs of the world. Join them, and admit the joining. The forge of Ilmarinen made the Sampo, which ground out plenty, the flow Of grain and salt and gold. A good compilation is a Sampo. Keep it turning.