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 received abroad more intensively than at home. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it is the most prolific text within Estonian literature, leaving its traces everywhere in Estonian literature and everyday life. The book includes a summary of the contents of the twenty tales of the epic and a comprehensive bibliography.