Trivia / The Kalevala

• What Could Have Been: Disney was considering making "The Swan of Tuonela" one of the segments in Fantasia.
• Many of the original songs that were collected back in the day (by Lönnrot and others) have been digitized and can be looked up from this archive. Only in Finnish, though.
• Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen were originally gods before they became mythical heroes. You can even see hints of this in The Kalevala in the form of their participation in the creation of the world. The Sky God Ukko is probably an epithet of Ilmarinen's. Literally Ukko simply means "old man". The name Ilmarinen is derived from the word "ilma" meaning "air". Another possibility is that Ukko is Perkele, the thunder god borrowed from Baltic mythology (Perkūnas‎) and corresponding to the Indo-European god Perkwunos. In that case he simply overtook Ilmarinen's place as the sky god.
  • Väinämöinen seems to have been a god of water and/or music.