THE GARGOYLE

Author: Andrew Davidson
Year: 2009
Publisher: Canongate Books
Language: English

Any reader of these lines will be familiar with Mary Shelley’s classic “Frankenstein”; that timeless meditation on the fragile thresholds between life and death, creator and created, humanity and the outcast. Victor Frankenstein’s pursuit to defy natural order gives rise to a being that should not exist, yet the tragedy lies not in the act of creation itself, but in the reckoning that follows. What must unfold when the created outgrows the creator’s intent.

In his significantly more recent novel, “The Gargoyle”, Andrew Davidson seems to rather ask what happens when the created loses control of the creator.

The book starts with a detailed, perhaps excessively so, account of a car crash. The narrator withholds no information. Sounds, images, smells, pain, thoughts running through his head. All is meticulously chronicled in the first section of the novel. While the driver should almost certainly perish in an accident like this, the narrator miraculously survives and is brought to a luxury clinic specialising in, among other things, burn victims. This is where the story really begins.

As his body is scorched beyond recognition, life loses its meaning and all he longs for, as he spends his days in a hospital bed while doctors and nurses scurry to salvage what they can of his earthly vessel, is the mercy of eternal release. Yet one day, the enigmatic Marianne Engel enters his room and speaks to him as if they have known each other for ages… literally. Like Sheherazade, week after week, she weaves stories and anecdotes with advice and observations, and lures him away from the precipice. She turns his mind away from death and toward the life that she insists he has lived, yet one that bears no resemblance to his own torturous memories. Within the hollowed shell of his burned flesh, she fashions a new person, entirely distinct from the man he once believed himself to be. In a way, she creates a new being from the remnants of what used to be a human being.

Yet, while Marianne Engel recreates the narrator’s mind, her own sanity is called into question. Her manic stints of artistic creation, during which she disappears for days to carve grotesques from stone, render her increasingly drained. Soon, the created must struggle to hold on to the creator, and in the end, he must fight to save her from the very force that once saved him.

What elevates Davidson’s novel is its sublime portrayal of madness. Marianne’s creativity is a function of her unreason; a subversive lens through which she perceives reality, challenging the conventional wisdom of the ordinary world. Davidson marks his respect for this transcendental knowledge by letting the hospital tolerate Marianne as a visitor to the narrator, even as the doctors voice the cautious, institutional opinion that she ought to be confined. Furthermore, the surrounding characters slowly move toward granting her a type of subjugated truth that is no less valid than the dominant worldview just because it remains beyond their grasp.  

It seems to me that Marianne's sovereign unreason is the very foundation of her creativity. Her determination to acts as a frankensteinian creator who reconstructs the narrator’s shattered identity seems incompatible with common sense. With time, her transcendental knowledge isolates her from rational society. The narrator’s emergence into sanity marks the completion of her work, a synthesis requiring the creator to succumb to her mania. To sacrifice herself for her creation.

“The Gargoyle” is Davidson’s debut and, to date, his only novel. Though it flirts with superficial romance, perhaps a concession to American tastes or young adult readers, its attention to character development and narrative richness kept me invested through all 500 pages. This book served as my official summer read of 2026, and it fulfilled its purpose more than adequately. 

FAIRYTALES AND STORIES

Author: Hans Christian Andersen
Year: 1902 & 1904 (19th cemtury)
Publisher: Gyldendalske Boghandel Forlag
Language: Danish

Hans Christian Andersen is arguably the greatest writer of children’s literature in history. His collected “Eventyr og historier” (“Fairytales and Stories”) can be rivalled only by the Arabian tradition of One Thousand and One Nights for global recognition, cultural impact, and durability over time. Although most of the stories were new to me, I was already familiar with a decent number of them.

Or so I thought. As I pressed on, fairytale after fairytale (80 in total), I became increasingly aware of how differently stories were told to children 150 years ago. I had not quite braced myself for the tempest of emotions that lay ahead. Yet, what captivated me most was the persistent, haunting motif of death.

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales are deeply embedded in the cultural, religious, and social realities of 19th-century Denmark. In Andersen’s time, death was an everyday presence. Infant mortality was high, epidemics were common, and life expectancy was short. This familiarity with death shaped how Andersen portrayed mortality in his stories. Not as a taboo or traumatic event, but as a natural, even spiritual, transition. His tales seem often to have served as moral and emotional guides, preparing, as it were, children for the inevitability of loss while offering comfort through themes of transcendence and divine justice.

Back then, death was public and communal in a completely different way than it is in our modern society. Church records mandated the documentation of burials and causes of death, and weekly lists of the deceased were curated by the authorities and published in Copenhagen papers. Not as a tribute, but as information. The Lutheran Church played a central role in framing death as a passage to Heaven, emphasising divine justice and the afterlife as a source of solace. Andersen’s stories reflect this worldview. In The Angel, a dead child is escorted to Heaven by an angel, and in The Little Match Girl, the protagonist’s death is portrayed as a peaceful release from suffering into the arms of her grandmother. These narratives normalised death as part of life, rather than something to be feared or hidden.

Andersen’s use of death also carried social commentary. Tales like The Little Match Girl highlighted the plight of the poor, where death was a frequent and visible reality. The story’s tragic ending where the girl freezes to death, was not just a moral lesson but a critique of societal neglect. Similarly, The Little Mermaid’s transformation into sea foam symbolised the sacrifice and redemption central to Christian teachings, reinforcing the idea that death could be a path to spiritual fulfilment.

Over the past century and a half, Western Europe has undergone a profound cultural shift in its relationship with death. The medicalisation of death in the early 20th centuries marked the beginning of this transformation. Advances in medicine, sanitation, and public health drastically reduced mortality rates, particularly among children. Death moved from the home to hospitals, and the secularisation of society diminished the role of religion in explaining mortality. Freud’s and his successors’ theories on grief and the pathologisation of mourning further distanced death from everyday life, turning it into a subject often avoided in polite conversation.

The World Wars, one can imagine, accelerated this shift. Mass death on an unprecedented scale forced societies to confront mortality in new ways, but it also led to a cultural suppression of grief. In the post-war era, death became taboo, particularly in children’s literature and media. Disney’s adaptations of Andersen’s tales, for example, often softened or removed the original tragic endings. The Little Mermaid’s film version ends with a wedding, not the mermaid’s dissolution into sea foam. This sanitisation targeted all of the children’s literature from the past, e.g. the aforementioned Thousand and One Night and the tales of the Grimm Brothers, and reflected a broader trend: protecting children from the harsh realities of life, including death.

By the late 20th century, death had become invisible in many aspects of Western culture. Funerals were moved from homes to funeral parlours, and discussions about death were often deferred until adulthood. The rise of consumer culture further distanced people from mortality, as death was increasingly seen as a medical failure rather than a natural part of life. Children’s literature and media largely avoided the topic, or re-packaged it in fantastical, non-threatening ways (e.g., ghosts as friendly characters).

Today, a modern young reader approaches Andersen’s tales with a very different cultural framework. Where a 19th-century Danish child might have seen The Little Match Girl as a realistic and morally instructive story, a 21st-century child may find it shocking or incomprehensible. Some say that the fluffy fairytales of our era make our children weak and ill-prepared for the challenges they encounter when they grow up. Others argue that children need to be children and should be protected from trauma and sorrow. We will all reach a point where we will have to worry about death, anyway. What’s the hurry?  

This is not to say that children’s literature has necessarily become less educational or meaningful in our era. Instead of death, it often helps the young reader to reflect on issues such as identity, loneliness, or exclusion. Issues that are more pressing to a modern child than death, which thankfully has become a rare event in that age group. Issues change over time, but the power of literature to see us through remains a constant.

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

Author: Adam Smith
Year: 2000 (1776)
Publisher: The Modern Library
Language: English

    “Whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.”

    “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

    “Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have got a little, it is often easy to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little”

    “With the great part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches”

    “A great empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers all the goods with which these could supply them”

All of the above are quotes from the same pivotal work on economic philosophy. Who might be the author? Karl Marx? Jürgen Habermas, perhaps? Maybe John Maynard Keynes, then? It certainly couldn’t be any of the books that are frequently held up as the intellectual cornerstones of unchecked modern-day capitalism, could it?

The quotes are, in fact, collected from the most often referred to but least often read classical work on economic philosophy, “The Wealth of Nations” by Scotsman Adam Smith, which this year celebrates its 250^th birthday. It was published only a few months after the battles of Lexington and Concord (which Smith dismisses in the book as “the recent disturbances”) and a few months before Colonel John Nixon read the declaration of independence to the public in Philadelphia.

This monumental work of over 1,000 pages changed economic theory forever, but not necessarily in the way Smith intended. For the phenomenon of individuals claiming familiarity with “The Wealth of Nations” without having read it is well-documented and has historical precedence. Even in Smith’s own era, misinterpretations of his work were common, prompting Smith to address them with a mix of openness to substantive feedback when warranted and well-placed disdain when necessary. This trend persists today, with many commentators and economists invoking their imaginary ideas of Smith’s thought without engaging with the actual text.

A pervasive misconception is that Adam Smith advocated for completely unregulated markets. This error is not merely anecdotal but reflects a broader cultural tendency to oversimplify complex works, reducing them to slogans or isolated concepts. The misinterpretation is largely based on the metaphor of the “invisible hand”. The “invisible hand,” is often cherry-picked and misconstrued as a universal law of market harmony. The popular understanding is that a free market will self-regulate and always lead to the best outcome for all. It is used to support the argument that government should under no circumstances intervene in a market economy, that greed is good, and that markets somehow operate in a naturally provided steady-state acting as the blood vessels that support life in the societal organism. This misinterpretation (or deception) serves ideological agendas, particularly among hardcore capitalists who advocate for unregulated markets, despite Smith’s explicit and consistent critiques of such positions.

A closer look reveals that Smith used the term three times across all his writing, and each time to illustrate an altogether different concept. In “The Wealth of Nations” specifically, it appears in Book IV Chapter II which is titled “On Restraints upon the Importation from foreign Countries of such Goods as can be Produced at Home”. Contrary to common belief, Smith here meditates on how merchants, when given the choice between investing domestically or internationally, will commonly invest in their own country which would be perceived as safer, thus contributing inadvertently to the local economy. The invisible hand is merely a visualisation of public benefit being a side effect, as opposite to the objective, of local investment by domestic merchants and industrialists.

While Smith undeniably did champion free markets where all suppliers are price takers, he was perceptive enough to realise that markets left to their own devices are bound to render themselves unfree given enough time by gradually forming price setters and in the end monopolies. He was a staunch critic of The East India Company, the dominant international corporation at the time, and argued vehemently against monopolies and oligopolies. He would with every certainty be aghast at the multinational conglomerates that control every niche and every market in the world in the 21^st century. In fact, Smith used the word “greed” only once in “The Wealth of Nations” and that was to criticise governments’ greed for power. In the same work, he accused The East India Company of largely acting like a government more than a company. From there, putting the pieces together appears to be a rather straightforward exercise. A free market, as Smith seems to have understood it, is a market that is free to leave and enter. Not a market where a few dominant companies make sure that no one else is allowed to compete for their profits. US anti-trust laws, such as the Sherman Act of 1890 or the Clayton Act of 1914, or the European Union TFEU articles 101 and 102 (and maybe even more so articles 107-109) might possibly be criticised by Smith for being crude and heavy-handed, but essentially recognised as necessary to ensure competition and functioning markets.  

Much has been written about “The Wealth of Nations” by analysts far more capable than I, and even the thoughts of This Banker, limited as they may seem, go far beyond what can be reduced to a blog post. It would make an interesting counterfactual thought experiment to image what our world would look like if Smith’s warnings had been taken seriously.

Given how ignorance has distorted the public understanding of one of the Enlightenment’s greatest works, I can only conclude that the world would be a far more interesting place if people spoke less and read more.

A MAN AND HIS DOG

Author: Thomas Mann
Year: 1955 (1919)
Publisher: Fischer Bücherei
Language: German

It is no secret that I have a soft spot for Thomas Mann. Beyond being merely a stellar writer, I find him to be a keen observer of humankind, and his books reveal as much about the details of the age he lived in as about the people and the interactions that shaped it. While deeply rooted in the intellectual and historical currents of his time, Mann’s writing spans from the decline of the bourgeoisie to the rise and demise of fascism. But more than that, it spans from the height of realism to the birth of existentialism making him one of the foremost chroniclers of modernism.

“Herr und Hund” (“A Man and His Dog”), published in 1918, occupies a unique and often underappreciated niche in the author’s vast life work. Unlike his monumental works such as “Buddenbrooks”, “Herr und Hund” is a slender narrative that captures the relationship between a writer and his beloved dog, a mixed-breed named Bauschan. On the surface, this book does nothing else. It is a matter-of-fact account of Bauschan; his fur, his personality, his habits, his preferences, and how he ended up with the author in the first place. Yet, something must have prompted Thomas Mann, which by the time of writing this was already an established and respected writer, to write a detailed account of his canine companion.

I submit that to understand “Herr und Hund”, one must first consider the personal and historical circumstances surrounding its creation. The book was written during a tumultuous period in Mann’s life. The First World War had shattered the European order, and Mann, like many intellectuals of his time, was grappling with the implications of modernity, nationalism, and the role of the artist in a fractured world. While at first allowing himself to be swept up in the nationalist fervour that led up to the war, Mann’s enthusiasm soon faded and as the war dragged on and his worldview disintegrated, he gradually descended into a personal identity crisis; as a German and as a human being.

His refuge, it is easy to imagine, was his faithful dog Bauschan. Although Thomas Mann had already made a name for himself as a writer of great symbolic and philosophical depth (see review of “Death in Venice” from April 2019) and convoluted sense of humour at the time, “Herr und Hund” comes across as a work of radical sincerity, a moment where Mann sets aside his usual layers of scrutiny and intellectualism to focus on the immediate, tangible, and familiar: the dog, the whole dog, and nothing but the dog.

“Im Folgenden ist ausschließlich von meinem Hunde Bauschan die Rede /…/ weder werden höhere Probleme der Sittlichkeit darin aufgeworfen noch bedeutende Charaktere zergliedert, geschweige denn, daß die gesellschaftliche Frage ihrer Lösung nähergeführt würde.”

The result is a book that feels like listening to a man talking for hours at length about his dog while showing and endless stream of snapshots of it in different contexts. This is Baushan when he sleeps, this is Baushan when he eats, this is Baushan from the from the front, this is Baushan from the back. The reader is the well-meaning interlocutor, patiently listening to the man go on, because they know that the speaker needs this. Thomas Mann needed to invest his attention into something he could grasp; something he could explain. And more than one hundred years after its first publication, we can still today act as Thomas Mann’s therapists by letting him bore us with his altogether mundane and average dog. His umbilical cord to the womb of sanity.

This, at last, is what in my mind makes this book so unique. Contrary to the many other works of fiction where animals play a key role, the dog in Mann’s book is not merely the main character. The book is not about the dog’s life. It is not about any challenge or journey of the dog. It is not about the happiness or the misery of the dog. It is purely and simply about the actual dog. “Das Tier an sich”, as Immanuel Kant might have put it. And maybe, by allowing Mann to tell us every last detail about his dog, we get to know the man better than we could have via any other manifesto, autobiography, or confession.

 

 

THE COMEDIANS

Author: Józef Ignacy Kraszewski
Year: 1968 (1854)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Literackie Kraków
Language: Polish

Unknown heirs materialising at the reading of a will. Lovers discovering, at the worst possible moment, that they share a parent. Love triangles sustained by pride and silence. Scheming matriarchs. Secret debts. Broken promises delivered under chandeliers. Honour invoked hourly and violated daily. Tears, slaps, duels, declarations. Such are the dependable ingredients of the telenovela.

On the surface, “Komedianci” (not available in English but a translation might be “The Comedians”) by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski might appear to belong in that universe. There is pride. There is deceit. There are broken assurances and carefully staged appearances. A grand household presides over a web of obligations and resentments. The title itself suggests performance, artifice, theatricality.

And yet Kraszewski is not interested in melodrama for its own sake. He is interested in structure. Where the telenovela thrives on sensationalism, “Komedianci” is concerned with the slow burn of social hypocrisy. Its drama does not hinge on blood ties unexpectedly rearranged but on credit extended too far. Its climaxes are not interrupted weddings but the sudden implosions of reputation that they trigger.

Set in the 19^th century Volhynian countryside among the rural szlachta, the novel dissects a social world built on land, lineage, and mutual dependence. At its centre stands the Dendera family, aristocratic in demeanour and confident in entitlement. They perform generosity with elegance. They host, flatter, and cultivate admiration. Around them lesser landowners orbit like satellites, eager for recognition and proximity to prestige.

If this were a telenovela, Count Dendera and his family would be unambiguous villains, their downfall punctuated by confession and disgrace. Kraszewski is subtler. The aristocrats are not scheming conspirators. They are embodiments of a class that has come to confuse appearance with substance. They believe in their own performance. That is precisely their weakness.

The metaphor of the stage governs the novel. Social life is theatre, rank is costume, courtesy is choreography. But unlike melodrama where performance heightens truth, here performance obscures it. The Dendera estate becomes a set on which aristocratic virtue is acted out while, behind the scenes, economic reality deteriorates.

Kraszewski’s insight is that exploitation need not be dramatic to be devastating. The Denderas do not ruin their neighbours through a single spectacular betrayal, nor do they in essence aim to do so. Rather, they draw upon their trust incrementally by extending loans, assuming obligations, grant deference, and avoid payments. Each gesture appears small. Collectively, they amount to extraction.

The surrounding community is not innocent in the way a betrayed heroine might be. The lesser szlachta participates in the illusion. They want to believe in the Count’s grandeur because that belief reflects well on them. Association with high nobility confers symbolic capital. Reputation becomes collateral. In this sense, “Komedianci” offers a more unsettling message than any melodrama: deception persists because it is mutually convenient.

When Count Dendera’s true position finally comes to light, the revelation lacks the thunderclap theatrics of serialised television. There is no shocking revelation of secret parentage, no courtroom confession. Instead, there is gradual exposure, the quiet, devastating recognition that the performance has outstripped reality. Financial and moral insolvency converge.

For modern readers, the novel feels unexpectedly contemporary. We, too, inhabit a world rich in performance but poor in productivity. Personal branding and curated identities are valued higher than industriousness and hard work. As of early 2025, Tesla’s market cap was higher than the next 15 car producers, including Volkswagen, Toyota, General Motors, Ford and Daimler Benz, combined despite producing less than 15% of the amount of vehicles that Toyota alone did that year.   reputational management. To a banker in particular, Count Dendera’s complacency and sense of entitlement will bear an eerie resemblance to the events preceding the collapse of the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008. “Komedianci” reminds us that the temptation to substitute optics for substance seems perennial.

If I may have one remark about this book, it is that it somewhat obscures who the main characters of the novel are going to be. While the first of the novel’s four parts centres around one of the orbiting szlachta noblemen, the mellow but shrewd Cavalry Captain Kurdesz, subsequent parts see his importance fading, and the narrative arc increasingly requiring the reader’s investment to shift to other characters. Once, the recalibration has been finalised, the story continues to flow smoothly.

In the end, I am a bit surprised that this novel has not found a larger audience because, much like a telenovela, this is a most supremely entertaining story. Yet while a telenovela resolves itself through catharsis, Kraszewski offers something more sober. He demonstrates that exposure does not restore innocence; it restores proportion. The social order survives, chastened. Illusion yields to reality, not with fireworks, but with consequence. Sooner or later, the stage set gives way, and the comedians find themselves without a script. In that unguarded moment, the illusion breaks, and the telenovela that has been the comedians’ life all along embarks on its final season.

THE LITTLE PRINCE

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Year: 1952 (1943)
Publisher: Rabén & Sjögren
Language: Swedish (translator Gunvor Bang)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Lille prinsen” (“The Little Prince”) is often, correctly or not, classified as a children’s book, a categorisation that itself reproduces one of the central faults the text quietly dismantles: the adult tendency to sort meaning into rigid taxonomies that obscure lived experience. Beneath its deceptively simple narrative lies a potent ethnography of adulthood, observed through the eyes of a child positioned as The Other within the dominant social order of grown-ups.

The main character, in social anthropological sense, functions as an etic observer. He moves between worlds, asteroids, deserts, and human institutions, and interacts with their respective societies without fully belonging to any of them. In the adult world, he is systematically misconstrued. Adults interpret through institutionalised parameters: numbers, ownership, rank, productivity. The child, by contrast, operates with relational epistemologies: care, curiosity, attachment, and presence. This mismatch renders the child an outsider, not because of juniority, but because of incompatibility.

The grown-ups Saint-Exupéry depicts are not individualised characters so much as social types. The king, the businessman, the geographer, and the lamp lighter are caricatures of actors captured in their roles. These are all people who have mistaken symbolic systems for reality itself and whose identities have consequently collapsed into their functions. Their lives are governed by what I call “self-imposed futility”: activities sustained not because they generate meaning, but because they reproduce the illusion of purpose. The businessman counts stars he can never use; the geographer records landscapes he has never seen.

Self-imposed futility resembles what Sartre called “mauvaise foi” or “bad faith”, but while self-imposed futility proposes to name a collective condition in which people inhabit empty roles sustained by social norms rather than lived meaning, mauvaise foi is the individual’s conscious self-deception that denies personal freedom by mistaking role for destiny. Both diagnose role capture, but Sartre moralises it whereas Saint-Exupéry anthropologises it, as it were.

Another concept akin to self-imposed futility is the Marxist notion of “estrangement” which describes how people can become disconnected from the fruit of their labour, and by extension from their context in society, which may lead to apathy and nihilism. However, in the most basic Marxist understanding this alienation is experienced, whereas self-imposed futility, I submit, encapsulates the continuous illusion of meaning into a state of the subconscious.  

What makes “Lille Prinsen” remarkable is that it, kills two birds with one stone, without announcing its didacticism. First, it reassures the child reader that they do not need to understand, or envy for that matter, the adult world. The book subtly delegitimises adult norms by revealing their arbitrariness. Children that are used to hearing “you will understand when you grow older” may find this refreshingly liberating as it legitimises not only their childhood, but also their worldview. Childhood here is not a preparatory stage but a fully realised cultural environment with its own logic and value system.

Second, the book offers grown-ups a mirror that is gentle but unsparing. By adopting the child’s point of view, Saint-Exupéry uncloaks adult practices, making them visible as odd, ritualised, and absurd. This is a classic ethnographic manoeuvre, externalising the familiar allowing for outside scrutiny. The result is an invitation for adults to recognise the arbitrariness of their life choices and the ways they have normalised nonsense in the name of seriousness. In Millennial vernacular: adulting.

Crucially, the text resists nostalgia. It does not argue that children are purer or morally superior. Instead, it suggests that adulthood often involves a narrowing of perception, a loss of interpretive plurality. The tragedy is not growing up per se, but forgetting that other ways of being remain possible. The little prince does not reject adulthood. He simply refuses to normalise it. Being an adult, he teaches us, does not have to follow a pattern. We could choose to break the routine, but we have grown blind to that option. And even if we saw it, having forgotten what it is like to be a child, we would no longer grasp the value of it. We are victims of self-imposed futility.

In the end, “Lille Prinsen” endures because it operates simultaneously as a fable, a philosophical critique, and a soft ethnography of modern life. It speaks to children without condescension and to adults without accusation. By positioning the child as The Other, Saint-Exupéry exposes how adulthood, far from being an inevitable norm, is itself a culturally specific, and perhaps questionable, way of organising existence.

KALEVALA

Author: Elias Lönnrot
Year: 2001 (1849)
Publisher: Atlantis bokförlag
Language: Swedish (översättare Lars Huldén and Mats Huldén)

It is easy to fall into the trap of reading “Kalevala”, compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the nineteenth century from oral traditions throughout the Finnish heartland, as a national epic in the heroic tradition of Homer or Virgil. Yet the key to understanding this work, seems to be the realisation that its virtue lies not in grand heroics but in the realistic representation of human frailty, contumacy, and recklessness. The three central figures, Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen are not heroic in any conventional, triumphant sense. Their pedestrian habits, repeated failures, and moral ambiguities form a mirror of Finnish cultural self-understanding and of a folklore tradition that values endurance, craft, and restraint over glory.

Väinämöinen, the nominally supreme hero, is defined not by martial prowess but by experience, song, and verbal skill. He is a singer and a seer, whose power is manifested in words carefully remembered, spoken, or sung. Even so, he is hardly idealised. Väinämöinen is stubborn, prideful, and often slow to adapt. His wisdom does not prevent him from making errors, nor does it grant him control over events. He loses contests, fails in courtship, and ultimately departs not in victory but in resignation. This portrayal resists the epic convention of heroic ascent; instead, it emphasises the limitations of knowledge and the inconspicuous dignity of persistence. Väinämöinen’s authority is provisional, rooted in experience rather than domination, and this modesty resonates with a cultural ethos that values patience and tacit understanding over spectacle.

The smith Ilmarinen embodies another deeply unglamorous form of excellence: labour. His defining achievement, the forging of Sampo, is not an act of conquest but of skilled craftsmanship carried out at great personal cost and against his will. Ilmarinen is diligent, reliable, and technically brilliant, yet emotionally inarticulate and unlucky in love. He forges wonders but cannot secure happiness for himself. His exploits in love end in death or bitterness, and his attempts to repair loss only underline the limits of craft as a solution to human grief. In Ilmarinen, “Kalevala” elevates work and technical competence while declining to romanticise them. Creation is necessary and valuable, but it does not legitimise existence or guarantee fulfilment. This sober view of labour aligns closely with Finnish folklore’s emphasis on work as a duty rather than a path to excellence.

Lemminkäinen, by contrast, appears at first glance to be the most conventional hero: youthful, handsome, adventurous, and impulsive. Yet his narrative arc is a sustained critique of reckless bravado. Lemminkäinen ignores warnings, provokes needless conflicts, and pursues honour without reflection. His death in Tuonela is not tragic heroism but the predictable outcome of carelessness. Even his resurrection, accomplished through his mother’s painstaking labour rather than his own merit, reinforces the poem’s scepticism toward individual glory. Lemminkäinen survives, but he does not mature. He remains a cautionary figure whose energy lacks direction. Through him, “Kalevala” suggests that courage without judgment is not admirable but dangerous, and that survival often depends on communal care rather than personal valour.

Taken together, I find that these figures articulate a vision of humanity grounded in limitations. None of the heroes achieves lasting success, moral purity, or final victory. Their world is governed by scarcity, weather, and fate, not by destiny shaped through will alone. There are no castles, only farms. There are no monsters, only forest animals and evil humans. There are deities, most prominently Ukko, the father of all gods, but they play a minor role and, much like forces of nature, show no sign of any will of their own. Conflicts in “Kalevala” are rarely resolved cleanly; instead, they fade, fracture, fluctuate, and rely largely on coincidence. This narrative texture reflects a folklore tradition shaped by harsh environments and long historical marginality, where survival depended less on conquest than on adaptability and cooperation. “Kalevala’s” heroes are thus not ideals to emulate but companions in endurance; figures whose flaws make them recognisable rather than exemplary.

The poem’s geography further underscores this mundane perspective. While “Kalevala” is rich in spatial imagination, moving between Kaleva, Pohjola, Tuonela, and distant lands, it is notable for what it omits. As a Swede, I am made aware that despite its long political and cultural dominance over Finland, Sweden is conspicuously absent from this work. By contrast, regions to the east and south are more readily invoked, and I noted references that point toward Russia and even Germany as part of a wider mythic horizon. Russia symbolises distance. Germany luxury and flair. This asymmetry is striking. The stories were collected in a time where Finland was still recovering from its violent and sudden decoupling from the Swedish realm, which it had been a part of for 800 years, and yet, Sweden is neither idealised nor demonised. It is, much to my surprise, completely ignored.

I choose to read the silence regarding Sweden not as ignorance but as a meaningful absence: an epic drawn from vernacular tradition does not centre on imperial power but instead maps a world defined by trade, rumour, and cultural contact beyond official authority. At the time Elias Lönnrot collected his stories in the mid-19^th century, Karelia in the easternmost parts of Finland was considered the heart of Finland, and the farther west he travelled, the less genuine and more “swedenised” he may have perceived the people and the lands. In this sense, “Kalevala” reflects a folk worldview that resists dominant narratives and preserves its autonomy through curated collective memory. Russia and Germany never threatened to pollute Finnishness and so reference to these lands may have appeared safe.

On a final note, despite the ostensibly chronological storyline and recurring heroes, I propose that each of the 50 songs is best read in isolation. Each carries its own secret and its own message. The songs sometimes interact with one another, and jointly describe a chain of events, and yet there are logical gaps and plot holes everywhere. One soon learns to overlook them.

There is infinitely more to say about this curious work, and scholarly coverage continues to develop, not only in Finland but around the world. Ultimately though, “Kalevala” is an epic of restraint. Its heroes are weary, flawed, and often morally weak; its values are practical rather than transcendent. By refusing the consolations of heroic triumph, the poem offers something rarer: a meditation on how ordinary virtues such as skill, patience, care, and memory, sustain life in an indifferent world. In this way, the non-heroic qualities of Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen are not shortcomings but the very substance of the epic’s wisdom and a peephole into the Finnish soul. I can only fantasise about what the 50 songs must sound like to a Finnish ear in their original tongue.