‘Swedes we are no longer—Russians we do not want to become… so let us be Finns!’. This lecture addresses the birth of Finland’s Romanticism and its cultural and societal manifestations in different areas of life.

In this overview, Helena Halmari begins with the Turku Romantics and the publication of Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala. The nineteenth-century National Romantic ideas reached the areas of language, literature, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Still today, people draw inspiration from the “Golden Age” of Finland’s art, and the Kalevala continues to inspire—from art to heavy metal.

PRESENTER

Helena Halmari is a Distinguished Professor of English at Sam Houston State University. Her recent publications include Multilingual Finland, vols. I & II (2024–25, co-edited with Lotta Weckström) and Finnish Romanticism: Language, Nationalism, and the Fine Arts in Nineteenth-Century Finland (2025, with Michael Demson). Halmari has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Finnish Studies, and currently she is Associate Editor of Brill’s Nordic Approaches to Language and Discourse book series. She also translates prose and lyrics from Finnish into English.