Vanha maininki : Runoja by Aleksanteri Aava
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Vanha maininki by Aleksanteri Aava is a collection of lyric poems written in the early 20th century. It weaves Finnish nature, rural life, hunting and homestead work, ancestral memory, and the living echo of the Kalevala into reflective scenes that move between myth and everyday experience, with a quiet emphasis on love, loss, and the pull of one’s homeland. The opening poem describes how spring light and forest music kindle the poet’s
voice, and the title piece likens Lake Ladoga’s lingering swell to the after-surge of ancestral song in the present. The first group paints strong rustic vignettes: a bear exulting in its power, a fox hunt through snowy woods, a boy learning woodcraft and manly measure from his grandfather, and a riverside love remembered amid autumn’s fade. The second group turns starker: seasonal visits to a cottage end in silence and implied death, a dialogue between a crone and a girl weighs life against Tuoni’s call, a night in a junk shed stirs memories and mortality, a folktale humbles a proud lord on a forest road, and a sauna scene exposes superstition around a newborn. The third group is a hymn to homeland—lakes, fields, and the warning never to scorn one’s birthplace—then a visionary return to the song-house of Kalevala, where an elder teaches that happiness is to honor forebears, break new ground, cherish the kantele, and share burdens with a good spouse. The final poems gather laments and resolve: a vigil for a dead beloved, a meditation that prizes striving over star-calm or wave-drift, autumn sorrow that lives in the heart more than the season, a lone skier bearing a deathbed message, an elegy for Aino, and a forest hymn affirming an upward-reaching spirit and the endurance of ideals beyond any single life. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Aava, Aleksanteri, 1883-1956 |
|---|---|
| Title | Vanha maininki : Runoja |
| Original Publication | Porvoo: WSOY, 1916. |
| Credits | Tuula Temonen |
| Language | Finnish |
| LoC Class | PH: Language and Literatures: Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages and literatures |
| Subject | Finnish poetry -- 20th century |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 77333 |
| ISBN (HTML) | 979-8-238-77333-9 |
| Release Date | Nov 25, 2025 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 209 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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