Introduction

Reforming oral tradition by Elias Lönnrot and Otto Manninen

“…Collecting, editing, publishing, and rewriting folklore into literature was a transnational process in the nineteenth century, and it can be categorized as being a part of Romanticism, nationalism, and a wider interest in folklore in art and research (Perraudin & Campbell 2017;Leerssen 2012). Even though oral and written cultural transmission is by no means only a nineteenth-century phenomenon (see e.g., Kallio et al 2017), it increasingly emerged during that century, particularly after Romantic ideas of folk and poetry were introduced by J. G. Herder and James Macpherson's Songs of Ossian (1760).…”