"In the morning when I went to the bathroom, there was a roll of toilet paper sitting on the back of the toilet in each bathroom. (I checked even and it was a different brand than what we had used before and a brand that wasn’t sold at the store there.) My good Father not only provided (without me asking), but He also was protecting my heart. We need to keep our hearts thankful, which we can do. All we have to do is know Him. Because if we know Him, we know He’s always good, always loving, always faithful, always trustworthy."

Here the history of Finland’s national poem becomes indistinguishable from the kind of myth-making it contains. Was Lönnrot unearthing the fragments of a single, scattered story? Or imposing cohesion where there was previously none? According to some, the physician pieced back together the fractured narrative, as if mending a bone, which had been shattered across the tongues of rural singers. “There was no problem of personal style”, writes the British translator Keith Bosley, “the ancient poetry which is now called Kalevala poetry has a single style transcending not only individual talent but even region and century”. Others, like the Finnish historian Timo Vihavainen, offer a more skeptical genealogy: “Finnish folklorists arrived at the conclusion that Kalevala had not been born in any particular part of Finland but on Elias Lönnrot’s writing table”.