About Karelian Kantele & Runo
The old Karelian five-string kantele is one block of pine hollowed from below, its soundboard three to five millimetres thick, its body black from years hanging in the smoke cabin. Ontrei Malinen's instrument carries 1833 cut into its short side and weighs 782 grams. Elias Lönnrot met him the next year and wrote him down.
This system takes the instrument literally. Soot-black pine is the ground, worn brass is the working colour, five hairlines run the field like strings, and text falls in paired trochaic lines because that is how the songs were sung. Fraktur for the 1835 title page, Garamond for verse, Source Serif for the archive.
- Origin
- Viena Karelia and the Karelian isthmus, village of Vuonninen, on both sides of the present Finnish–Russian border
- Era
- 1833–1835 (Malinen kantele dated 1833; Lönnrot's notebooks 1834; Kalevala preface 28 February 1835); tradition pre-1900
- Key figures
- Ontrei Malinen · Elias Lönnrot
- Movements
- runolaulu and the Kalevala metre · 19th-century folk-song collecting · Karelianism
Karelian Kantele & Runo design spec
Colors
Typography
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