4 ms·
I learned about the Kalevala through MST3K, of all things. They did commentary on "The Day the Earth Froze", which is an edited version of the Soviet-Finnish f
by eesmith 4y ago
I learned about the Kalevala through MST3K, of all things.
They did commentary on "The Day the Earth Froze", which is an edited version of the Soviet-Finnish film "Sampo" loosely based on the Kalevala.
See it yourself, at https://youtu.be/yRhXcxx1SwM?t=958 https://youtu.be/yRhXcxx1SwM?t=958 .
- foobarian 4y agoI remember it from watching some weird black and white movie as a kid on some communist TV station. There was a long haired old man chanting "Kalevala show yourself" over and over again (all foreign stuff was subtitled for us). Nothing else stuck :-) (Edit: it's possible it was Sampo, even though that seems to be in color. We just didn't have color TVs back then).
- Mistletoe 4y agoHaha my girlfriend and I still sing the Sampo song. That movie is so disjointed that I didn’t even recognize this was that. And I still don’t know what the Sampo is!
- juki 4y ago> And I still don’t know what the Sampo is! No one does. Sampo is basically just a magical MacGuffin that brings wealth to whoever has it. In Kalevala it is usually understood as a mill that creates infinite grain, salt and money, but different folk stories have different interpretations.
- iggldiggl 4y agoDon Rosa wrote a Kalevala-based Scrooge McDuck story (The Quest for Kalevala), and a "mill that creates infinite grain, salt and money" (gold) is of course an ideal object of desire for ol' Scrooge.
- goto11 4y ago> And I still don’t know what the Sampo is! You are not alone! Scholars are still debating it. It is some kind of magical device which create wealth, but there is a number of very different theories raging from a magical mill to the "pillar of the world".
- krapp 4y agoA Sampo is just a sampoid in the category of sampofunctors.
- eurasiantiger 4y agoYou jest, but Sampo is clearly an instance of the cornucopia archetype.
- mhd 4y agoI think I first made my entry into some Kalevalan topics from researching where the Forgotten Realms gods came from. Mielikki was somewhat literally taken, "Illmater" was a weird one, from a air goddess to a (male) god of suffering. But yeah, the Russian movies from MST3K were some of my series favorites.