BOOK: Johan Ludvig Runeberg, "The Tales of Ensign Stål"

Johan Ludvig Runeberg: The Tales of Ensign Stål. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork, Clement Burrbank Shaw, and C. D. Broad. With an Introduction by Yrjö Hirn and illustrations by Albert Edelfelt. Helsingfors: Söderstrom & Co., 1952. xxvi + 244 pp.

I first heard of this book and its author about ten years ago, thanks to a rather remote connection: I was reading Sven Hedin's propaganda book America in the Struggle of the Continents and found him quoting a phrase that seemed evidently to be from a poem, but there was no hint as to its source. By googling a bit, I found that it was from one of Runeberg's poems which form part of The Tales of Ensign Stål (in the present volume that particular poem is translated as The Ensign at the Fair).

There was much to fascinate me and excite my curiosity about this book and its author, and make me want to read it. Here was a man who was hailed as the national poet of Finland, but he wrote everything in Swedish! I was amazed by this. Finland had been under Swedish rule for many centuries, but apparently had been treated well enough that there was not much bad blood between them. I couldn't help but compare it to our own history; Slovenia had been part of the Austrian Empire (and its various predecessors) for many centuries, but if someone asked if a poet writing in German could have been considered our national poet, the idea is completely unthinkable. I could never regard such a poet as anything but a foreigner, even if he and his ancestors had lived here for generations. But apparently in Finland things were very different; I cannot entirely understand them, but I am fascinated by it nonetheless.

And then there was the subject matter of this book; here is a volume of poems about the Finnish War of 1808–9, a conflict so obscure by present-day standards that I had hardly ever heard of it before! — but it clearly loomed enormously large in the minds of Runeberg and his contemporaries in 19th-century Finland. How could I resist wanting to read more about it? I soon bought a secondhand copy of this book, but only got around to reading it now, some ten years later.

The book comes with a useful and interesting introduction which provides enough historical background that one can appreciate the poems just fine without feeling the need to look anything up in the wikipedia (though at times looking things up can be interesting just the same). Sweden used to be something of a great power in northern Europe, and that role brought her into a never-ending sequence of conflicts with Russia, conflicts which Sweden eventually mostly started losing. The war of 1808–9 was just the last step in this process, and in it Sweden lost Finland to Russia. Runeberg was born in 1804, so that as a young man he must have had plenty of opportunities to read and hear about the war from people who had experienced it themselves, and it was these things that inspired the poems in the present volume. In one of the first poems he presents the whole thing as being based on his conversations with an elderly veteran, the eponymous Ensign Stål, though judging by Yrjö Hirn's introduction at the start of the book, Runeberg's sources of inspiration were actually a bit more varied and complex than that.

I was a bit surprised that the volume, which is not very extensive, was translated by as many as three translators. The table of contents shows who translated which poem; if I counted aright, 25 poems are in Stork's translation, 9 in Shaw's, and only one (the first poem in the book, Finland) by Broad. In fact Shaw had previously published his own translation of the entire work, as The Songs of Ensign Stål (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1925). On the other hand, Stork had published a translation titled The Tales of Ensign Stål (Princeton University Press, 1938), with an introduction by Yrjö Horn same as the present edition, but it was only about 150 pages long (the present edition is about 240 pages), so it was probably incomplete and contained only the poems which are marked, in the table of contents in the present volume, as having been translated by Stork. The present volume, then, is something of a second edition of Stork's 1938 book, with the missing poems supplied from Shaw's 1925 book.

Incidentally, Shaw's edition is available on hathitrust.org and actually looks very good. It has many of the same illustrations (by Edelfelt) as the present volume, as well as some musical scores, maps, a fairly extensive historical introduction, and best of all, a short introduction before each poem, with useful background information — just the thing which I occasionally missed while reading the present edition. One downside of Shaw's edition, however, is that he insists of describing the work as an ‘epic’ and the individual poems as ‘cantos’, which strikes me as simply silly; it's obviously a collection of poems about a shared topic, not a single epic poem.

Anyway, I enjoyed The Tales of Ensign Stål a great deal (the illustrations are a nice touch as well), so in the rest of this post I'll just write a few words about each of the poems that I particularly liked:

• Finland (pp. 3–5): a beautiful poem full of love for his country. I particularly liked this stanza: “This is a sweet and lovely spot, / All, all we need lies here. / However fate may cast our lot / A land, a homeland, we have got — / And what is worthier, far or near, / To cherish and hold dear?”

• The Veteran (pp. 29–35): an old veteran, hearing that a battle is to be fought close to where he lives, puts on his old uniform and goes to sit at the edge of the battlefield to watch the fight! “He longed to hear the clashing / Of sword-blades yet once more, / The full familiar echo / Of great field-cannons' roar;— / Would call to recollection / His young life's valiant mood, / See this new race of fighters,— / The courage of its blood.” Amazingly, although the fight occasionally comes close to him, nobody molests him and all bullets miraculously whizz past his ears. The Finns win the battle, and the veteran cheers on them as they return from the field: “Great thanks to you he renders / For this illustrious day; / For no more glorious combat / Did e'er his eye survey. / To God be praise and glory, / We triumph yet again; / Still lives our fathers' spirit, / And still our land has men!”

I really liked this poem because it is so very different from what we could imagine today. For someone to watch a battle and not get horribly killed himself in the process, is inconceivable today (frankly, I wonder how realistic it was even in 1808/9). Moreover, nowadays it seems as if two adjacent generations couldn't possibly do anything but hate each other and consider each other wrong about everything; but here the veteran gave full-throated, full-hearted praise to the soldiers of the young generation. Back then there was still the idea that society could continue from one generation to another, that where one generation left off, the next would continue building upon that; now, by contrast, everyone is convinced that it is every generation's duty to ignore or dismantle everything that was built before their time, and start anew from scratch. Sigh.

• The Girl of the Cottage (pp. 42–6): a nice poem with a twist. The girl is watching soldiers returning from battle, but doesn't see her sweetheart amongst them. She goes to look for him on the battlefield, but doesn't find him among the dead there either. Previously, she grieved for him because she thought he was dead; but now, realizing that he had deserted to avoid risking his life, her grief takes an altogether darker turn: “When others came and he came not, I wept his fate most truly, / Among the dead there on the field I thought him lying duly; / I sorrowed, but my grief was sweet, 'twas not a grief to kill, / I would have lived a thousand years to sorrow for him still. // Mother, I sought until the light no more the west was streaking, / But never found amid the slain the face that I was seeking, / I'll dwell no longer in a world where men deceive and lie; / I found him not among the dead, and therefore I will die.” A beautiful ballad in a beautiful metre — what more could you wish for?

• Sven Duva (pp. 47–54): Sven is a big and strong lad, with a brave heart but not much of a brain, and horribly clumsy at everything he tries to do; he joins the army, but even there he's the laughingstock of everyone by getting all the orders mixed up while drilling. But when war comes, he has the chance to prove himself; his unit is sent to hold a bridge against the incoming Russians, but his comrades are soon killed and Sven holds the bridge by himself long enough for reinforcements to arrive. (I was reminded of Macaulay's brave Horatius, but he had two companions while Sven stood alone.) Their commander, General Sandels, comes to praise Sven, but it is too late: “But Sandels saw that underneath his heart the grass was red, / His breast was pierced, and through the wound his life by now had sped. // These were the words the general spake: ‘We'll all of us admit / That bullet knew far more than we, it knew the place to hit; / It left unhurt the poor lad's head, which was not of the best, / And found itself a worthier mark, his noble, valiant breast.’ ”

You might say that this poem partly deals with the question of whether it's better to have a good heart or a good brain; I for one would be happy to agree that a person with a good heart and not much of a brain is to be preferred over the opposite, and I suspect that most people would say the same, but alas, in practice those with more brain than heart tend to fare better in life.

Incidentally, poor Sven's surname seems to be something of a joke: duva is Swedish for ‘dove’.

• The Dying Soldier (pp. 59–62): although the war of 1808/9 was a bitter one, this poem shows that the author could see the humanity in his enemies as well. Night has fallen on the battlefield and an old Russian soldier is dying next to the body of a younger Finnish soldier with whom they had fought during the day. A girl arrives, searching for her sweetheart amongst the dead; and to be sure, it is none other than the young Finn we have just mentioned. The Russian tries to get up and say something, but in that moment he dies. “He came from out a hostile land, / He served a hostile cause; / But pity him, brother, take his hand, / And mind not what he was! / The time for vengeful thoughts is o'er, / And in the grave men hate no more.”

• Sandels (pp. 70–7): General Sandels is taking his time at dinner and ignoring the messengers bringing increasingly urgent reports of a Russian attack. Soldiers begin to grumble that he is evidently a coward. But he proves his courage by showing himself on horseback in view of the enemy forces, indifferent to the bullets whistling past him; and it turns out that he had a plan all along: “Your men, are they good for a counter-attack? / Will they strike a downright blow? / The enemy's bottled, that was my plan.” It proves a great success, and the enemy is routed.

• The Two Dragoons (pp. 80–3): a poem about a friendly rivalry between two soldiers. Lod was awarded a medal while Stål was recovering from an injury, and so Stål now recklessly charges a group of enemies in the hopes of either getting a medal of his own, or getting killed in the process. And he would have got killed, but Lod rushes to help him, and they both survive. “Lod to Sandels came, / With the medal from his jacket / In his hand displayed, / ‘Let Stål have another like it, / Or take this,’ he said.”

• Old Man Hurtig (pp. 84–8): the fortunes of war have been turning against the Finnish side; Hurtig is an old soldier who feels they have been retreating too much, and resolves not to retreat any more. He goes to sleep “[d]reaming how he nevermore would flee”. The poem now deliberately skips any details about what exactly happens, and ends very touchingly with a scene of Hurtig's body lying in the field in the wake of the Finnish retreat: “And he slept, as if of Gustaf's glory / Every memory long since had passed;— / Deeper slept, from march and battle's story, / Than on bivouac field his last;— / Slumbered, from all care and trouble free, / Dreaming how he nevermore would flee.”

• Kulneff (pp. 89–96): Kulneff is a Russian commander full of energy and zest for life, and his vigour and courage win the respect of his enemies: “Yet all the while throughout the war / There was no Finn but felt a glow / Of undisguised affection for / This battle-seasoned foe. / His well known features would evoke / An answering grin among our folk. / And bear would greet his brother bear / Across the carnage there. // [. . .] 'Twas something that can scarce be told, / When Kulneff and the Finns took hold; / They knew how to appreciate / A worthy wrestling-mate. // [. . .] Cowards alone deserve our hate, / Heap shame on them without remorse; / But hail to him who soon and late / Ran a true soldier's course! / A joyous cheer, a hearty cheer / For him who fought and knew no fear! / Further than that, why ask to know / If he was friend or foe?” I was really impressed by this poem and the sentiments contained therein, especially since they are so unthinkable today. I can't imagine that anybody in the numerous armed conflicts that are going on at present would admit to having such gallant respect for his enemies. Perhaps it's because technology has changed and war is now more impersonal than two hundred years ago.

• Sveaborg (pp. 105–8): the important fortress of Sveaborg was handed over to the Russians treacherously by its commander, for which the narrator of this poem badmouths him in the most impressive manner — it's practically an adjuration — while scrupulously avoiding his name (which accordingly never occurs in the poem): “Call him the arm we trusted in, / That shrank in time of stress, / Call him Affliction, Scorn and Sin / And Death and Bitterness, / But mention not his former name, / Lest they should blush who bear the same. // Take all that's dismal in the tomb, / Take all in life that's base, / To form one name of guilt and gloom / For that one man's disgrace, / 'Twill rouse less grief in Finland's men / Than his at Sveaborg did then.”

Incidentally, the historical note at the start of the book tells us that his name was Karl Olof Kronstedt. He was sentenced to death in absentia, but “kept away from Sweden and lived in Finland where he received a pension from the Russian government” (p. x). A happy end, I guess :)) By the way, judging by the wikipedia, it isn't quite so clear if Kronstedt was really acting treacherously or not.

• Döbeln at Jutas (pp. 109–21): General Döbeln has been badly ill with fever for some time, but an important battle is at hand and he realizes that his army will be routed unless he is there to lead it. His soldiers are delighted to see him again, he reviews the troops and speaks a few words to a soldier here and there, then leads them to a glorious attack: “From Döbeln's haughty eyes two tears were streaming: / ‘Come on, you gallant folk, then, to the fray! / I've seen enough, we've no more time for dreaming. / 'Twill be a good fight; this is Döbeln's day. / The harvest's ready. Adjutant, give orders / On hill and plain and through the forest borders / Down the whole front that we're to move ahead. / Not here, out there we'll fight. I've such reliance / In troops like these, I'd bid the world defiance. / We wait no longer, we attack instead.’ // From all the line rose sudden jubilation: / ‘Forward to death or victory!’ it rang.” Wow, what rousing lines! To slightly misquote a sentence from TV Tropes: ‘what can you say to verse like that, except: Get me a horse, I want to *invade* something!’

Döbeln's army achieves a resounding victory, but the general himself finally succumbs to his fever. In the last few stanzas we find him dying alone on the field, addressing god in a way which is not exactly prayer, for his religious opinions are too unconventional for that: “ ‘You have restored my country, by no merit / Of mine, for every other hope was hid. / Do You, all-seeing, look into my spirit, / If gratitude be there for what You did. / The slave may court his god with genuflexion; / I cannot cringe and grovel for protection, / I seek no favor, ask for no reward. / I would but stand here happy in Your presence, / With fervent heart but yielding no obeisance; / That prayer a free man's soul may still afford. // [. . .] But You it was who saved us and none other, / How shall I speak to You? My God, my brother, / Giver of victory, my thanks to You!’ ”

• The Soldier Boy (pp. 125–8): the narrator of this poem is a boy descended from a long line of soldiers; he is an orphan: his father died in battle, and his mother “wept three long days through, / The fourth day she was dead.” But the boy thinks so highly of military glory that, at news of his father's death, he “was distressed, and happy too”; and although he is a beggar now, he can't wait to turn fifteen so he can join the army as well and continue the family tradition: “When whizzing bullets fill the air, / Whoever seeks may find me there, / For I in turn would follow where / My fathers led the way.”

• The Ensign at the Fair (pp. 133–42): an old veteran, fallen on hard times, ekes out a miserable living as a balladeer, singing about old wartime days in the hope of alms from passers-by. At the end of the poem, a general whom we saw at the start of the poem as a rather cold and haughty figure, recognizes the veteran as an old comrade: “ ‘Random are the gifts of fortune, such is Wisdom's high decree; / Mine are glory and abundance, yours are need and poverty; / But the best are ours in common: faith untarnished, ever bright, / Honor by our blood attested, and the consciousness of right. // Therefore we are comrades. Come and sit by me then, battle-mate! / Gladly let us share the small things, who are equal in the great. / I have gold, if you require it; shelter, food unstintingly. / You may end your days in comfort, singing your brave song for me.’ ”

• Lotta Svärd (pp. 143–51): Lotta is a soldier's widow who now works as a vivandière, following the troops with a cart and selling drinks, often close enough to the battle lines that a bullet occasionally whizzes through her tent. “She loved the war, with its griefs and joys, / Whatever their ebb and flow, / She was fond of the grizzled old soldier boys, / And that's why we liked her so. // [. . .] She followed the army, bold and true, / On all of its hard career. / Where shots were cracking and bullets flew / She never was far in the rear. // She liked to see her boys at their game, / And always she used to say, / No matter how close the fighting came, / ‘Well, I'm no nearer than they.’ ”

I liked this poem not just because it's quite touching, but also because it's an example of the wide range of people covered by the poems in this volume: war affects a lot of people besides just the soldiers who fight in it, and its effects linger long after the battles are over; Runeberg is of course very well aware of all this and shows it in the choice of characters and incidents illustrated in his poems (although soldiers and officers and battles understandably do take up the majority of his attention).

Incidentally, later this poem inspired the name of a Finnish women's auxiliary organization in the 1920s and '30s.

• The Stranger's Vision (pp. 159–63): one of several poems that show the lasting impacts of the war decades after it was over. Late one evening, a traveller observes a curious scene through the windows of a stately home: “Upon the wall / I saw a picture and, with interval / Of space between, another there suspended. / The woman, as her steps drew near the pair, / Stopped short, the while her downcast brow ascended / With a glad attitude as if in prayer.” It turns out that she does this every night, and the paintings are of her two sons who had died in the war years ago: “She was those youthful heroes' aged mother; / She did not pray to them—she said good-night.”

• Von Törne (pp. 170–7): one nice thing about the poems in this book is that the poet is very good at showing us the distinct personalities of his characters, many of whom have their own peculiar eccentricities. Major von Törne here is a kind of country squire, now commanding a regiment which he seems to have raised from amongst his own tenants, and he knows all his soldiers personally. He has stopped his regiment a good distance from the fight, and his men are taking pretty successful shots at the Russians from there; but a messenger from the general arrives, with an order to advance. At first von Törne shows no inclination to advance, and wastes time in endless prattling; but then an enemy bullet comes flying “[r]ight through the portal 'twixt the old man's knees”. The man now flies into a rage, and finally orders the attack: “He's shot the coat to tatters and damnation / The second day I've had it on my back! / The devil take that devil! Boys, attack!” :)

• The Commissary Driver (pp. 204–9): a recurring theme in this book is how long the Finnish/Swedish army kept retreating, and how unhappy the men were about these endless retreats. In this poem we meet a remarkably lethargic and ill-kempt driver of a provisions cart; but then when the army reaches Siikajoki and finally gets ready to stop retreating and make a stand, the driver suddenly appears clean, upright, and looking several years younger. He explains why the change: “Slow's the way you travel, when your land you fly. / [. . .] What's the use, besides, to keep your face so clean? / When 'tis washed, your shame's the easier to be seen. / [. . .] Now 't 'as all been changed, like, no more shame to hide, / Finland lies before us, open heaven-wide; / There's no stain upon her, never more shall be, sir, / So a man can wash his face again, d'ye see, sir?”

• Wilhelm von Schwerin (pp. 210–17): the protagonist is a young captain, only fifteen years old, who has distinguished himself by his courage and leadership, but within weeks he gets badly injured and dies; the poem ends with his funeral. You cannot help being touched, but you also can't help wondering how desperate they must have been if they allowed such a young man to get involved in the fighting.

• Number Fifteen Stolt (pp. 218–23): here we meet a vagabond who has sort of joined the army in an informal manner — “you took the gun / A fallen man's hand let go / And came along with us on the run / To the heart of the battle's glow”. He distinguished himself in combat, and is accepted into the ranks and given the uniform of a recently killed comrade. It is the first time he was actually accepted anywhere, and he is moved to tears: “Now the first time on his wintry heart / A sunbeam of spring was cast, / And something within him thawed apart, / For tear upon tear flowed fast.”

• The Brothers (pp. 224–9): the betrayal of the Sveaborg fortress, which we already encountered in one of the earlier poems, casts its long shadow over the current poem as well. Johan Wadenstjerna is visited by his brother, whom he has not seen for almost twenty years, but who evidently had some share in the guilt for the betrayal at Sveaborg, though the details aren't clear to me;* this brother is seeking reconciliation, but Johan drives him away at gunpoint; but Johan himself is anguished about this, and spends a sleepless night in tears.

[*According to the note in Shaw's edition, the brother's name is Carl Wilhelm Wadenstjerna and he doesn't seem to have been guilty of much more than commanding a battallion at Sveaborg, and going along with the surrender. That note also says that he and Johan were actually just brothers-in-law (more specifically, their wives were sisters), and that Johan “died within a year of Sveaborg's capitulation”, so I guess the poet took some liberties here in showing both men still alive 19 years after the end of the war. Perhaps he was inspired by the fact that Carl died in 1819, soon after the date of this poem, and we are perhaps meant to imagine that his death had something to do with the failed reconciliation attempt depicted here.]

• The Provincial Governor (pp. 230–5): this poem shows as an example how valour can be found outside of combat as well. The protagonist, as the title shows, is a senior civil servant, not a soldier. By now most of Finland is in Russian hands, and a Russian general shows up, telling the governor to issue a proclamation that if those who still resist won't surrender, their families' property will be seized. The governor, however, dares to stand up to him and points out that such a confiscation would be contrary to Swedish law, which the czar had promised to uphold when he took over Finland. The general, evidently impressed by the man's courage and uprightness, shakes his hand and goes away. I couldn't help being impressed by this surprisingly wholesome turn of events; if this poem had been set in the present time, in the Russian-occupied parts of the Ukraine, the governor would probably have simply been killed, or deposed and packed off to some prison camp. In some ways our civilization has taken some considerable steps backwards since the days in which this book is set.