A note to what Jack Campin said about Kullervo, Sigmund and Siglinde. I'm doing retellings of both these stories- the Völsunga Saga (which contains Sigmund and Signy's incest with each other, and Signy convincing her brother to kill their first two sons due to the fact that she thinks they're cowards) is the major one. Grishka also gave me advice about retelling shorter folktales first, so I picked Kullervo's story as the short one. Both these stories are my favourites, due to their connection to Tolkien and because they're great stories. Kullervo's story, in particular, has the feel of irreversible tragedy.

Here's what I found on the Kullervo runes from pages 145-148 of Domenico Comparetti's book, The Traditional Poetry of The Finns, which was published in 1898 and is available online on the Archive website.

The earliest Finnish/Karelian songs about Kullervo say nothing about any incest and don't give his name, but only call him Kalevanpoika, son of Kaleva, Kalehva, or Kalervo, who's born after a feud between his father's and uncle's clans. He's blessed/cursed with incredible strength, and tears his swaddling clothes and breaks his cradle when he's three days old. As a child he's sold as a slave to a blacksmith whose cruel, malicious wife gives him scraps to eat while her family and other servants eat good food. She bakes him some bread for lunch while he's herding cows, a task he's given after he ruins every other task he's assigned due to his superhuman strength. He breaks his father's old knife on the stone his mistress baked inside the loaf, and takes his revenge, casting a spell to turn her cows into bears when she comes out to milk them, when they maul her to death. He then runs away, finds his uncle Untamo's clan and kills all of them. There's also two other runes which got combined with that one, which are about a man leaving for war who asks his family if they will cry if he is killed in action, and one where a man is leaving, usually for war, and hears of the deaths of his entire family but is only moved at the death of one (usually his wife). Comparetti calls these poems the Son of Kaleva's Revenge, the Setting Out for the War, and the Death Tidings.


The episode of the young man who commits incest with his sister while on a tax-collecting trip comes from another ballad, "Sisaren turmelus" or "Deflowering of The Sister," where the hero is mostly named Tuiretuinen, Turikkainen or or Tore or Turo. In that ballad, originally the hero doesn't commit suicide, instead repenting by making a sacrifice. But in some parts of 19th-century Karelia, in the Archangel area,there were variants of the song which called the hero Kullervo and usually had the unknown sister get pulled out of a group of girls at a festival. The name "Kullervo" linked the Deflowering Of The Sister with Kaleva's Son's Revenge and the Setting Out For The War, as well as the Death Tidings. Lönnrot used a combination of these runes found in the Archangel area as a basis for Runos 31-36 in the Kalevala.

Traditional Poetry of The Finns by Domenico Comparetti.