When the Soviet Union sent half a million troops into Finland on Nov. 30, 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien was sharing a glass of gin with his friend C.S. Lewis and reading him a chapter from his new story about hobbits, “The Lord of the Rings.”
It was the 19th-century Finnish epic, “The Kalevala,” that so impressed Tolkien as a young man and helped to inspire his own story. A collection of ancient songs and myths, “The Kalevala” gave the Finnish people a history and a cultural tradition—a national identity—of their own. And it is credited with helping the Finns to break away from Russian rule during World War I.
