The essay is dedicated to Friedrich Reinhold
Kreutzwald (1803–1882), the author of the Estonian national
epic Kalevipoeg (1857–1861). As 200 years from Kreutzwald's
birth lapse on the 26th of December this year, the author makes
a call for a radical revision of the place of Kalevipoeg
in European and Western literature. His main claim is that Kreutzwald's
epic should not really be evaluated from a folkloric and folklorist's
point of view – which has prevailed during the 20th century
–, but as an outstanding literary work in the canon of
European individual epics reaching from Virgil's Aeneid,
the anonymous Chanson de Roland and Cantar de Mío
Cid to Camões's Os Lusiadas and the late Western
Romanticism.
