Kalevala Day!

So I just learned (or re-learned) that today, February 28th, is Kalevala Day in Finland, the day when they celebrate the Finnish national "epic" collected by Elias Lönnrot in the 19th century. Tolkien, of course, had an early fascination with this poem, which he first saw in W.F. Kirby's translation as a teenager.

By pure coincidence, though, I was reading The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis just last night, and saw that CSL also read and admired Kirby's text. Here's a part of it:

After Kirby's Kalevala

Sound of weeping in slender grasses
Rose, a mourning in the pretty woodland.
Round him mourning were the tender grasses,
Flowers of leaved glade were grieving,
Fading for the maiden's marring;
Woodland weeping for a mother's daughter.
In one place no grass was growing,
Flower-forsaken, earth was naked,
Where he had done the unholy thing,
Where maid had fallen and man stolen
Maidenhead of his mother's daughter.

Lewis, as you can see, keeps the trochaic rhythm while deviating slightly from the traditional tetrameters (that is, some lines have 9 or 10 syllables). He also wrote the poem in 1936-1937, so a few decades after Tolkien's first encountered the Kalevala. Not sure why it took Lewis so long to read the poem, given that he surely knew of Tolkien's liking for it, but it's also possible that Lewis read the Kalevala long prior, but was only now getting to writing about that reading.