by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Hey, J.R.R. Tolkien fans. If you’ve plowed through the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and any and all apocryphal Middle-Earth material, and you’re jonesing for more, there’s a placebo out there for you. It’s called Kalevala, it’s the mythological epic of Finnish folklore, and any similarity to Tolkien’s imaginary universe is fully intentional. Tolkien in fact learned Finnish specifically to read Kalevala.

“The eternal fight between good and evil is naturally present in both,” explains Mari Kaasinen, a third of the female vocal trio central to the Finnish neo-folk nonet Värttinä, who have co-composed the score to the forthcoming Lord of the Rings stage musical. “In Kalevala we have Sampo, which is a machine made of gold. Whoever owns it will be happy and rich and have all the power in the world. Many characters are hunting it, and eventually Sampo is destroyed.”

Replace the machine with a ring and you’ve got LOTR. Not that Kalevala doesn’t have its distinct quirks. “According to Kalevala’s ‘evolution theory,’” notes Kaasinen, “the world is born from the egg of a duck.” Quack!

More to the point, though, music is a fundamental element of Kalevala, both in its narrative and in how its raw material, the ancient runo poems, were passed down prior to being collected by the Finnish doctor and folklore scholar Elias Lönnrot in 1835.

“The main character is an old man,” says Kaasinen, “a wizard called Väinämöinen. He was very much respected for his wisdom, and also for his talented singing and playing. He built the very first kantele, the Finnish national instrument, out of jaws of a pike fish. He played it so very well and beautifully that even all the animals gathered to listen.”

It takes a village…

“I get a lot of inspiration out of Kalevala,” says Kaasinen. “Often, just one word or sentence can launch a whole story.” In 1983, in the village of Rääkkylä in the eastern region of Karelia (from whence sprang Kalevala’s raw material, and Värttinä’s Finno-Urgic tongue), those ancient words launched the story of Värttinä.

The group began as a sort of an informal, song-focused folklore club for young girls, initiated by Kaasinen, her sister Sari and a few friends. Janne Lappalainen was the first lucky young gentleman to be inducted into what seems an unusual activity for teens, given that most are inclined to reject tradition and, you know, start rock bands at that age.

“I was 12 years old,” recalls Lappalainen, “and the girls were the same age as me, and a little older. It was a small village, so there weren’t that many options for what kind of music you could do, because we didn’t have proper teachers or anything.”

They did have their trusty Kalevalas, though, and began their journey with faithful renditions of its building blocks, the runo poem-songs. “Runo is a Finnish word, and its original meaning was ‘singer,’ but also ‘wizard.’ This style has special rules—for example, eight syllables for each line, and instead of the usual rhymes at the end of each line, it has rhyming syllables in the beginning of each word in a line. We find this endlessly fascinating and a challenging part of our songs. English translations are not 100 per cent accurate, because it is impossible to translate exactly. And we like that aspect of it also.”

“From the beginning, we tried to do it a little differently, add some more energy and do it our own way,” says Lappalainen, who plays the notably un-Finnish bouzouki and saxophone. “So there was a rebel attitude, even when we started. For many years, we’ve done only originals. But always, in the backs of our heads, we try to write melodies that would be ageless, that could have existed 200 or 2,000 years ago. They sound old, but then we do them in a modern way.”

Ferociously feminine

Old or new, there’s something almost unique about Värttinä’s vocal approach. Kaasinen and co-singers Johanna Virtanen and Susan Aho have planted their flag on a largely untouched patch of the emotional spectrum.

Forceful female vocals aren’t unprecedented—consider the joyful noise of black American gospel divas, the incoherent rage of Courtney Love or the deep sorrow present in soul music’s heartbroken howls, and in funeral laments the world over.

But rare are the women’s voices that are as fierce and focused as Värttinä’s, whose lyrical themes are distinctly feminine. Kaasinen, who somehow finds time in Värttinä’s schedule to teach kantele to young Finnish girls, chalks this up in part to their roots. “The stories we sing are based on Finnish folklore, in which women have traditionally sung all their feelings out. It used to be easier to express one’s feelings by singing rather than talking.

“Often, these songs weren’t sung in public but privately, in the forest for example. The pines and spruces in the woods were listeners that the singers could rely on—they listened to every word that was sung and never told anyone the secrets they heard.”

There’s more to it than that, though, at least on their latest album, Miero. The title means “outcast,” and that theme, the anguish and bitterness of the rejected one—in a romantic relationship, or within a community—is present throughout, delivered with a ferocity, precision and honesty few women are willing to risk allowing themselves.

Dig this lyrical gem, from album opener “Riena”: “My loathing drips blood, my pain slashes, curses, drenches with pus.” Whoa! Move over, Norwegian black metallists!

“We’ve done so much happy music in the past, it was just time to explore the darker side of ourselves and our music, to try to find something new,” says Lappalainen, who credits producer Aija Puurtinen’s fixation on vocals with the album’s artistic success.

“I also think the Lord of the Rings stage production has affected our compositions and lyrics,” says Kaasinen, “by bringing in a glimpse of a somewhat darker world.”

Ring singers

The LOTR musical, the biggest and most expensive such production ever, sees its gala premiere, well, quite possibly as you read this. Tonight, March 23, is the date of the grand unveiling at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto, where for some months, Lappalainen has been on hand as the five-hour running time was whittled down to a tidy three and a half, and thus the music chopped up and rearranged.

Given the fantastic, Finnish thread running between Tolkien, Kalevala and Värttinä, summoning up inspiration wasn’t too difficult. Neither was accepting that their music would be manhandled by others— Värttinä can look forward to the soundtrack album they’re recording being the definitive document. The real challenge, though, would seem to be the collaboration with India’s A.R. Rahman, a major icon in Bollywood’s filmi music pantheon, whose notions are interwoven with Värttinä’s to create LOTR’s musical tapestry.

“Actually, it was quite easy. There was a link between us—Chris Nightingale, the musical supervisor. Our working methods are somewhat different—Rahman is one person, we are nine in the band. He’s working on a computer with samples, a very technological way of doing music, while we just come to the room, pick up our instruments and start jamming. How we worked was, we’d get sound files from A.R., which we’d interpret to our sound and bounce back to A.R., and then in between, Chris would orchestrate some bits, knitting things together. When you hear the results, it sounds very organic. It’s hard to tell who did what.”

Plenty of Tolkien fans are looking forward to it, but barring a jaunt to the T-Dot tonight, they’ll have to wait. Pressed for morsels of information about the production, Lappalainen takes on a tone of wicked glee. “There are many details that I’m not allowed to tell,” he says in a hushed voice. “There might be little magic tricks and stuff, but you can’t tell that to anybody. Otherwise, I’d have to kill you.”

At Kola Note on Sunday, March 26, 8 p.m., $25

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