The spirit of nationalism that swept over the small peoples of Europe in the early nineteenth century touched faraway Finland and started the Finns on the quest of the Finnish. There as elsewhere scholars who were also patriots found that the native tongue, lost to the educated and the well-to-do, had been preserved in the songs and stories which were current among the peasants. Elias L nnrot spent a long and busy life collecting those ancient runos from which he succeeded in building up a national epic, the Kalevala. This is L nnrot's great contribution to his own country and to the world. Beside the material for the Kalevala L nnrot made important collections of lyrics, proverbs, and stories.