speculation on fictionality of the tales’ characters. Many of the lyrics are love songs emotive of Finland's rural landscapes pulling imagery from its forests, lakes and occasionally village life. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, clergymen hoped to stamp out the songs of old folk poetry due to its pagan origins despite efforts of Bishop Mikael Agricola, who introduced the Reformation into Finland in, in an effort to preserve the language of his people. In the preface to Jacobus Finno’s hymn book of 1582 the Church's justification for its disdain towards old folk poetry seemed to be 'Because there were no sacred songs for the people to learn, they began to practise pagan rites and to sing shameful, lewd and foolish songs'. Two centuries later attitudes towards folk poetry changed after scholar Henrick Gabriel Porthan in 1766 began research collecting old material. His advocation inspired serious scholarship among fellow teachers and students until in 1789, a friend Christfrid Ganander published Mythologia Fennica, ‘an encyclopaedia of phenomena associated with folk beliefs and poetry’. Studying folk poetry has become a main resource in understanding and reconstructing Finland's past. By the 1820s expeditions to collect such material were already entering the borders of Russia. A leading figure in this part of history was Lönnrot, a collecter who'd made contact with old folk singers taking notes of their poems. His idea was that the manner of these songs was fragmented in the sense that the Greek epics Illiad and Odyssey were believing that he could combine several epic sequences into one long poem. This process included the removal of unnecessary Christian imagery and the names of people and places in relation to the history of old folklore. Collection of old folk poetry has continued since the 19th century in the spirit of National Romanticism. The collection of epic poetry was favoured above everything else as they were deemed part of an ‘expansive oral narrative which one could still access’. The authenticity of these findings has continuously been debated as often national romantics had to creatively fill in the gaps left by the fragments they had found. However, today’s scholars are less concerned with authenticity as defined by the folklore’s origins and are rather concerned with bringing the pieces of Finland’s poetic history together. The material retrieved from these expeditions have since been documented by modern scholars as ‘shared experience dialogues’ consisting of lyrics,