Castren, Mathias Alexander

Castren, Mathias Alexander, the founder of Ural-Altaian philology, was born in 1813 at Tervola in the north of Finland. He received his earliest instruction in the town of Tornea, and afterwards studied at Helsingfors (1830-36). In 1838 he undertook a pedestrian excursion through Finnish Lapland, in order to extend his knowledge of the language and literature; and, in 1839, another through Karelia, to collect ballads, legends, &c., illustrative of Finnish mythology. On his return, he published in Swedish a translation of the great Finnish epic, the Kalevala (q.v.). During 1841-45, conjointly with Lönnrot, he prosecuted his researches among the Finnish, Russian, and Norwegian Laplanders, as also among the European and Siberian Samoyeds; whilst, as linguist and ethnographer to the St Petersburg Academy, he, between the years 1845 and 1849, extended his laborious investigations as far east as China, and as far north as the Arctic Ocean. On his return he was appointed professor of the Finnish language and literature at the university of Helsingfors. He employed himself in preparing for publication the vast materials which he had collected, but died 7th May 1852, from exhaustion—a martyr to science. The six works published before, and the twelve after his death, are mostly in Swedish, but the greater number have been translated into German. They include accounts of his travels, lectures on Finnish mythology and the Altaian races, grammars, vocabularies, &c. See his Life by J. W. Snellman (1870). A son, Robert Castren (1851-83), wrote several monographs on Finnish history.