Linguistic unity was also furthered by the attempts of nationalists to construct an ancient heritage for the national culture. In Finland this task was undertaken by the nationalist poet Elias Lönnrot (1802–84), a regional health officer who collected folk tales and songs in villages and rural communities and shaped them into a national epic, the Kalevala (1835, enlarged 1849), choosing the variants that fitted best into an overall structure and adding a few linking passages of his own (amounting, it is now thought, only to around 3 per cent of the total).
