Elias Lönnrot

Elias Lönnrot (9 April 1802 – 19 March 1884) was a Finnish philologist and collector of traditional Finnish oral poetry. He is best known for composing the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic compiled from national folklore, which had a great impact on J.R.R. Tolkien.

In a 2007 article, Jason Fisher makes a comparison between Christopher Tolkien and Lönnrot, from the aspect that both "smoothed out complex, irregular source material into a coherent text".