Trochaic tetrameter in the context of "Tetrameter"

Kanteletar is a collection of Finnish folk poetry compiled by 19th-century Finnish linguist Elias Lönnrot. It is considered to be a sister collection to the Finnish national epic Kalevala. The poems of Kanteletar are based on the trochaic tetrameter, generally referred to as "Kalevala metre".

The name consists of the base word kantele (a Finnish zither-like instrument) and the feminising morpheme -tar and can be roughly interpreted as "maiden of the kantele" or "zither-daughter", a kind of muse.

Finnish literature refers to literature written in Finland. During the European early Middle Ages, the earliest text in a Finnic language is the unique thirteenth-century Birch bark letter no. 292 from Novgorod. The text was written in Cyrillic and represented a dialect of Finnic language spoken in Russian Olonets region. The earliest texts in Finland were written in Swedish or Latin during the Finnish Middle Age [fi] (c. 1200–1523). Finnish-language literature slowly developed from the sixteenth century onwards, after written Finnish was established by the bishop and Finnish Lutheran reformer Mikael Agricola (1510–1557). He translated the New Testament into Finnish in 1548.

After becoming a part of the Russian Empire in the early nineteenth century the rise in education and nationalism promoted public interest in folklore in Finland and resulted in an increase of literary activity in Finnish. Most of the significant works of the era, written in Swedish or increasingly in Finnish, revolved around achieving or maintaining a strong Finnish identity (see Karelianism). Thousands of folk poems in what came to be called Kalevala meter were collected in Suomen kansan vanhat runot (The ancient poems of the Finnish people). The most famous poetry collection is the Kalevala, published in 1835. The first novel published in Finnish was Seven Brothers (1870) by Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872). The book Meek Heritage [fi] (1919) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1888–1964) made him the first Finnish Nobel Prize winner. Another notable author is Väinö Linna.

The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. Events in the story are set in the Pictured Rocks area of Michigan on the south shore of Lake Superior. Longfellow's poem is based on oral traditions surrounding the figure of Manabozho, but it also contains his own innovations.

Longfellow drew some of his material from his friendship with Ojibwe chief Kahge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway), who would visit Longfellow's home. He also had frequent encounters with Black Hawk and other Sauk people on Boston Common, and he drew from Algic Researches (1839) and other writings by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnographer and United States Indian agent, and from Heckewelder's Narratives. In sentiment, scope, overall conception, and many particulars, Longfellow insisted, "I can give chapter and verse for these legends. Their chief value is that they are Indian legends."