What is a nation without a national epic? Well, it is a nation without a national epic, obviously, but the heart-flaming and eye-watering power of mythologised prose makes a nation. Without a song to rally around, many national revivals would have spluttered to an end before they even rounded the first corner.

As the 19th century began putting the chairs away and sweeping its floor, the Latvian people were still lacking in the ‘national epic’ stakes. The Latvians had been ruled by Russian bureaucracy and German-speaking landowners for centuries, and whilst other nations suffering a similar fate had begun to express their desire for autonomy through art, our Latvians were lacking that centrepiece.

It was left to a poorly-educated boy from Birzgale to change that regrettable state of affairs. Andrejs Pumpurs grew up on both sides of the Daugava, as part of an extremely proud Latvian district that made sure the youth were aware of the tales told around fires and in dark rooms.

Pumpurs received a lucky break early in his existence, as he was one of three kids from the civil parish to be chosen by the Lutheran minister to attend the German class of the church school in Lielvārde. The course was supposed to last three years, but Pumpurs’ immense poverty put a stop to his education. The working world awaited.

And boy did Pumpurs work. An assortment of odd-jobs filled the next few years for the young man from Birzgale, including stints as a forester, an agricultural labourer, a raftsman, a surveyor, a barista on Hardman Street in Liverpool and a volunteer topographer. The blue-collar nature of his existence meant he spent many an evening listening to older, grizzlier men tell the many legends of Latvia, and Pumpurs himself began to put pen to paper himself.

Andrejs’ first works were written in a town called Vecpiebalga, a town some 128km inland from Riga. The town holds a special place in Latvia’s cultural history, as it was in Vecpiebalga that the first Latvian novel was written. The book was titled ‘Mernieku Laiki’, which translates as the Shellac-friendly ‘The Time of the Land Surveyors’, a tale of the transition from a quiet rural existence all the way to a more modern individualistic life. To even begin to think that Pumpurs would not have read ‘Mernieku Laiki’ is naive beyond words.

The 1870s were a time of heady excitement throughout the younger people of Europe and Eurasia, and nowhere was this more true than in the Slavic lands and the borderlands of the Russian Empire. Latvia wasn’t about to attempt to throw off its own imperialist rulers, but a group of idealistic young Russians had decided to help Serbia in its struggles against the Ottoman Empire by forming the Slav Volunteer Regiment. Here Andrejs was introduced to the prominent Slavophile Ivan Aksakov and conservative editor Mikhail Katkov, fuelling the fires within Pumpurs further.

Andrejs Pumpurs was only the third Latvian to volunteer to fight with the Serbs, and his scrapping ability led him to the Crimea, where he aced an officer training course in Odessa and found work doing various administrative jobs for the Russian Army, to whom he was fiercely loyal until his dying days and presumably ever after.

Despite this loyalty Pumpurs made no secret of his love and adoration for his native Latvian culture. Pumpurs had been writing for the young Latvian press since his 20s, and he was suitably inspired by the work of young Fins and Estonians to try and build Latvian folklore into a source and cultural and spiritual wealth. Latvia needed a national epic, and Andrejs Pumpurs was the man to provide it.

Pumpurs decided to create his own protagonists for the epic, but to take inspiration from traditional sources along the way. The final product was a vast sprawling epic called Lāčplēsis, or the Bear-Slayer. That is an immensely cool title.

Lāčplēsis was born of a man and a female bear, which one assumes led to a difficult upbringing and all sorts of issues when it came to finding the right temperature for porridge. He felt it was right to show how literal his name was from an early age, which he did by killing a bear. He was a youth whose moral compass was firmly set, a boy of virtue with bear ears who was able to tear beasts apart with his bear hands, a joke that will never, ever stop being funny.

It was pandamonium I tell you. Lāčplēsis went on may adventures, battling sorceresses and helping the good in their battles against the bad, a one man-bear run through the glories of Latvian lore. He makes friends along the way, even teaming up the Estonians to do battle against the major enemy in the area – the German missionaries.

The epic ends when the bad guys get wind of the fact that Lāčplēsis’ super-human strength comes from his totally inconspicuous bear ears, and the Black Knight manages to rip them off in the heat of battle. Lāčplēsis was seemingly in a grizzly situation, but using his final spurts of strength our hero was able to drag the knight with him over a cliff and into the muddy waters of the Daugava.

Legend has it that when all evil is banished from the Latvian lands, a castle of light will rise from the that spot. In truth, the castle of light has already risen, and it has taken the form of a proud Latvian national identity. Lāčplēsis was the basis of this, a chest-beating poem that proudly put Latvians front and centre of their own story.

The characters from the story soon entered the wider national consciousness. There is Staburadze, the water nymph who became a rock in mourning and is now found in an unusual 18-metre high cliff on the bank of the Daugava, It was Staburadze who saved Lāčplēsis from drowning at the very spot her cliff is now found. Then there is Laimota, the maiden that Lāčplēsis falls in love with and eventually marries in a sweet double wedding, the love of his life that dies when Lāčplēsis takes his final fall into the Daugava.

Andrejs Pumpurs had a very simple aim – to provide Latvia with a true hero, one that they could identify with in what Pumpurs assumed was an inevitable battle with the Baltic German aristocrats that had ran the show for the previous forever. The epic is full of fairies and witches, metaphors for the idealised version of Latvia before the conquest, a magical place that saw its magic tempered by the iron fist of the occupiers.

Lāčplēsis became exactly what Andrejs Pumpurs wanted it to become. Latvia had itself a hero, a national epic, a poem to rally behind in times of struggle. There were many of them to come, but Pumpurs would be long dead by the time they came around. After a trip to China Pumpurs died in Riga of rheumatism, and Latvians mourned one of their very best.

‘An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery’ is available for purchase, we swear. To pick up a print copy of the book (€20 plus postage), send us an email at miseryslavic@ . The digital version is available on Amazon at the link linked here , although you can also buy the digital copy through us. That is unless you think Amazon deserves 30% of the work.