Who was E. Lekve?

February 17, 2025

Who was E. Lekve, whose name is engraved on the bottom of the carefully crafted kantele SM496 in the Sibelius Museum?

The kantele was donated to the Sibelius Museum in 1974. The instrument had belonged to the donor’s mother’s father, stationmaster Mauno Paatero (1866-1908), who had bought the kantele from its maker, E. Lekve, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Mauno Paatero in question may be the same person as the Maunu Vilho Paatero, originally with the name Magnus Vilhelm Österlund, found on the geni.com website. He was born in Turku, graduated from Turku Lyceum in 1890 and was stationmaster at Simo from 1903 until his death. The announcement of the funeral procession in the newspaper Uusi Aura of 29 November 1908 gives his first name as “Manu”.

Mauno Paatero’s mother tongue was probably Swedish, or at least he knew both Swedish and Finnish. The Finnicisation of names was part of a wider movement against Russification at the beginning of the 20th century. On the 100th anniversary of J. V. Snellmann‘s birth, on 12 May 1906, in a supplement to the Suomalainen Virallinen Lehti, some 24,800 people announced that they had Finnishized their surnames. In 1906 and 1907 the total was about 70,000. Magnus Wilhelm Öhrlund’s announcement to change his surname to Paatero can be found in the list published in the newspaper Finlands Almänna Tidining on 12 May 1906.

So, who was E. Lekve?

Lekve is a Norwegian surname. There are at least two Endre Lekves mentioned in Finnish historical newspapers. The elder, the Norwegian engineer Endre Lekve (1833-1882), who died at the age of 49, is also mentioned in the National Biography of Finland. Although he (and his younger brother Torbjör Lekve) had connections with the Finnish railways, especially in their design and development, his age does not make him a possible builder of Mauno Paatero’s kantele.

The other, younger Endre Lekve worked as a telegrapher for the state railway and died in 1908, aged only 26 or 27. Both in terms of time and his railway connections, he could be a possible builder of the kantele. Could he have been the son of the elder Endre Lekve?

According to the National Biography, engineer Lekve’s wife was Antonie, daughter of Professor Hunäus of the Hanover Polytechnic School, who died in Helsinki in 1873. So she cannot be the mother of the younger Endre Lekve. The biography also mentions that Lekve’s surviving children left Finland as adults.

Endre Lekve is such a rare name in Finland that some kind of family connection between these two men seems at least possible.

The fact that the name of the town is engraved in two languages at the bottom of the kantele suggests that the builder spoke both Swedish and Finnish.

The footsteps of the younger Endre Lekve can be traced in the newspapers as follows.

In 1903, E.G. Lekwe arrived at Kuivaniemi station as a trainee telegrapher. Kuivaniemi is close to Simo station, where Mauno Paatero worked from the same year.

In March 1904, Lekve became engaged to Irene Labbart from Oulu.

In the Grand Duchy of Finland, officials were required to know Russian, and in October 1905 it was announced that Lekve had been awarded a travel grant to study Russian.

At the end of 1905, Lekve decided to move from Kuivaniemi to become a telegrapher at the Rajamäki railway station.

On 13 February 1906, the newspaper Kansan tahto announced the marriage of the telegrapher Endre Gustaf Lekwe from Kuivaniemi and Irene Labbart from Oulu, and at the beginning of March “telegr. E. Lekwe and his wife from Helsinki” were mentioned as guests at the New Hotel in Oulu.

Endre Lekve’s obituary was published in several newspapers in August 1906. His age was given as 26 or 27. The Huvudstadsbladet of 7 August 1906 said that his wife and elderly mother were missing him, while other reports mentioned only the young wife. In Uusi Suometar, the young telegrapher’s cause of death was listed as lung disease.

After Endre Lekve’s death, the young widow Irene Lekve passed her railway exams in Oulu and was employed as a trainee telegrapher at Tornio station. In October 1909 she applied for a job as a clerk at the State Railway Inspectorate, and in February 1910 she became engaged to Arwid Björkman, a bank clerk in Tornio. They were married in December 1910.

Perhaps Mauno Paatero, the stationmaster of Simo, acquired the kantele from Endre Lekve when he worked at the nearby Kuivaniemi station, or later in Oulu from his widow Irene Lekve.

These different stories and human destinies surrounding the kantele show how widespread the instrument was in Finland at the turn of the 20th century. In addition to museums, countless home-made kanteles can be found in people’s attics, warehouses and heirlooms.

Kantele instruments seem to have been such a common part of life that they are often only mentioned in passing. As a result, the history of individual instruments is often lost in the mists of time, but they do tell something essential about the importance of the instrument as part of the everyday lives of all kinds of people.

At the same time, in the early 20th century, while in remote Karelian villages there were still kantele players who used the hollow kantele as part of the old runosong culture, in other parts of Finland the increasingly developed big kantele had taken on a life of its own. New playing techniques were developed for them, in keeping with the new winds of changing musical culture.