In the spring of 1935, Finnish student Yrjö von Grönhagen decided to leave the Sorbonne and travel on foot from Paris to Finland’s Karelia region to research the local rune singing tradition. Along the way in Germany, he got the chance to write a newspaper article about the Kalevala singers, which caught the eye of Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler. The SS boss met the young man and got him a post at the Ahnenerbe institute for Aryan heritage. His task was to organise expeditions to Finland and collect audio and visual evidence of the origins of rune singing and the traditional Finnish zither, the kantele. The film tells the story of this odd mission using recordings von Grönhagen made in 1946 in an allied prison in Oslo along with a wealth of other sound and visual elements.