Finnish creatures

What this is

Finnish and Karelian folk belief, taken where possible from the recorded oral poetry rather than from the national epic that was assembled out of it.

That distinction is this section's whole character, and it does not exist in the same form anywhere else on this site.

The book came second

Elias Lönnrot collected oral poetry in Karelia and eastern Finland, and in 1835 — in an expanded form in 1849 — published the Kalevala: a single continuous epic, with a plot, built from thousands of separate songs that had never been sung as one work.

He was not forging anything, and he said what he was doing. But the Kalevala is an editorial composition: Lönnrot chose variants, ordered episodes, bridged gaps with his own lines, and made characters consistent who were not consistent in the material.

Meanwhile the material itself was being written down, and it survives. Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot — the Old Poems of the Finnish People, 33 volumes published between 1908 and 1948 — collects roughly a hundred thousand recorded texts in the Kalevala metre, song by song, singer by singer, region by region. It is freely available.

So this tradition offers something rare: you can read the epic and then read the raw material it was made from, and see exactly where they differ.

Where this site can work from the oral record, it does, and it says when a detail comes from Lönnrot's composition instead.

The second problem: place-names

Finnish folk belief sits unusually close to the landscape, and several of the beings here began as places rather than as persons.

Hiisi is the clearest case: a word that appears to have meant a sacred grove, a burial site, a stony place — and that became, under Christian pressure, something like a devil. The same word survives in hundreds of place-names across Finland, attached to boulders, hills and rapids. The being is younger than the word.

Reading a Finnish creature therefore means asking which came first: the thing or the ground it is named after.

Start here

• Väinämöinen — the old singer, whose weapon is knowing where things came from
• Näkki — the water-taker, and the belief that was still being told to children in the twentieth century
• Hiisi — a place that became a demon, documented in the map
• Tonttu — the house spirit, and how it met Santa Claus

The rest

• Iku-Turso — the sea thing from the poems, which nobody can describe
• Louhi — the mistress of Pohjola, and what Lönnrot made of a figure the singers treated differently

Reading the sources

• Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (SKVR), 33 volumes, 1908–1948 — the collected oral poetry, in the original dialects, with collector, place and date for each text. The primary source for this section.
• Elias Lönnrot, Kalevala (1835; expanded 1849) — the epic. Evidence for what Lönnrot made, and a guide to the material only when read beside SKVR.
• Martti Haavio, Suomalainen mytologia (1967) — the standard twentieth-century synthesis, and a careful one about what the poems do and do not support.
• Mikael Agricola, verse preface to the Psalter (1551) — the earliest printed account of the gods and spirits of the Häme and Karelian peoples, a list of twenty-four names written by a bishop who disapproved of all of them.

A note on names

Finnish has no grammatical gender and the folk material is often vague about whether a being is one creature or a category. Where the sources are vague, this section is vague, which is sometimes unsatisfying and always more honest than the alternative.