Ajatar

A figure with no story

Ajatar is a belief figure rather than a character — an evil female being of the forest.

The entry she rests on is Christfrid Ganander's, in Mythologia Fennica (1789). He gives the plural too, Ajattarot, and glosses the name in Swedish as Skogs-Spöken, forest spectres: an evil and frightening female wraith in the woods, who led woodsmen and hunters astray. Ganander also points to the Finnish Bible, where the plural at Leviticus 17:7 is a common noun for wilderness demons, not a name.

That is the attested core, and it is small. There is no tale in which Ajatar does something to somebody from beginning to end — a different kind of existence from the domovoi or the rusalka, and one worth sitting with rather than converting into a biography.

What the sources do not describe

Ganander gives a gender and a disposition, and stops. Mythologia Fennica has an evil, frightening female wraith of the woods; the Swedish gloss, Skogs-Spöken, puts her among spectres. There is no height, no face, no hair, no clothing, no voice, no footprint, no animal shape, and no account of how she appears to the person she misleads. The name is also given in the plural, Ajattarot, and in that form it stands for wilderness demons in general at Leviticus 17:7 — a word for a class of beings rather than a portrait of one.

The absence is worth stating plainly rather than filling. Ajatar belongs to the part of the record that explains an experience — the path gone, the forest closed over a traveller — and an explanation of that kind needs a cause, not a body. A figure blamed for an illusion in the woods is itself only ever heard of at second hand, by its effect. What the collected material preserves is the effect.

The pictures that do exist come from later illustration, not from the charms or the dictionary. The dragon, the serpent-woman, the hag with a lantern and the forest temptress are nineteenth- and twentieth-century inventions, consistent with the kind of being popular writing wanted her to be. Where a published image shows features the early entry does not name, those features are the illustrator's.

What she was blamed for

Losing the path is the complaint.

Ganander's two verbs are the whole job description: she frightened people and she led them astray. Both belong to a tradition that treated being lost as something done to you rather than something you did — the forest closing over a person, the familiar way refusing to be where it was.

Where metsänpeitto names that condition, Ajatar names a cause for it, and the two accounts sit side by side in the same forest.

The mother of the diseases is somebody else

Finnish healing charms are origin-charms. To stop bleeding, the singer recites the birth of iron. To treat a burn, the birth of fire. To treat an illness, the singer states where it came from — its mother, its birthplace, the ground it was born on. Knowing the origin is a claim on the thing, and once it is stated the illness can be commanded: go back to the swamp, go back to the stone, go back to the one who bore you.

That structure does have a mother of diseases in it, and her name is Loviatar. In the forty-fifth poem of the Kalevala she is the blind daughter of Tuoni, got with child by a gust of wind from the east, who bears nine sons in one night in the sauna at Pohjola and names them for the diseases — the stitch, the colic, the scab, the plague among them — leaving the ninth unnamed and sending it out as a sorcerer instead. Louhi, mistress of Pohjola, heats the sauna and then turns the brood loose on Väinölä.

Loviatar is the address those charms return an illness to. Ajatar is not, and no early source puts her there. The disease role is a later attribution, arrived at by way of her company — with Hiisi and Lempo — rather than her texts.

Where the charms send things

The destinations are consistent and unglamorous: the swamp, the wet spruce ground, the stony place, the cold spring, the ground where nothing is grown. The charm takes the illness from the body and returns it to that kind of ground — wet, cold, uncultivated, and outside the farm.

A tradition whose idea of a hostile place is "unworked wet ground at the edge of the fields" is telling you what its practitioners actually feared. It is also the ground the forest beings were thought to live in, which is why the two bodies of material are easy to confuse.

Snakes belong there too. Ganander records the formula under a neighbouring forest being, Ahtolainen, who bound snakes about his fence-stakes in place of withes — which is why the runes call the creature a withe in Ahtolainen's fence.

Against the pantheon

A great deal of popular writing on Finnish mythology presents a tidy list of gods with portfolios, and Ajatar usually appears in it as a goddess or demon of the forest, sometimes as a dragon, sometimes as a spreader of pestilence.

The written record does not support any of that. Mikael Agricola's 1551 verse preface, which began that record by listing the deities of Häme and Karelia in order to condemn them, does not contain her. Ganander, two centuries later, has her as a forest spectre and nothing more. The dragon comes from modern fiction and illustration; the pestilence is Loviatar's.

What remains is a name with one job: the thing in the woods that is blamed when the path goes missing.

Sources

Ganander, Mythologia Fennica (1789) for the entry that defines her; SKVR (1908–1948) and Haavio (1967) for the structure of the origin-charm; the Kalevala's forty-fifth poem (1849) for Loviatar and the nine diseases; Agricola (1551) for the beginning of the written record and for the habit of listing that it started.

• Finnish Literature Society, Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (SKVR) (1908). 33 volumes, 1908–1948The recorded corpus of Finnish oral poetry, including the healing charms and the sending-charms that name where an illness is to be returned to.
• Martti Haavio, Suomalainen mytologia (1967). WSOYThe standard synthesis, cited here for the origin-charm structure and for the mother of the diseases in that material.
• Mikael Agricola, Verse preface to the Psalter (Dauidin Psaltari) (1551)The earliest printed list of Häme and Karelian deities and spirits. Ajatar is not in it; cited for the beginning of the written record.
• Christfrid Ganander, Mythologia Fennica (1789). Åbo: FrenckellThe entry this figure rests on: Ajattara, plural Ajattarot, glossed in Swedish as forest spectres — an evil, frightening female wraith in the woods, who led woodsmen and hunters astray. Ganander also points to the plural in the Finnish Bible at Leviticus 17:7, where it does duty for wilderness demons in general.
• Elias Lönnrot, Kalevala (1849). Expanded edition; first edition 1835The forty-fifth poem, in which Loviatar bears the nine diseases in the sauna at Pohjola. Cited for the figure this one is routinely confused with.