Tapio

The forest is a household

The single most useful thing to know about Finnish forest belief is that the forest is not treated as a wilderness. It is treated as somebody's farm.

It has a master — metsän isäntä, the master of the forest, named Tapio — and a mistress, and a dwelling called Tapiola, and livestock. The elk and the bear and the grouse are his cattle, kept in his yard.

Once that model is in place, every practice around hunting follows from it logically. You do not take a stranger's cattle. You arrive at the edge of the property, announce yourself, pay your respects to the household, ask for what you want, and accept what is given.

What the charms describe

There is no portrait of Tapio. The hunting charms in SKVR are addressed to him, not about him, and what they supply instead of a body is a wardrobe and a title. He is greeted as master and householder; where dress is mentioned at all it is a hat and a coat, and his beard is spoken of in the vocabulary of the forest itself — moss, lichen, hanging growth. These are formulaic epithets, repeated by singers who had them from other singers, and they vary from one recording to the next. They describe the forest looking like a man rather than a man looking like anything in particular.

What is missing is almost everything an illustrator would want. No height. No face. No account of whether he is seen at all, or only addressed. The charms do not say whether the hunter who speaks at the treeline expects a figure to answer, and they are not troubled by the question. Agricola's 1551 list gives a name and a function, and no description of his appearance whatsoever. The household around him — a mistress, children, servants — is named more often than it is pictured.

The green-bearded giant of later Finnish art is not from this material. It is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reading, built after Lönnrot and alongside the National Romantic painters, and it fills a gap the charms left open: a landowner is identified by his property and his courtesies, not his face. The spruce, the antlers and the opened gate are what the record actually offers.

What the hunter says

The hunting charms in the collected poetry are not spells in the sense of forcing something to happen. They are approaches, and their register is formal courtesy.

The hunter greets the forest on arriving. He praises the master and the household. He asks for the gate to be opened and the cattle to be driven within reach. He promises good conduct. After a kill there are words for that too.

Compare the Slavic leshy, where the arrangement is similar and the tone is warier: the leshy is bargained with by herdsmen and is dangerous to boast in front of. The Finnish material is less about avoiding a being than about being a good guest, and the vocabulary is domestic throughout.

The 1551 problem

Mikael Agricola, a bishop, printed a verse list of what he called the gods of the Häme and Karelian peoples in 1551 — twenty-four names, published to condemn them, and the earliest printed record this tradition has. Tapio is among them, connected with the hunt.

That is excellent evidence that the name was current and important in the sixteenth century. It is weaker evidence for what Tapio was, because the list was compiled by someone describing a religion he wanted suppressed, in a framework — gods, each with a portfolio — borrowed from classical and biblical models.

The poems themselves are less tidy. The forest master is addressed with household titles as often as with a name, the household around him shifts between singers, and there is little that looks like worship in the sense the bishop assumed.

So: Tapio is named in the earliest source, and the earliest source is organised by a man who needed names in order to list them. Both parts matter.

Payment at the edge

Recorded forest offerings are small and placed at boundaries: coins, salt, a piece of food, left on a stump or a stone at the edge of the ground.

That is the same economy as the polevik's two eggs in a ditch and the nuno's rice on the mound — the minimum acceptable payment, left at the boundary, by someone taking something from the inside.

The same practice is recorded in Slavic, Finnish and Philippine tradition alike: the owner of a place is paid at its edge, cheaply, in advance.

Tapiola after 1835

Lönnrot took the forest material into the Kalevala, and the name travelled from there into Finnish art — most famously into Sibelius's tone poem Tapiola in 1926, which is where many people outside Finland first meet the word.

As with Väinämöinen and Louhi, the later form is worth enjoying and worth keeping separate. A symphonic poem about a brooding northern forest is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century idea of what the woods mean. The charms are the work of people who needed an elk.

Sources

Agricola (1551) for the earliest printed record; SKVR (1908–1948) for the hunting charms; Haavio (1967) for the synthesis and for the household language. The evidence does not settle whether Tapio was a god or a householder: the 1551 list and the charms describe him in different registers.

• Mikael Agricola, Verse preface to the Psalter (Dauidin Psaltari) (1551)The earliest printed list of the gods and spirits of the Häme and Karelian peoples — twenty-four names in verse, recorded in order to condemn them. Tapio is among the names, given in connection with the hunt.
• Finnish Literature Society, Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (SKVR) (1908). 33 volumes, 1908–1948The collected oral poetry, including the large body of hunting charms addressed to the forest and its master.
• Martti Haavio, Suomalainen mytologia (1967). WSOYThe standard synthesis, including the household language used about the forest.