finland pictures and map

Everytime I begin a new geographical page, I fall in love with the country. Finland is no exception. I was there with my mother for a few hours one November in the early 1960's when I worked for an airline. We had a pass with SAS that allowed unlimited travel, so we left a charming Copenhagen one noontime and arrived in Helsinki shortly thereafter. The city showed the drab, stolid aftereffectsof a long period of Soviet oppression. We walked a few blocks, felt the bone-chilling cold, the bleakness and sadness, and we couldn't bear it. We went back to SAS and returned that same afternoon to Copenhagen. Yet, strangely, Helsinki's heaviness deeply touched my heart and I often wondered about the country and her people over the following decades. (I learned recently from one of my students that today Helsinki sparkles as magically as Copenhagen or Stockholm -- I hope to return one day.)

The inspiration for my Finnish page dates back many months when I was intrigued by a pagan site done by a cyberfriend, Yasmine Galenorn, a devotee of two Finnish woodland deities [see below]. More recently, in Yasmine's book, Dancing with the Sun, I found a wonderful Finnish spell for knotting up the winds for future use (Finns are famous for their wind-magic). At the same time, another popularized book on Finnish magic, Finnish Magic : A Nation of Wizards, a World of Spirits, by Robert Nelson, Ph.D., briefly introduced me to Finland's great epic, the Kalevala. I had heard of the Kalevala for years but knew almost nothing of its content or history. I finally bought a magnificent translation from Harvard University Press by Francis P. Magoun and decided to skim through enough of it to offer some brief comments to my folklore students this spring. I planned to speak no more than 20-30 minutes. Instead, I found myself so captivated that I wound up reading the entire volume and preparing a two hour lecture; I could have gone on for several more hours.

Were it not for the Kalevala, it might have been many more months before I found time for a page on Finland's myths and lore. But as it turns out, I now have no choice -- that ancient world calls to me and I wish to share some of its strangeness and magic with you.

There are stunning opening descriptions, for example, of where songs come from. Here's a brief excerpt (but the full sweep of this material comes only when you read the longer passage):

...The cold recited me a lay, the rain kept bringing me songs.
The winds brought another song, the waves of the sea drove some to me.
The birds added songs, the treetops magic sayings.... [Magoun:4]

There are great "origin songs" for iron (from the breast-milk of three air-virgins); bears [see below for Yasmine Galenorn's retelling]; snakes; the Water Dragon; fire; diseases; and beer (from two lonely plants, hops and barley, and their desire for close companionship -- a marvelous touch is the trial-and-error search for a fermenting agent: even frothy bear spittle is tried before success is finally achieved with honey -- the songs celebrate the failures along with the successes, for all are part of the same process). There are also charms against all manner of misfortune in which animistic powers are invoked in rising hierarchies (just to ensure that all the bases are covered). Then there are chillingly grim, eerie wedding lays about the fate of new brides leaving the shelter of their familiar homes for lives of endless toil -- this may be one reason why all of the major male characters in the Kalevala had such dreadful luck with women, for, despite these males' amazing wizardry, they were blind to the fact that women too had their songs and sorcery (equal if not superior to the men's), and were far more than drudges to clean, mend, bake, milk, work the farm, and keep a bed warm. Male attitudes are perhaps best summed up in these two lines of lament from an old woman:
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