Ugric is not, as at first I thought, perhaps because of the inflection with which I heard it spoken, a burp. Much less is Finno-Ugric a fine burp; rather, it is the name given to a group of languages spoken in portions of Northern Europe and Western Russia. Among these, of course, is Finnish, which was spoken and sung long before there was ever a Finland. Unless you live there, however, these matters may not be all that clear to you.
Nor would it always be clear, even if you had looked into the matter, which is worth doing, what the heck is going on in some of the folklore of the region. Perhaps the best known example of this is the Kalevala. This is a book made up of a cycle of poems which, in their original state, were a vast scattering of songs sung in the countryside and passed on from generation to generation. It used to be that generations could pass things like this along and keep all the details intact. I fear it doesn’t happen much any longer.
Nearly two centuries ago a fellow named Elias Lönnrot came along and listened to a lot of these songs. They really pleased him so he began to write down the words. Soon, enthralled, he was traveling around and listening to more and more of the songs and writing down the words. He couldn’t stop himself. In all he wrote down tens of thousands of lines of poetry from these songs but he didn’t stop there. Next he began to tinker with all this material and to shape it into cycles of stories. This excited him, and it excited a lot of people who heard about what he was doing. There was much excitement in the air because at the time Finland was just getting ready to emerge as a nation. How nations emerge could be a topic for a later date, so let’s just note that Finland was getting ready to emerge and here was Lönnrot writing down all this marvelous Finnish poetry, poetry collected right from the horse’s mouth, as it were. It was decided to call Lönnrot’s poem a national epic, and to hail Lonnrot himself as a national figure. It’s always nice to be hailed as something, I should think.
Virgins of the Air
Now if virgins of the air are your kind of thing –- and why shouldn’t they be –- then you might feel right at home with Finnish folklore. Airy virgins abound. (Did I mention that Lönnrot married a woman twenty years younger?) In the legends, one of these breezy virgins unwittingly assists with the origin of Finnish fire. It happens when the big guy himself -- the creator, the thunder god Ukko -- one day strikes his flaming sword against his fingernail and a spark leaps to life. Ukko entrusts this precious spark to the care of one of the virgins of the air but right away it gets away from her and rolls around through the clouds and ultimately down through the nine vaults and the six lids of the air. Soon the spark plops into a lake where it is eaten by a blue trout, which in turn is swallowed by a grey pike. The pike gets caught and the spark is freed –- fires spring up everywhere –- but eventually it all gets neatly contained, despite the mishandling by the airy virgin.
The details in this folklore, as you can see, are frequently rather fuzzy around the edges. It can be frustrating to certain types of personalities. I must admit, though, I rather like Mader-Akka. Mader-Akka is the wife of that high god Ukko, who himself is also known as Mader-Atcha. (Mader-Atcha is not an angry sneeze.) Akka is a sky mother, another airy gal but an important one. She was usually depicted on the drums of shamans as a triangle. Some of these details eventually do make some sense if you stare at them hard enough. Mader-Akka sees to the fecundity of women, and I’m always glad when somebody takes that on.
Another hapless virgin of the air elaborately drowns herself amidst islands, after first moaning on and on and worrying about who is even going to notice, which is evidence enough that she ought to have just stayed up there in the air, and virginal.
