Most of the world is familiar with Balto-Finnic mythology from the epic Elias Lönnrot created in the 1849 Kalevala, all or parts of which have been translated well over 100 times in over 50 languages. In its oral form, this mythology was embedded in relatively short songs, ranging from a few lines in their recorded forms up to several hundred. A vast amount of it has been collected, and the corpus published by the Finnish Literary Society, Suomen kansan vanhat runot (old runic songs of the Finnish people) fills dozens of thick volumes. Areas of distribution include Finland, Karelia, Ingria, and Estonia, whence the designation Balto-Finnic mythology.

An initial point of comparison comprises the long time depth of the sources. Although the sources of Old Norse mythology were written down primarily in the thirteenth century, most scholars (if not quite all) would agree that the mythological structures are older and probably extend back to the Viking Age and perhaps even the Migration Period or beyond. They would also agree that although the texts are mostly recorded in Iceland, they can tell us about myth (and religion) elsewhere in the northern world. The same thing is surely true for Balto-Finnic mythology. Although the texts were recorded mostly in the nineteenth century and are the products of individual singers, their mythological structures are older and probably were not limited to the narrow region where the singer lived and was recorded. We can point to the list of native gods by Agricola, many of which are quite recognizable in the epic songs collected centuries later. This point of comparison should hardly surprise us, since we are dealing with two oral cultures.

There were, of course, extensive contacts across the Baltic, and these from an early date. Central Sweden (the Mälar region), especially, has connections with Finland, and the Vendel Period and Viking Age contacts are widely accepted by historians and archaeologists alike. There had to be a fair amount of bilingualism, so there probably were people who could appreciate Swedish and Balto-Finnic poetry. In addition, runic inscriptions certify alliterative poetry from Sweden throughout the Viking Age—for example, the Rök stone from Östergötland in the early ninth century and the snatches of poetry on some eleventh-century stones from farther north in the Mälar region. The fact that the Finnish mythological songs go by the name runo, perhaps a Germanic loan, certainly suggests cultural contact.

Unlike eddic poetry, but like West Germanic poetry, the form of this Balto-Finnic poetry was stichic. And Balto-Finnic poetry was sung, whereas the Old Norse verb kveða and its cognates, the operative verb for the oral performance of poetry, operates equally well for ordinary speech (e.g., “Þá qvað þat Þrymr, þursa dróttinn” (Þrymskviða st. 22, 25, 30) (Then Þrymr said that, the lord of monsters)) and has no etymological association with singing or even chanting.

The short mythological poems of both traditions tend to focus on a single narrative scene. Many such scenes are to be found in both traditions. These include such obvious parallels as cosmogonies or etiological stories, verbal duels, the acquisition of precious objects, seeking women from an out-group, and the issue of the permanence of death, to name a few. These are staples of mythologies. One sees them not only in such familiar Indo-European traditions as Greek and Roman, but also outside the Indo-European area, as for example in Knud Rasmussen’s collections of Greenlandic oral tradition (1921–1925).

When Elias Lönnrot first strung together cycles about Lemminkäinen, Väinämöinen, and one of wedding songs (the unpublished “Proto-Kalevala” of 1833), he was no doubt motivated by the spirit of the 1817 statement by Kaarle Akseli (Carl Axel) Gottlund that captured the Zeitgeist in Russian Finland:

The so-called Old Kalevala of 1835 realized this dream in print, but what we now know is the 1849 “classical” or “canonical” Kalevala. It differs from the Old Kalevala in that the cosmogonic songs are placed in the beginning, and it plays up the agonism between the people of Kalevala and those of Pohjola. Finally, it ends with the departure of Väinämöinen, who belonged to that old era, just as Hamðir, Sǫrli, and Erpr (Guðrún’s sons) did. Just as there are numerous formal and thematic comparanda in both traditions, so too, the raw material in both could be worked into a single grand mythological narrative.

But Castrén’s ending is the best part of this discussion.

Comparison is still a slippery path that can easily lead us astray. But the path is clearer now that Old Norse mythology is closer to having been considered properly and the Finnish material has been more thoroughly collected.

Following Castrén, I will start with the apparent similarities between Väinämöinen “eternal sage” (Haavio 1952) and at least some of the characteristics of Óðinn. Both are masters of verse, wanderers who seek and acquire wisdom. The oldest sources seem to suggest that crafting verse was a primary feature for Väinämöinen. In his list of the gods of Häme, Agricola wrote “Äinemöinen wirdhet tacoi” (Äinemöinen forged songs), and Ganander has an entire entry on “Wäinemöinen or Äinemöinen” as poet (Ganander 1984: 203–4). Included in this entry is the information that (like Óðinn in Ynglinga saga ch. 6) Väinämöinen can have a protective function in battle; Väinämöinen offers protection with his cloak, however, not through anything like “battle-fetters”—making his enemies deaf and consumed with fear. Ganander goes on to report that Väinämöinen sang of the deeds of great heroes, of the foundation of the world, of the origin of fire, of the nature of things—that is, that he possessed precisely the kind of cosmic knowledge possessed by Óðinn, knowledge that was realized in verse, that is, frœði “wisdom”. Alluded to in this entry, and spelled out in the entry on Joukavainen, is the duel with this figure (styled as Joukahainen in the Kalevala). In songs recorded later from oral tradition, as taken up in the Kalevala, this duel is a singing contest, which is easily likened to the contest of wisdom Óðinn undertakes with the giant Vafþrúðnir in the Poetic Edda (Vafþrúðnismál). Although Ganander reports that Joukavainen is indeed a giant, the duel as he describes it is at first resolved with a spear with which Väinämöinen stabs Joukavainen. Thereafter, however, Nuori-Joukawainen (Young Joukavainen) calls upon Väinämöinen to sing, and this has cosmic results: the doors of darkness open, the air resounds, cliffs crumble. But in the song recorded in 1825 by A. J. Sjögren in Archangel Karelia from the renowned singer Ontrei Malinen (the basis of part of runo 3–4 in the Kalevala), young Joukavainen and old Väinämöinen really do contest in wisdom, along a road (“Ken on tiiolta pahempi / sen on tieltä siirtyminen” (Finnish Folk Poetry p. 102) (He whose knowledge is the worse / must move aside from the road)). Väinämöinen bests Joukavainen’s knowledge because Väinämöinen has first-hand knowledge of cosmogonic events, which were his doing. Väinämöinen sings Joukavainen into the ground but frees him from this death when Joukavainen promises Väinämöinen his sister. Thus, like Óðinn, Väinämöinen participates in cosmogony.

Castrén’s next point of comparison was between Ilmarinen and Þórr. Agricola had this to say of Ilmarinen, listed like Väinämöinen under the rubric of the gods of Häme: “Ilmarinen Rauhan ja ilman tei / ja Matkmiehet edheswei” (Ilmarinen made the calm and the air / and advanced travelers). There is certainly little here that suggests Þórr, unless we interpret “calm and air” as having reference to thunder and thus to the etymology of Þórr’s name, if not to his actions in the mythology that has come down to us. Ganander makes Ilmarinen the brother of Väinämöinen, which could perhaps recall the family relationship of Óðinn and Þórr, although there it is father and son. More to the point, Ganander too lists Ilmarinen as god of the air (“luft-guden”), also ruling fire and water, and indeed he cites the verse from Agricola (Ganander 1984: 19). Air, fire, and water may suggest smithing, and Ganander confirms this notion, citing several lines of rune poetry in which Ilmarinen is smithing. Certainly this smithing could suggest alignment with Þórr, for it is not difficult to discern aspects of the blacksmith in the Norse deity, not least in his handling of molten metal in the myth of his encounter with Geirrøðr (Skáldskaparmál, ch. 18).

However, as the eternal hammerer, Ilmarinen is forever making things: the cosmos, the sampo (a most mysterious item at the center of Lönnrot’s Kalevala), a metal woman (she proves unsatisfactory as a sexual partner), and so forth. Þórr, on the other hand, never makes much of anything. Frankly, Ilmarinen does better in a comparison with Wayland the smith of Germanic tradition (Vǫlundr in Norse), although the idea of Ilmarinen as unlucky in love, which would parallel Vǫlundr’s loss of his swan-maiden wife in the eddic poem Vǫlundarkviða, was largely the product of Lönnrot’s editing of the Kalevala. And indeed, twentieth-century scholarship, when considering the figure of the smith, tended to look first at Óðinn among the gods (e.g., Davidson 1969; Motz 1973; cf. Hauck 1977, who postulates a visual trope of smith and valkyries). Moreover, when Maths Bertell put Þórr in a more general Nordic context, his point of comparison in Finnish mythology was with Ukko, not Ilmarinen (Bertell 2003).

Finally, Castrén’s desire to equate Lemminkäinen with Týr is a far greater stretch than his other two proposed points of comparison. Although Lemminkäinen is not found in the lists of Agricola and, with his epithet “lieto” (reckless), is mentioned by Ganander only for rowing Väinämöinen’s new boat, Lemminkäinen in the poems hardly seems centered on a model of a “brave and warlike” nature. Furthermore, that description of Týr may also be misleading. It is of course true that in Gylfaginning Hár introduces Týr as “djarfastr ok bezt hugaðr ok hann ræðr mjǫk sigri í orrostum” (Gylfaginning ch. 25) (bravest and most valiant, and he has great power over victory in battles (Faulkes 1995: 24)). It is also, of course, true that Týr equates with Mars in the interpretatio Germanica of the weekdays’ names. But his mythological function is very spare, and although it may be brave indeed to put one’s hand into the mouth of a slavering wolf (Gylfaginning ch. 25), we do not see Týr in battle.

Both mythologies do show a desire of the in-group males to marry or otherwise obtain out-group females (see Tarkka 2013: 259–326, on courtship poems and courtship cycles in the Kalevaic material, which usually involve a journey to an Other world). However, the lust of the giants for the women of the Æsir has no real analogy in the Balto-Finnic material, and, even more important, the system of social interaction that privileges the movement of females from giants to Æsir and blocks it in the other direction—what Margaret Clunies Ross called “negative reciprocity” (1994: 103–43)—is missing in the Balto-Finnic materials. Lönnrot and the painter Akseli Gallen-Kalella combined to make Väinämöinen’s lust famous, but Lönnrot invented Aino, the object of Väinämöinen’s lust, and even more to the point, Óðinn’s purpose-oriented sex—to get the mead from Gunnlǫð (Skáldskaparmál ch. 58; Hávamál st. 104–10), to sire an avenger on Rindr (best documented in Gesta Danorum 3, 4)—has nothing to do with lust. It is true that Lemminkäinen and Kaukomainen are involved with sexuality, but not in a way that fits any Old Norse figures.

A relationship between Lemminkäinen and Baldr, the son of Óðinn whose death starts the end of the world in Norse eschatology, was mentioned by Castrén and has remained a scholarly staple (Krohn 1905; Fromm 1963; but cf. Lindow 1977). Recently it was the topic of a long and far-ranging dissertation by Frog, who again argued direct influence of the Baldr cycle on inchoate notions of Lemminkïanen within a general circum-Baltic context (Frog 2010: 352–64). While Frog certainly succeeds in locating numerous heretofore unnoticed parallels and in very thoroughly collating the Finno-Karelian material, his model, like all such models, requires a good deal of postulating hypothetical early stages of narrative clusters. In this Frog to some degree follows the tradition within Finnish scholarship to assign dates confidently to the origin of various themes within the mythological poetry, mostly as the result of outside influences, considerably removed from the dates of the collection of the material. Nevertheless, his argument on behalf of direct influence in particular cultural and narrative contexts is powerful and subtle.

I do think that there is a similarity between the binaries of the Æsir and jǫtnar in Old Norse mythology and the Kalevala and Pohjola people in Kalevala, but that is, I think, exactly what Castrén noticed: the similarities in Kalevala (he was probably one of the few who could read it in the original). Unfortunately, that was another of Lönnrot’s manipulations. While the underlying oral tradition naturally relies on a distinction between in-group and Others, a clearly defined ethnic binary is lacking.

One way to think about possible comparison between Old Norse mythology and Balto-Finnic mythology is that both to some degree represent narrative traditions informed to a greater or lesser extent by notions of shamanisms (see, e.g., Siikala 2002). Journeys to other worlds, as a response to various sorts of crises, would especially be expected in such narrative traditions, as might verbal duels. However, Clive Tolley (2009) has cast doubt on the existence of shamanism in the Old Norse materials, and even if one takes a less strict view than that of Tolley, there are significant differences of the degree of what appears to be shamanic in the two traditions.

Despite the apparent similarities taken up (all too briefly) in these pages, there remains a major distinction between the two mythologies, namely at the ideological level. Old Norse mythology, as we have it, betrays a very large amount of royal ideology, as opposed to Balto-Finnic, which betrays none. Freyr is king in Uppsala; Óðinn heads up royal genealogies, and aspects of the myths surrounding him seem to reflect the warrior bands adhering to chieftains who were the predecessors of kings. Valhǫll is not just any world of the dead; it is the military camp and palatial hall of a powerful chieftain.

My exposition may seem rather negative. The formal similarities between the two poetic systems are interesting, but do they tell us anything? The parallel between the Poetic Edda and Kalevala is interesting, but how much can it tell us about the material of either? And what about the similarities of content? Are they not for the most part vitiated by similar content in many mythologies, and, more importantly, by the royal ideology of Old Norse mythology?

And yet I think this comparison is important for those of us who work in Old Norse mythology. We can recognize that there are similarities of form, content, and what we might call the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception of Nordic and Finnish-Karelian mythologies, and that these mythologies existed in more or less contiguous spaces around the Baltic. We can recognize also that the research field about contacts and influences in this region is still relatively underworked. However, my efforts emphasize distinctions that deal primarily with timing and scale. Old Norse mythology was for the most part recorded in a very specific time and place, namely medieval Iceland. Take away the eight manuscripts that contain versions of Skáldskaparmál, with its mythic narratives and skaldic stanzas; take away the four manuscripts that contain Gylfaginning, take away the one manuscript that is the Poetic Edda and its parallel, AM 748 4to, and we would know nearly as little about Scandinavian mythology as we know about, say, Anglo-Saxon mythology. Balto-Finnic mythology was also recorded in a specific time and place: in a nineteenth-century Europe that had discovered the value of traditions in the countryside and where national romanticism flourished. More than two thousand kilometers separate these places, and five centuries or so separate these times. One major difference is the technology of recording: it was easier to write with an ink pen than a quill, and it was easier to write in a little notebook than on vellum; and of course it only got easier. An even greater difference was what I will call information technology, with the Balto-Finnic material being not only assiduously collected but also systematically archived. The Balto-Finnic mythological material shows clearly how much material was out there, not just—as the archives show—in places where Balto-Finnic languages are spoken, but also—as I am arguing we should accept—in areas where Germanic languages were spoken. If modern collecting conceptions and technologies had been available eight centuries ago, we might have as many lines of verse about Óðinn, Þórr, and Freyr, and as varied and subtle pictures of these mythological figures as we do about Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen. We might see extensive variation of names, as we do with these figures (e.g. Ilmarine, Ilmoninen, Ilmorini, and the like), and scholars would not need to expend quite so much philological energy when confronted with three versions of the name Mimir, Mímr, and Mími, or seemingly incompatible versions of what characters are or do (Kvasir provides a good example). Most scholars accept at least in principle the idea of variation within the overall system in the Germanic material. If we had a corpus even 10 percent the size of the Finnish-Karelian, we would see variation so clearly that it would presumably cease to be an issue. At the same time, we would see the consistencies. They would show even more clearly than now the “semantic core” of various deities. The system would be more nuanced, more complex, but still presumably clear and systematic, in keeping with the definition of myth presented above. In the end, that is something valuable that Balto-Finnic mythology can teach us about Old Norse and indeed Germanic mythology.

Agricola, Psalter of David

Translation

Translation

Translation

Hávamál: see Poetic Edda

Translations

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Translation

Skírnismál: see Poetic Edda

Vafþrúðnismál: see Poetic Edda

Vǫlundarkviða: see Poetic Edda

Vǫluspá: see Poetic Edda

Þrymskviða: see Poetic Edda