The surprising fairy tales of Finland

Even in difficult times like ours, Christmas is a time when tensions ease and people, at least for a couple of days, stop running and fretting. In this atmosphere of relaxation, where you finally try to share time with your loved ones, why not leave some space for imagination and creativity? Why not try to go back to being a bit like children by reading a good fairy tale, which is different from the usual ones we are used to from an early age?

This is what allows us to make "Finnish fairy tales" (Iperborea, 2021, pp. 254), an agile little volume that offers us the best of the popular tradition of Finland in the translation of Giorgia Ferrari and Sanna Maria Martin.

The book is an opportunity to fly on the wings of the imagination and to get to know a people, a land and a culture that plays a particular role in the Nordic landscape and has a very specific identity. Getting in touch with the Finnish world means, in fact, discovering the Finno-Ugric universe, a universe that, starting with the language, has little to do with the Scandinavian countries with which Finland also borders. At the same time this nation is not an island separate from everything around it. It has been and continues to be a meeting point between West and East, between Western culture and the Russian world. And this melting pot of different traditions is reflected in the folklore and popular traditions of Finland, first of all the fairy tales presented in the book by the writer Eero Salmelainen in the mid-nineteenth century.

A transcription that presents itself with a direct, concise style, tinged with irony and with the freshness of popular song.

Naturally, the backdrop to the fairy tales are forests, lakes, islands, ice, that is the landscape that the Finnish people have always had in their eyes. On this stage dominated by nature, a typical fable-like figure such as the evil stepmother can send the stepdaughter to Hiisi, home to evil spirits typical of Finnish folklore, as are the vetehiset, the lake gods with whom a young man must contend. the little he has goes to seek fortune. In an omnipresent nature, of which the shamans keep the secrets, the animals of the forest talk, help human beings and play jokes, and the snow bears the traces of a comings and goings of sleds, skis and portentous ships capable of plowing even the earth. The sea, on the other hand, can be crossed by bridges sprouted by magic and in the sky you can travel on the back of an eagle or a seagull.

A common fact is that in Finnish fairy tales the protagonists never stand still. Everyone wanders and everyone is looking for something: Ilmarinen, the blacksmith who has always lived, goes to get married, two boys look for their seven brothers turned into swans, Lippo, who has gone hunting, finds a home after years thanks to his son, who will start the history of Lapland. And there are even those who seek, and find, the way that leads Finns to happiness because if you are not happy and content in the ending of a fairy tale, then when can you be?