A Treasure Chest Of Traditional Tales

I fell in love with the written word when my parents would read me bedtime stories. The Disneyfied versions of Cinderella and Snow White were fine, but when I discovered the collection of traditional Finnish fairy tales, I was hooked.

I loved the rich language and characters, the beautiful princesses and heroic knights, but also the cunning old women and the monstrous giants. I also preferred their gruesomeness and the fact that not everyone always lived happily ever after. Because not everyone does.

Like the Brothers Grimm, there were young men in Finland who travelled the country collecting folktales, poems, riddles and spells. The first of these collectors was a priest, Christfrid Ganander. He lived in a poor parish of Rantsila in northern Finland in the 1700ths. I still recall the excitement of reading those words: my dad was also from Rantsila. I spent my childhood summers in the same surroundings as the man who was the first to write down Finnish fairytales.

In my young mind, I created a personal connection and an attachment to those fairytales. Even though I later understood that Ganander didn’t collect all the fairytales in the book. Travelling the country to record old stories that had been passed through the generations increased in popularity in the 19th century. This resulted in a collection of over 50,000 stories and adaptations.

A Finnish publisher Werner Soderstrom wanted to publish a collection of these stories and hired Raul Roine, a published author for children to sort through the collection. After years of reading through the stories, my treasured collection of Finnish fairytales was born.

The old tales brought alive a world that doesn’t exist anymore. A world of wonder and magic. In the stories nothing was impossible to the heros and heroines, not even bringing dead people back to life. And I’m not talking about cases like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. No, these heroes and heroines could bring life back to people who’d had their heads cut off.

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that my parents didn't read the gory stories to me when I was very young. I discovered these stories a little bit later, when I was old enough to read myself, but not yet too old to request a bedtime story.

Here is a translated extract from one of the stories with its fair share of heads being chopped off. And fixed back on.

“So you shared a bed with my wife!” Jussi shouted and cut his brother’s head off with his sword.

“What did you do, my husband!” the princess said. “Only for a moment did he sleep in the bed and even then he put his double-edged sword between us.”

“Was that so?” Jussi regretted his actions. “In that case my brother can keep his head.”

Jussi smeared the ointment he had taken from the devil’s wife on his brother’s neck. His brother came back to life, and all was well again.

Just like that. Easy as pie. At least when you are starring in your own Finnish fairytale.

Some stories share common traits with old Greek tragedies. Here is a scene where two wise men are staying at an inn when the innkeeper’s wife goes into labour.

But the screaming and moaning continued in the bedroom where the mistress in the house laid in bed.

“Would you help the mistress with her childbirth, too?” the younger of the wise men said.

“It’s better to let them both mother and son die. Then we can stop great sins from happening,” the older wise man said.

“What sins?” asked the younger man.

“The boy, will commit awful deeds. He will murder his father and marry his mother.”

Talk about an Oedipal storyline.

But the stories are not all full of violence and gore. Some stories had strong female characters who outwitted many men. Like the main character in the story about the king and the farmer’s daughter.

The king had heard that the farmer’s daughter was as wise as she was beautiful and wanted to test her intelligence.

“I will set you a difficult task. If you can perform it, I will marry you.

“What kind of task?” the girl asked.

The king said, “You have to return home now, but come back tomorrow. But you cannot come dressed nor naked, not on a horse or without a horse, not riding or in a carriage, you cannot travel on the road nor on the side of the road. Do not arrive during the day, but not during the night either; you cannot enter my house but you cannot stay standing outside either. If you do all this, I will marry you.”

The girl went over the conditions until she remembered them all. She returned home and undressed herself until she was completely naked. She found a large fishing net and wrapped herself in it. Now she was neither dressed nor naked. From her neighbour she borrowed a donkey and tied the fishing net to the animal. The donkey pulled the girl in the net so she was neither riding nor driving in a carriage.

The donkey pulled her along the ditch and she kept one foot on the side of the road. She arrived at the king’s castle at dawn when it was not yet day, but no longer night, either. There she placed one foot over the threshold whilst keeping the other outside, so she was neither in nor out.

What a genius way to meet all the conditions. Shame the king never thought to ask her whether she actually wanted to marry him. We can only assume she did, since she performed the task so well.

There are so many gems in this book of Finnish fairytales, stories that I still revisit and cherish. Although before this challenge a long time had passed since I last picked up the fairytale collection.

These are stories that never age. They are just as entertaining and relevant now as they were when they were first told by the fireside. They were stories told to youngsters to scare them into behaving and teach them good morals.

And most importantly for me, they are stories that have the power to transport me back to childhood. Back to a simpler time when I could still crawl into bed with mum and dad. A time when monsters and evil only lived inside the covers of the fairytale books.

I’m glad the challenge prompted me to revisit the old fairytales. Lately, I have been ‘too busy’ to read them. Tonight, I know what I’ll be reading in bed.