Ajatar

Also Known As: also Ajattara, plural Ajattarot; Aijotar; Aattara; Ajaster or Ajasteri in the far north
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Finnish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: An evil female wraith of the forest who leads woodsmen and hunters astray, keeps company with serpents, and in the northern songs shoots sickness into people.
Role in Mythos: She is the malevolence of the deep woods given a female name, a figure the old Finnish charms and the first Finnish mythographers set against the safety of the settled clearing.
Relation to Humans: She is purely hostile, and the harm she does falls on people at the edge of the wilderness: the hunter who cannot find the path, the woodcutter who walks in circles until dark, the body that suddenly sickens with no cause anyone can name. The 1776 Finnish Bible used her name in the plural to translate the demons that Israel was forbidden to sacrifice to, which tells you how the clergy regarded her.

The first snow has not come, and the mire is still open water under a thin skin of moss. A hunter working a spruce ridge at dusk passes the same lightning-split trunk for the third time. Crushed bog myrtle smells sharp and medicinal under his boots. There are no birds. Something is keeping pace with him, behind or beside, and by the time the light fails he will not be able to say which way the village lies. Finnish has a name for whatever has done this to him, and the name is feminine.

She was a warning before she was a story. That is the honest way to begin, because Ajatar has spent three hundred years acquiring a body, and most of what she now looks like was put on her after the fact.

The oldest place she can be found is a book. In 1789 a country priest named Christfrid Ganander published *Mythologia Fennica*, four hundred and thirty alphabetical entries in Swedish, the first serious attempt to write Finnish folk religion down before it disappeared. Between AHTOLAINEN and AKKA sits a short cold paragraph. Ajattara, plural Ajattarot: forest ghosts. An evil, terrifying female wraith in the woods, who led woodsmen and hunters astray. Ganander then does something a modern compiler would not think to do. He sends the reader to the Finnish Bible, to Leviticus, where the 1776 translation renders the demons of the wilderness as *ajattarot*: nothing shall any more be sacrificed to the Ajattaras. In Swedish, he notes, that word is simply *djeflomen*. The devils. When a Finnish translator needed a word for the goat-demons of the desert, this was the word lying ready to hand.

Ganander was not inventing her. His contemporaries knew the same figure. Daniel Juslenius called her an evil witch and a forest troll. Christian Erici Lencqvist described her as a female evil forest *haltija*, frightening and fast, who drives people out of their way. The picture is consistent and it is not flattering: something female, something quick, something that lives where the trees close over.

The serpents came in sideways, and they came in through a fence. In Ganander’s book the entry immediately above hers belongs to Ahtolainen, an ugly evil wraith, a troll who bound live snakes around his fence-stakes in place of withes, so that in the old songs a lizard is called a withe from Ahtolainen’s fence. A century later the philologist Eemil Nestor Setälä found the same formula attached to a name much closer to hers. In western Finnish songs about the origin of the snake, the snake is a twig in Aattara’s fence. The image is the whole of it. Somewhere out past the last field there is a fence, and it is not built of wood.

Push north and she slides into someone else entirely. In runic songs collected at Muonio and Enontekiö, up near the Swedish and Norwegian borders, the name Ajaster or Ajasteri turns up as another name for Syöjätär, the eateress, who in the Kalevala spits into the water and lets the wind and the sun finish the job, and out of the spittle comes the snake. In those same northern songs she is the one who injures people by shooting. That is the language of the Finnish healing charms, where illness arrives as an arrow loosed from the wilderness into a body, and the sick are cured by singing the arrow’s origin back to it. Hers is one of the mouths the arrow comes out of.

Her name has been argued over for a hundred and fifty years and it has not been settled. The most natural reading takes the verb *ajaa*, to drive or to pursue, and adds the feminine ending *-tar* that Finnish hangs on a whole family of dangerous women: Loviatar, Syöjätär, Kivutar. The female driver, then, or the pursuer. Kaarle Krohn, who examined the problem in 1914, was not convinced. He suspected the *aja-* at the front had drifted in later, out of exactly that association with a pursuing nightmare, and pointed instead toward *aatta*, a bad woman, and toward *hattara*, which Ganander himself glosses as a troll-hag, almost the same, he says, as the Ajattarot. Others reached across the Gulf of Finland for the Lithuanian *aitvaras*. The tidy form “Ajatar” that everyone now uses was not sung by anybody. It was standardised in the nineteenth century by Matthias Castrén, who wanted a single spelling, and got one.

What she does, she does with almost no equipment. She has no weapon, no throne, no consort, no myth of her own that runs from beginning to end. Her power is the power of the forest itself turned personal: the path that closes, the landmark that moves, the two hours of daylight that become none. She breeds and keeps the snakes, and she looses sickness into people who never see what hit them. In Aleksis Kivi’s play *Kullervo* of 1860 she is finally given lines to speak, and she uses them to lean over the shoulder of a ruined young man and tell him to murder his master’s family. She lives in the mountains, she says. Lempo is in her service. Her mother’s father is Hiisi. It is fiction, and it is also the most complete portrait anyone has ever drawn of her, and there is something bleakly funny about that.

Her limits sit inside her power. She belongs to the woods, and a person who reaches the clearing has left her behind. What she does can be undone by the right words, because the whole architecture of Finnish magic assumes that a thing named and traced to its origin can be commanded, and a sickness sung back along its own arrow will go. And she has one weakness that no charm was needed for. The record left her so thin that a poet, a lexicographer and a run of translators could each hand her something, and she took it, and now nobody can tell where the forest wraith ends and the borrowed dragon begins. She is a devil made mostly of other people’s guesses, which may be the most Finnish thing about her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ajatar in Finnish mythology?

Ajatar, also spelled Ajattara, is an evil female forest spirit in Finnish folklore. The earliest written account, Christfrid Ganander’s *Mythologia Fennica* of 1789, describes her as a terrifying female wraith of the woods who led woodsmen and hunters astray. She is associated with serpents and, in northern songs, with shooting sickness into people.

Is Ajatar a dragon?

No source from Finnish folk tradition describes Ajatar as a dragon. The dragon form is entirely modern, coming from twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, art and games, and from popular retellings that call her the Devil of the Woods. The older material makes her a female forest wraith connected to snakes, not a fire-breathing beast.

What does Ajatar do to people?

She drives them off the path. The consistent thread across the early sources is that Ajatar leads hunters and woodcutters astray in the forest until they are lost. Runic songs from the far north also name her as one who injures people by shooting, which is the standard image in Finnish healing charms for the arrival of sudden illness.

Why is Ajatar connected to snakes?

The link runs through the old songs about the origin of the snake, in which the creature is called a twig in Aattara’s fence, a name the philologist E. N. Setälä connected to Ajattara. The same formula in Ganander’s book belongs to a nearby figure, Ahtolainen, who bound live snakes around his fence-stakes in place of withes. In northern song variants her name also stands in for Syöjätär, from whose spittle the snake was made.

Does Ajatar appear in the Kalevala?

She does not appear by name in the Kalevala or in the documented body of Finnish folk song, which is one of the odder facts about her. Her name comes down through mythographers, dictionaries and Bible translation rather than through the sung tradition. Her fullest surviving portrait is in Aleksis Kivi’s 1860 play *Kullervo*, where she urges the hero to kill his master’s family.