Ajatar

Also Known As: also Ajattara, plural Ajattarot; Aijotar; appearing in the songs as Aattara and Ajasteri, and standing beside the word aatta, “bad woman”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Finnish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She takes the path out from under a man’s feet and leaves him turning in the trees.
Role in Mythos: She is the female terror of the Finnish woods, the forest’s own malice given a name and a sex.
Relation to Humans: Woodsmen and hunters were the ones who met her, and what she did to them was to make the forest stop being a place they knew. The eighteenth-century Finnish Bible borrowed her name in the plural for the devils people had been sacrificing to, which tells you what the word was worth in ordinary speech.

Snow had gone off the ground and the spruce was breathing again, that resinous cold-sap smell that gets into wool and stays there. A man is walking a line of trees he has walked since he was nine. He knows the boulder with the split face, he knows where the ground goes soft, he knows which way the light falls at this hour. Then he does not. The path is behind him and also ahead of him and also, somehow, to the left, and the boulder with the split face is a boulder he has never seen. Something moved fast between the trunks, low and to the side, and it did not sound like an animal.

Finnish had a word for the thing that did that to you, and the word was Ajattara.

The oldest full account of her is a single dense paragraph in Christfrid Ganander’s *Mythologia Fennica* of 1789, the first proper encyclopedia of Finnish myth, written in Swedish by a country priest who spent his life collecting what people still said. He files her under forest-spectres and glosses her, with a classicist’s shrug, as a Priapus. Then the sentence that matters: an evil, terrible wraith of the female sex in the woods, who led woodsmen and hunters astray. He notes she comes in the plural, Ajattarot, a whole population of her. And he sends the reader on to a second entry, Hattara, which is where the trouble starts.

Christian Lencqvist, writing seven years earlier in the great Turku survey of Finnish superstition, gave the same figure in fewer words and put her in a class. She was the same sort of evil forest spirit as the liekkiö, he said, only female: frightening, quick, and a leader of people into places they had not meant to go. Two men, two paragraphs, and between them nearly everything anyone has ever known about her.

The songs are stingier still. In the whole recorded body of Finnish folk poetry she surfaces inside one formula, the charm that recites the origin of the snake, and even there her name is unstable. The line runs: a withy in Aattara’s fence. Somewhere out in the woods there is a fence, and where a sensible farmer would have twisted a birch withy to bind the rail, this one has used an adder, and the adder is still alive, and it hangs there in the cold with its dry patterned length going slack and tightening again. That is the image. The snake was made because something needed a fence tied.

Kaarle Krohn went through the variants of that line in 1914 and found the name coming apart in the singers’ mouths. In South Savo they sang Ahtiainen, or Aholainen, or Aholahen, or Ajolainen, or simply hattara. Lönnrot’s dictionary gave aatta as a word for a bad woman, and Krohn’s reading is that the ordinary insult kept elbowing aside the unfamiliar spirit-name nobody recognised any more. The aja- forms came in, he thought, because people heard the verb ajaa in it and pictured a nightmare that chases you. In the Finnish Lapland snake-charms she turns up once more as Ajasteri, standing in as a second name for Syöjätär. In every version the parallel line is filled by another female monster, which is the one thing the singers never got wrong: whatever her name was, she was a she.

Hattara, the word Ganander sent us to, means a foot-rag. A scrap of cloth. It was thrown at women. Lars Levi Laestadius used kujahattara, alley-rag, of a woman he disapproved of, and also described a hattara as a spirit that moves about in the dark and laughs. Ganander had gone further and read the standing epithet of the sky-god Ukko, *hattaroita hallitsevi*, as evidence that Ukko kept a race of heaven-storming giants in order. Krohn pointed out that the line immediately before it is *joka pilviä pitävi*, who holds the clouds. Ukko was not disciplining giants. He was managing weather, and a hattara is a rag of cloud.

What she can do follows exactly from what she is. She has no weapon and no bargain and no myth cycle. Her whole power is the forest’s willingness to stop cooperating: the path unmaking itself, the speed at the edge of vision, the fence where the snakes are. Her limit is the same fact from the other side. She is a being of one line and one paragraph, and she was fading out of the singers’ memory while the songs were still being sung, which is why the men who wrote her down had to keep explaining who she was.

She is not a dragon. She does not breathe fire, she is not the mother of serpents, and she does not sow plague. Those claims come from a chain of English-language reference books and, latterly, from novels and games, and one link in the chain can be pointed at. John Abercromby’s 1898 survey of Finnish magic song contains a memorable creature whose hair-plait reached to her heels and whose breasts hung to her knees, compared there to the Swedish forest-woman and the wild maiden of the Eifel. She is Akahatar, the Pain-maiden, and she goes to a bath-house in Sariola to give birth to Wind, Fire, Sharp Frost, Atrophy, Worms, Cancer, Gout and Pleurisy. Abercromby’s two volumes do not contain the name Ajatar anywhere. The plagues of the Finnish songs belong to Louhiatar and the cold old wife of Pohjola, who bore Boil, Scab, Gripes, Fits and Sudden Death in a similar outhouse. Somewhere between Akahatar and Ajatar a compiler’s eye slipped, and a forest spirit with no face acquired a body, a brood of diseases and eventually a pair of wings.

The real one is better. She is the moment the woods turn on you, given a name in the feminine and then half forgotten, and a fence with adders on it, standing in a clearing that nobody can find twice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ajatar in Finnish mythology?

Ajatar, more properly Ajattara, is an evil female forest spirit of Finnish folklore who leads woodsmen and hunters astray. She is first described at length by Christfrid Ganander in 1789 and by Christian Lencqvist a few years earlier, who classed her as a female counterpart to the forest spirit liekkiö. She appears in the plural as well, Ajattarot, so there was understood to be more than one of her.

Is Ajatar a dragon?

No. No Finnish source describes Ajatar as a dragon or gives her any physical form at all. The dragon image comes from twentieth and twenty-first century English-language reference books, novels, games and heavy metal, not from the folk record, where she has no body, no fire and no wings.

Does Ajatar appear in the Kalevala?

She does not. Her only foothold in recorded Finnish folk poetry is a single formula in the charm for the origin of the snake, where a serpent is called a withy in Aattara’s fence, and the name is spelled half a dozen different ways across the variants. In Finnish Lapland she surfaces once more as Ajasteri, used as an alternative name for Syöjätär.

What does the name Ajatar mean?

The name sits in a cluster of Finnish words for a bad or disreputable woman, including aatta and hattara, the latter meaning a foot-rag. Kaarle Krohn argued that the aja- spellings arose because singers heard the verb ajaa, to chase, in the name and pictured a pursuing nightmare. The ending -tar is the ordinary Finnish feminine suffix, the same one in Syöjätär and Kivutar.

Does Ajatar cause disease?

Not in any Finnish source. That claim traces to a confusion with Akahatar, the Pain-maiden of the magic songs, who gives birth to gout, worms, cancer and sharp frost in a bath-house at Sariola. The Finnish disease-mother is Louhiatar, the old wife of Pohjola, and Ajatar’s name does not appear in the collections where those songs are printed.