Lempo

Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Finnish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: Lempo works through edged iron and through the body, turning a blade in mid-swing or lodging sickness in a person like a shot arrow.
Role in Mythos: He is one of the standing names for the evil principle in Finnish song, the malice that spoils a hero’s work and a farmer’s hands alike.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary people met Lempo not in the forest but at the moment a tool went wrong, and the charms answer him with counter-violence, cutting the Lempos with knives of their own making. He was something to be named aloud, argued with, and driven out, never worshipped.

The third day of the boat-building was the one that went wrong. Väinämöinen had been at it since the light came up, hammering the fragments of a spindle and a distaff into a hull on the flank of an iron mountain, because a girl on the rainbow had said she would come down for a man who could do it. The hatchet rose. It had risen a thousand times that morning. Then something took the crooked handle and turned the blade in the air, and the axe went into rock instead of wood, and the rock threw its splinters back into him. His knee opened. Blood came off the stone in a sheet, enough of it, the song says, to fill seven boats.

The Kalevala does not leave the culprit vague. Lempo took the handle. Hiisi cut the veins.

That single line holds almost everything the old poetry has to say about him. Lempo is not a beast that comes out of the trees with its teeth showing. He is the thing that happens to the tool. He lives in the half-second when the edge goes where you did not send it, and he has been blamed for that half-second in Finnish and Karelian song for as long as anyone was writing the songs down.

The blood-staunching charms, gathered from village singers across Finland and Karelia, put the accusation more plainly than the epic does. If the iron acts amiss, one of them says, if Lempo cause the knife to slip, then the flesh of Lempo shall be sliced, the Evil One be cut in twain, with a blade that himself has made. The charm does not plead. It turns his own workmanship back on him. Another goes further and treats him as an entire household of malice: father Lempo received a cut, and they flung his head into the water; mother Lempo received a cut, and they whisked her head into the fire; boy Lempo received a cut, and they stamped his head into a swamp. All the Lempos, cut by their own knives, hammered on their own anvils. Their veins were knotted up, the singer says with the flat logic of a man kneeling over a bleeding leg, so why not this vein too?

He has a forge, and it is not in any mountain. In the songs of hatred the wizard tells the sickness to blow up the coals and heat Lempo’s forge in the hollow of the victim’s heart, to set its tent in the liver and its cellar in the lungs. Hurt is manufactured. Someone hammers it, and the smell of hot iron in that image is deliberate: this is a culture that understood metal as a thing that had sworn an oath and broken it, and Lempo is what got into the metal. A swelling under the skin is called a boss of Lempo. His lands, in the armouring charms, sit alongside Hiisi’s, and a man puts on an iron cap and iron gloves before he will walk across them.

The name is the strange part. Lempo comes from lempi, which in Finnish means love, and not the tender kind: erotic heat, the pull that will not be reasoned with, the state a girl’s kin tried to raise in her with ritual before a wedding. Nineteenth-century readers of the Kalevala found this so uncomfortable that they made a doctrine out of it, deciding the old Finns had given love to an evil demon precisely because they thought passion was a form of madness lit by an enchanter. That reading says more about the Victorians than about any Karelian singer. What survives in the songs themselves is simply the coincidence, sitting there unexplained: the word for desire and the name of the spirit who slips the knife share a root, and both describe a force that takes your hand and moves it.

No one in the old poetry ever describes his face. He has flesh, since the charms cut it. He has parents and a son. He has a smithy and a country. He does not have a body anyone thought worth picturing, and the reason is probably that nobody ever claimed to see him. What people saw was the aftermath: the axe wrong-footed, the swelling, the fever, the woman in a byre with a fish knife suddenly slick and red in her hand and no explanation for how it had turned.

Christianity did not so much destroy him as flatten him. Lempo, Hiisi, Piru, Juutas and Perkele slid together into one interchangeable Devil, and preachers used them as synonyms, which is why the epic can hand a hatchet to Lempo in one line and the wound to Hiisi in the next without anyone feeling the seam. Something older is visible underneath, a fire spirit or a spirit of the raging in the blood, but it is visible only in outline, and it would be dishonest to pretend the songs preserve more than that.

His powers follow from the one thing he does. He can turn an edge, spoil a working, put an ailment into a body and keep the forge of it burning. He does not fight anyone. He waits for you to pick up something sharp.

His limits follow just as neatly. Lempo can be named, and in Finnish magic naming a thing is the beginning of ruling it. The wound in the Kalevala is not closed by strength but by a grey-bearded old man who demands to be told the origin of iron, because a hurt whose birth you can recite is a hurt you can command. Väinämöinen sings the milk of the three sky-maidens, the ore hiding in the marsh, the hornet that carried venom instead of honey to the tempering water, and only then does the bleeding stop, under a bandage and a prayer to Ukko. The charms work the same way, cutting the Lempos with the knives the Lempos forged. He is undone by his own workmanship, every time.

There is a last indignity. The demon who once needed an iron cap and an iron coat to be faced now survives in everyday Finnish mostly as a mild oath, the kind of word a person mutters when the hammer finds a thumb. Which is, when you think about it, exactly the situation he was always in charge of.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Lempo in Finnish mythology?

Lempo is a malevolent spirit of Finnish and Karelian tradition, one of several interchangeable names for the evil principle alongside Hiisi, Piru and Juutas. He is best known from the Kalevala, where he seizes the handle of Väinämöinen’s hatchet and turns the blade into the hero’s knee. In folk charms he is blamed for accidents with edged iron and for sickness lodged in the body.

What does Lempo do to humans?

Lempo works through tools and through illness. He makes a knife or an axe slip at the wrong moment, and the charms describe him running a forge inside a victim’s chest, hammering pain into the heart, liver and lungs. A swelling under the skin was called a boss of Lempo.

How is Lempo defeated?

Lempo is defeated by words rather than weapons. Finnish blood-staunching charms cut the Lempos with knives Lempo forged himself, and in the Kalevala the hero’s wound is only closed once the origin of iron has been sung in full and Ukko has been asked for help. Knowing where a thing came from is what gives a Finnish magician power over it.

Why is Lempo’s name connected to love?

The name derives from lempi, the Finnish word for erotic love or desire. Nineteenth-century commentators built an entire theory on this, claiming the old Finns made love a demon because they saw passion as a kind of madness. The songs themselves do not explain the link, and the folk material shows Lempo purely as an evil spirit rather than a god of love.

Does Lempo appear in the Kalevala?

Yes. In Rune VIII, while Väinämöinen is building a boat to win the Maiden of the Rainbow, Lempo grasps the crooked handle of his axe and guides it into his knee, and Hiisi severs the veins. The bleeding that follows drives the whole of Rune IX, in which the origin of iron is sung as a healing charm.