Otso

Also Known As: also Ohto, Oksi, Kontio, Kouko and Mesikämmen, “honey-paw”; Metsän kuningas, “king of the forest”; the everyday modern Finnish word is karhu
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Finnish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He was born in the sky on the shoulders of the Great Bear and lowered to earth in a golden cradle on a silver chain, and the whole point of killing him was to get him back up there.
Role in Mythos: He is the sacred bear, first and highest of the game animals, treated in ritual not as prey but as a visiting kinsman whose bones must be returned intact so that he can come again.
Relation to Humans: Hunters approached him with flattery, apology and a flat denial of responsibility, insisting to his face that he had fallen out of a tree by himself. He was then carried home, seated in the place of honour, married to a village girl in mime, eaten, and escorted back to a pine top with his skull looking at the stars.

Three men on skis, not talking, crossing a hillside in the last dark of a winter morning. They are going back to a circle of trees they blazed in the autumn, a ring of axe-marks around a den, and when they cut that ring they were careful to leave a gap in it. Nothing gets shut in. Under the roots ahead of them, in a hollow packed with fir branches and soot-black earth, something enormous is asleep, and its soul may be out walking, and if they kill the body while the soul is elsewhere the whole business will go wrong for years.

The Finns and Karelians did not use a plain word for him if they could avoid it. The old songs call him honey-paw, the golden one, the money-precious, the forest apple, the sooty fellow, the king of the forest, kouko meaning grandfather or elder. Otso and ohto belong to the same evasive habit, and both are old enough to have fossilised in place names across Finland, Karelia and Estonia. The point was never poetry. Naming the animal directly was thought to call it, and a great many of these creatures could hear their own names spoken indoors.

His origin is sung rather than told, in short question-and-answer verses collected from singers in the nineteenth century. Where was Bruin born, honey-paw turned around? High up in the heavens, on the Great Bear’s shoulders. How was he let down? By a silver chain, in a golden cradle. That is the whole birth in one Kitee variant, and its economy is the reason the rite worked: the bear came down from a specific place and could therefore be sent back to it. The version Elias Lönnrot stitched into the forty-sixth canto of the Kalevala is longer and stranger. A maiden walks the red rims of the clouds in gold shoes, shakes wool onto the sea and hair onto the rivers, and the currents carry the tufts to a wooded island. Mielikki, mistress of the woodland, gathers the wet fleece, sews it together, binds the bundle in a birchbark basket and hangs it from a pine top on gold chains, and rocks it until it is alive.

What she rocks awake is soft. It has no teeth and no claws, and Mielikki says outright that she would be glad to give it some if she could trust it not to abuse the favour. So the bear kneels in front of her and in front of Ukko and swears never to harm the innocent, and only then does she go looking for materials, trying mountain ash, juniper, oak and the dry knots of alder before she finds a fir with silver branches and golden cones and fits the creature out from that. Everything dangerous about him is on loan and conditional. It is a remarkable thing to build into the origin story of an animal that could open a man like a sack.

The hunting songs assume he is a person. On the way out the singers ask Hongatar, the pine mistress and the bear’s own guardian, to score the trees and mark the hill so that strangers can find their way. At the den they do not stab a sleeping animal. They sing him awake, calling him up off his branch bed and out of the tar-black place where he rests his head, inviting him to walk a golden lane and a silver road, and only when he is standing does the heavy bear spear go in.

Then comes the disclaimer, and it is delivered in the second person, to him: it was not I who met the bear, nor any of my mates. You fell off the spruce yourself, slipped from the bent bough, pierced your berry-filled belly and shattered your golden maw.

He was skinned in the forest and carried home to singing lifted straight out of wedding ritual, the hunters announcing at the yard gate that a great guest had arrived and asking where he should be taken. Women of childbearing age got out of sight. Inside, he was set in the corner where the family’s sacred objects stood, under the icon in Orthodox houses, because that was where an honoured guest belonged. A boy was named groom and a girl was dressed as bride. The head came out of the cooking hut first, on its own dish, and the man carrying it had to call at the threshold that the good was entering the house. The main dish was a pea soup made from what one old description calls the deceased’s own flesh, and there was a great deal of beer, and the eating went on until nobody could manage more. Not one bone was allowed to go in the fire.

They ate him.

The eating had a purpose beyond appetite. Taking the snout, the ears and the eyes was framed as addition rather than theft: I take old Bruin’s ear for my own ear, along with the ear I had before, but not to be the only one. Afterwards the teeth were broken out of the skull and shared among the men who had gone to the den, and they kept them, and the teeth were the sign that they had been there together. A parish report from 1754 describes the skull being filled with ale. In 1640 Bishop Isaacus Rothovius complained that at these feasts men drank beer out of the bear’s skull and growled like bears, and thought it would bring them luck.

The last stage was the walk to the skull pine. The head and the collected bones went out in procession, the skull was fixed high on a branch of a chosen pine among the skulls hung there before it, the bones were buried at the roots, the ale brought along was drunk, and everyone walked home again in the same order and in silence. At Kivijärvi in the seventeenth century they rang the church bells for it. The verse for that moment says where the catch went and where it did not go: not left on the ice, not dropped on the road, not drowned in an ice pool, but set in a clean pine, a fir with a hundred sprigs, set there to watch the moon, to know Otava the Great Bear, and to fix its eyes on the sun.

His powers are the powers of an animal that is also a guest and also a god’s son. He grants the hunt or withholds it, he carries the senses that the eaters wanted for themselves, and he can be born again out of an undamaged skull, which is why destroying one was unthinkable. He was widely believed to leave women alone if he could tell they were women, the exception being a woman carrying a boy, since he was thought to know a future hunter when he smelled one.

His limits are the terms of the deal. He swore an oath before he was given the equipment to break it. He cannot be taken asleep, cannot be blamed on the man who speared him, cannot be insulted, cannot be left on the ice, and cannot climb back to Otava on his own. He needs a procession, a pine, and a village willing to lie to his face out of respect.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who or what is Otso in Finnish mythology?

Otso is the sacred bear of Finnish and Karelian tradition, the king of the forest and the highest of all game animals. He is not one individual bear so much as the bear as a kind, a being of celestial origin treated in ritual as a kinsman and an honoured guest. Otso is also called Ohto, Kontio, Kouko and Mesikämmen, “honey-paw”.

Why does Otso have so many names?

Speaking the bear’s ordinary name was avoided because it was thought to summon the animal, so Finnish and Karelian singers used substitutes such as honey-paw, the golden one, the forest apple and the king of the forest. The habit produced dozens of by-names, several of which survive in Finnish, Karelian and Estonian place names. Otso and ohto are among the oldest of these evasive terms.

Where was Otso born?

The old bear songs say Otso was born high in the heavens on the shoulders of Otava, the Great Bear constellation, and was lowered to earth in a golden cradle on a silver chain. The Kalevala gives a fuller version in which a sky maiden throws wool onto the sea and Mielikki, mistress of the woodland, gathers it, sews it together and rocks it to life in a pine top. The bear was born without teeth or claws, and Mielikki only fitted him with them after he swore never to harm the innocent.

What was the karhunpeijaiset bear feast?

The peijaiset was the feast held for a slain bear, structured like a funeral and a wedding at once. The bear was carried home to wedding songs, seated in the household’s place of honour, given a mimed bride and groom from among the village young people, and eaten as a communal meal at which no bone could be discarded. The teeth were broken out of the skull and shared among the hunters who had gone to the den.

Why was the bear’s skull hung in a pine tree?

The skull was fixed high in a chosen pine, the skull pine, so that the bear could return to the sky he came from and be born again. The bones were buried at the roots and the skull was left facing the moon, the sun and Otava, the constellation named after him. Destroying a bear skull was taboo, because an intact skull was what made the bear’s return possible.