Tapio

Somewhere in the old woods there is a spruce with its crown broken off, so that the trunk ends in a flat platform of branches. This is the table. Beer brewed from the broth of the first kill goes on it, and small rye cakes, and sometimes a coin of silver. The hunter lays his bow and his snares among the roots, walks around the tree with his hat on, twice with the sun and once against it, then sets the hat on the ground, kneels, presses himself flat to the cold moss, grips the earth with one arm and begins to sing. He is talking to the landlord.

Tapio is the first name on the oldest written page of Finnish religion, and the man who wrote it down wanted the whole business abolished. In 1551 the bishop Mikael Agricola set a rhymed roll of Tavastian and Karelian gods into the preface of his Finnish Psalter, partly as scholarship and mostly as an indictment. The opening couplet runs: Tapio granted the catch from the forest, and Ahti brought fish from the water. Väinämöinen forged the songs after that, and Rahko cut the moon dark, and the list closes with the bishop’s flat verdict that a people who believe such things and pray to them are out of their minds. Four and a half centuries later that couplet is still the anchor of everything anyone can say with confidence about the god of the Finnish forest.

What Agricola caught in one line is the entire theology. Tapio does not haunt the forest. He runs it. In the runic songs the wilderness is not wilderness at all but an estate, with a master and a mistress, a household, servants, outbuildings and stock. Game animals are called vilja, the same word used for grain and for cattle: a crop, someone’s property, kept behind a door. The door is Tapio’s aitta, the raised storehouse that stood on every Finnish farm, and the keys to it hang on a ring at the mistress’s thigh. A hunter walking into the woods is not exploring. He is going up to the big house to ask for something that belongs to somebody else.

He was old and he was grey. The Kalevala gives him three compound words that stick: halliparta, havuhattu, naavaturkki. Grey-beard, hat of conifer boughs, coat of beard lichen. Naava is the pale hanging Usnea that drapes the branches of old spruce in wet northern forest, and the picture is exact rather than ornamental, a man assembled out of the parts of a tree that hang down. Past that the sources go quiet, and the quiet carries information of its own. Many of his titles, king of the forest and grey old man among them, were also the words hunters used for the bear, whose real name was too dangerous to say out loud. The line between the forest’s owner and the forest’s largest animal was never firmly drawn, and there is no sign anyone wanted it drawn.

Where the name came from has been argued over for two and a half centuries without resolution. In 1774 Nils Idman derived it from an epithet of Ares. Franz Anton Schiefner made it a clipped Saint Eustace in 1853; Domenico Comparetti tied it in 1891 to tapi, a rod or staff, on the theory that the god was worshipped in the shape of a tree trunk; Otto Alcenius announced in 1904 that Tapio was simply Saint Stephen. Martti Haavio took it back to tapa, chance or luck, which would make Tapio the one who deals out the lots. Janne Saarikivi has more recently suggested tavata, to catch up with something. Kaarle Krohn and Uno Harva argued something plainer and harder to dislodge: that tapio was once just a word meaning forest, and that a person grew inside it after the original sense was forgotten. Harva noted that the runic singers themselves were sometimes unsure whether they were naming a god or the trees. Agricola’s own Karelian list hands the same job to Hiisi, who granted victory over the forest-dwellers, and a Turku dissertation of 1688 states outright that what Tavastia calls Tapio, Karelia and Savonia call Hiisi.

His household is better documented than he is. His wife Mielikki is the mistress of the forest and takes most of the prayers, often more of them than he does. His son Nyyrikki, a clean-faced man in a red cap, cuts blaze marks along the ground and builds cairns on the hills so that a stranger can find the game and then find his way back out. His daughters Tellervo and Tuulikki work the stock. One rune asks Tuulikki to drive the animals down to the open clearings, and if a beast is sluggish off the mark, to cut a birch switch from the thicket and tickle its flank and its armpits until it runs. Somebody is moving livestock. The neat family tree is partly Elias Lönnrot’s housekeeping, since he assembled the Kalevala in 1849 out of thousands of separately collected runes, and the raw material is looser than the epic makes it look: sometimes the name Tapio belongs to the female ruler of the forest rather than the male one, sometimes it turns up in a feminine form as Tapiotar, and very often it means nothing more than woods.

The set piece comes in the fourteenth poem. Lemminkäinen, promised a bride in the north if he can run down the elk of Hiisi on skis, greets the hills and the hollow-sounding spruce woods and asks the forest to soften, the wilderness to be moved, and the one and only Tapio to bend. He skis three days across bog and burnt heath, climbs a boulder, looks north, and sees the doors of Tapio’s houses glowing gold on the far side of the marsh. He goes close and crouches at the sixth window. Inside, the givers are sitting in filthy workaday rags and the mistress of the forest is black-faced and dreadful to look at. He tells her he remembers it differently. There used to be three castles here, he says, one of wood, one of bone, one of stone, six gold windows at every corner, the whole household swarming in gold and swaying in silver, gold coils on the wrists and good beads at the throat. Put the threshing rags away. Put on your luck-clothes and your giving-shirts, and dress the forest while you are at it, silver on the pines and gold on the spruces, copper belts on the old trees and gold blossom on the birches, the way it was in your better days, when a spruce bough shone like the moon and the whole blue wilderness smelled of honey.

He sings for a week at the edge of the thicket and it works. The household is charmed, the maidens are won round, and they chase the Hiisi elk out from behind Tapio’s hill straight into his noose. What kills Lemminkäinen later happens somewhere else entirely and has nothing to do with the forest. He got what he asked for.

That scene is the clearest statement anywhere of how the god was understood. Whether the forest gives is legible in what its family is wearing, and their clothes can be changed from outside by a good enough singer. The bargaining is explicit and unembarrassed, gold and silver offered by name in exchange for meat. Prayers to Tapio were not devotion. They were negotiation, conducted with enormous courtesy by someone holding no cards.

His powers are a proprietor’s powers. He opens the storehouse or he keeps it shut. He can push game onto a path and hold it there, and the runes ask him to set his palms on either side of the trail like fence rails so the animal cannot swerve, to shove deadfall aside, to break a fence to five withes and seven stakes, to lay silk across a river as a bridge and red broadcloth as a stair. He can also do none of it, which was the commoner experience. The same poems concede that he sleeps through the singing, that the pleading runs on for years and returns nothing, that the evening comes home joyless and the day was long and catchless. There is a small honey-mouthed figure in the rune whose whole assignment is to play a sweet pipe at the mistress’s ear to wake her, because she does not hear, or does not often hear, however golden the tongue coaxing her.

And he cannot be compelled. Nothing in the Finnish record gives a hunter any hold on Tapio beyond flattery, beer, silver, good manners and song, and the etiquette weighs more than any single item in it: the hat off, the circling, the weapons laid down at the root, the body pressed to the ground. The one thing the singer never claims is a right. He asks the forest to bend, and then he waits to find out whether the doors are gold this year or whether the mistress is in rags.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tapio in Finnish mythology?

Tapio is the Finnish god and master of the forest, called the king of the forest and the old man of the forest. He is the earliest deity named in Mikael Agricola’s 1551 list of Tavastian gods, the oldest written record of Finnish religion, where he is credited with granting the hunter’s catch. In the runic songs he heads a forest household that includes his wife Mielikki and their children Nyyrikki, Tellervo and Tuulikki.

What does Tapio look like?

The Kalevala describes Tapio as a grey-bearded old man wearing a hat of conifer boughs and a coat of beard lichen, the pale Usnea that hangs from old spruce branches. Beyond those three details the sources say very little about his appearance. Several of his epithets, including grey-beard and king of the forest, were also used as substitute names for the bear, so descriptions of him and descriptions of the bear are not always separable.

How did Finnish hunters worship Tapio?

Hunters made offerings at a Tapionpöytä, or Tapio’s table, a spruce whose top had broken off to leave a flat platform of branches. Special beer brewed from the broth of the first catch was brought to it, along with small rye cakes, silver and spirits, and the hunter would lay his weapons and traps at the roots, circle the tree twice with the sun and once against it, then kneel, lie face down and sing a prayer. Herders used the same tree, offering things like the blood of a ram butchered at Michaelmas or the first cheese from a newly calved cow.

What happens in the Kalevala story about Tapio?

In the fourteenth poem of the Kalevala, Lemminkäinen skis for three days in search of the elk of Hiisi and finds the golden doors of Tapio’s houses across a marsh. Crouching at a window, he sees Tapio’s household dressed in filthy work clothes and the mistress of the forest looking black and hideous, so he sings to them for a week, asking them to put on their luck-clothes and giving-shirts and to hang the forest itself with gold and silver. The household relents and drives the elk into his noose.

Is Tapio the same as Hiisi?

Agricola’s 1551 preface assigns Tapio to the Tavastians and gives the Karelians Hiisi in the same role, granting success against the animals of the forest, and a 1688 dissertation from Turku states plainly that the being Tavastia calls Tapio is called Hiisi in Karelia and Savonia. Both words were also used simply to mean forest. Uno Harva treated the two names as regional euphemisms for the same power rather than as separate gods.

Related Entries

Otso, Hiisi, Ukko, Ahto, Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Louhi, Vellamo, Haltija, Ajatar, Menninkäinen, Leshy, Skogsrå, Green Man, Curupira