Finland

Finland sits on a religious fault line that runs through the country rather than around it. Western Finland was drawn into the Latin church through Swedish rule from the twelfth century and into Lutheranism with Sweden in the sixteenth. Eastern Karelia was drawn into the Orthodox world through Novgorod, and the monasteries of Valaam and Konevitsa on Lake Ladoga were its centres. The border between those two spheres moved repeatedly, and it moved again in 1940, when the ceded territories were evacuated and the monks of Valaam carried their community into Finland to refound it as New Valamo at Heinavesi. The Finnish Orthodox Church is small, around one per cent of the population, but it is a national church in law alongside the Lutheran one, and both may levy a church tax collected by the state.

The Lutheran church still holds a majority of Finns as members, though the share has fallen steadily and resignations rose sharply once an online service made leaving straightforward. Attendance is low, but the rites of passage held: a large proportion of fifteen year olds still attend confirmation camp, which functions as much as a social institution as a religious one.

Northern Finland is different again. Laestadian revivalism, named for the Swedish Sami botanist and preacher Lars Levi Laestadius, spread through the north from the 1840s and remains a substantial movement within the Lutheran church rather than outside it. Its largest branch, Conservative Laestadianism, is one of the few groups in the Nordic countries with high birth rates and high observance, and its internal disputes are national news.

Elias Lonnrot was a district doctor who spent years on foot and by boat in Karelia, sitting with singers and writing down runic song in the old trochaic metre. He published a first collection in 1835 and an enlarged one in 1849. The result gave Finland a national epic at the moment it needed one, and it gave the study of Finnic religion its principal body of material.

It is important to be exact about what the Kalevala is. It is not a transcript. Lonnrot selected, ordered, edited and in places wrote connective material, assembling a continuous narrative out of songs that circulated as separate items with no single sequence. The raw collections he and others made survive separately and run to far more material than the epic contains, which is why scholars work from the archive rather than from the poem when they want the tradition rather than the artefact.

What comes through the poem is still substantial: Vainamoinen the singer whose power is verbal rather than martial, Ilmarinen the smith, Louhi of Pohjola, and the sampo, an object that brings prosperity and whose nature is never settled. The sampo has been read as a mill, a pillar of the world, a sun symbol and a coin die, and no reading commands agreement.

The revival that draws on this material is small. Karhun kansa, meaning the people of the bear, was registered as a religious community in 2013 and takes the bear ceremonialism recorded in the songs as a central image. It does not claim unbroken descent. Neither do the researchers, who are generally clear that the Kalevala preserves a poetic tradition in which religious material is embedded, not a liturgy anyone can reopen.