BRONZE AND IRON AGE RELIGION: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SACRED

In Agricola’s list as well as in the Kalevala poetry the culture hero Ilmarinen plays a prominent role. Three sacral qualities, those of fire (Finnish tuli), of iron (Finnish rautd) and of the smithy (Finnish paja), connect Ilmarinen closely with the profession of a blacksmith.

The symbolic content attached to iron as a highly valued cultural product is also attached to the substance of iron slag (Finnish rautakuond), which plays an integral role in the process of separating metal from raw ore. Archaeologists have frequently observed iron slag in Iron Age burials. It has been found as grave goods and in the fill of graves in several places in Sweden, notably in the province of Gastrikland, where a third of the Viking period graves contained slag (Taavitsainen 1991: 12). The American archaeologist D. J. Shepherd has hypothesized that slag was deposited intentionally in Iron Age cremation cemeteries. Having carried out archaeological fieldwork in Finland, Shepherd posits that the slag “might have served as a symbolic metaphor equivalent to the corpse itself’ in Iron Age village culture and its funeral rites (Shepherd 1997: 13- 14). She suggests that in the Middle and Late Iron Ages communities there may have been a symbolic link by which slag and conceptions regarding the presence of a dead person’s soul and body in this and the world of the dead were connected.

Cemeteries became the key sacred sites both in Bronze and Iron Age village settlements in which communal rituals were performed. Their close proximity to dwelling sites and cultivated fields testifies to the sociological significance of the dead to the sacred order of the local community, as observed and emphasized by Uno Harva in his book Suomalaisten muinaisusko (“The ancient beliefs of the Finns”):

Numerous examples show that those who had departed to the underworld played a socially important part in ancient Finnish beliefs. The object of actual worship was, however, not the dead in general, but the respected dead of each family, the continuation of whose work and the fulfilment of whose wishes was the sacred duty of their descendants. This tradition was the basis of the whole social life of the ancient Finns. The departed were the guardians of morality and the judges of manners, and they maintained order in society. In this respect not even the god of the upper air could compete with those who had departed to the underworld.

(Harva 1948: 510-11)

Ritual communication between the living and the dead was one of the most significant social mechanisms by means of which values were expressed, transmitted and renewed in Finnish Bronze and Iron Age communities. From the Bronze Age (1500-500 BCE) until the end of the Iron Age in the twelft h century CE, the dead were first cremated and then buried, either in the cremation cemeteries on level ground as was the case in south-western parts of Finland, or in the cremation cemeteries of cairns in the provinces of Häme and Satakunta, the only exception being the Eura-Koylio-Yläne region in Satakunta where inhumation burials took place as early as the sixth century CE (see Lehtosalo- Hilander 1984: 284; Karvonen 1998: 4; Purhonen 1998: 188-9). On the basis of archaeological finds from the burial grounds, it can be deduced that religious ideas during the Bronze and Iron Age in Finland display a strong Scandinavian orientation. A new vision of life revolving around death and rebirth was incorporated into the religious practices. The metaphoric link between agriculture and death emphasized the continuation of life and was focused on the transmigration of the invisible soul. An interesting piece of evidence is provided by deliberately damaged objects which have been found in archaeological excavations in two sites dating back to the Merovingian period. In the spots studied, swords, spearheads, knives, saxes (large knife-like weapons from the Merovingian Age) and torques had been rendered useless either by bending and beating before being placed in the pyre or by being cut into pieces (see Karvonen 1998). There have been various attempts to explain the ritual breaking of the grave goods. Some archaeologists tend to think that breaking was an act of liberation of the souls of objects, so that they were able to follow the deceased to the world of the dead (ibid.: 5), while historians of religions have interpreted this practice as being based on the idea of the mirror image nature of the world of the dead: what is broken in this world will be whole in the world of the dead and vice versa (see Harva 1948: 297-8; Eliade 1964: 20).