CONCLUSION
In this chapter, the data and diverse schemes of interpretation that have been applied to the prehistoric religious traditions in Finland have been looked at and approached from the point of view of archaeology, linguistics, onomastics, folkloristics and the history of religions.
A hitherto prevalent view according to which prehistoric religious traditions in Finland are predominantly of Uralic/Finno-Ugric origin has been challenged and recent research on Indo- European loanwords in the Finnish language has been presented. The spread of an Indo-European-speaking population in the Late Neolithic era contributed to introducing changes in cosmology and religion. Along with the core religious features in the comb-decorated-pottery culture - shamanism, a specific set of mortuary practices, bear ceremonialism and the hunting of the moose - a new religious world-view became gradually established during the Bronze Age (ca. 1700/1600-500 BCE). In the coastline culture of the Proto-Germanic immigrants, social practices constituting “religion” and the overall systems representing social and economic value were closely connected with settlement patterns, social positions, spatial and gender divisions, and systems of purity and impurity. In the inland wilderness regions, “religion” can be understood principally as practices that regulated hunting in relation to landownership, territorial divisions and areas of economic exploitation, and practices that defined the domain of women in society. Ritual practices at stone settings became the hallmarks of a new vision of life in which the invisible world of the souls of the dead and of animals acquired a special value as a source of economic growth, socio-political power, social security and personal health. With the onset of the Iron Age (500 BCE-1100 CE), religion became a major social formation that supported the maintenance of hierarchy and ownership in the kin-based society. Religion and its systems of ritual action became even more closely connected with the social domain within the interior of the Viking Age village settlements than was the case during the Bronze Age.NOTES
1. Modified from the translation of the Kalevala by Frances Peabody Magoun, Jr. (Magoun 1963: 264), using Kuusi et al. (1977) as a reference.
2. The Knittel was widely used in western Europe during the Middle Ages and the period of the Reformation in epic verse and drama. The metre is based not on the number of syllables or length but on stress: each line begins with a rising stress and lines form rhyming couplets. See Sarajas (1956: 5).
3. English translation by Dr Ellen Valle (University of Turku).
4. The notion of “god” is used, as Ilkka Pyysiainen rightly points out, both as an emic term, denoting, e.g., the god of Christianity or the god of Islam, and as an etic concept, in the sense of a general label for a type of beings (Pyysiainen 2009: 197-8).
5. In Finnish, adj. pohiasti (< pohja) is used in mythological contexts to refer both to the north and to the bottom of the heavens (e.g. pohjantahti, North Star and Pohjannaula, The Nail of the North in the poem of Sampo as a mythical world pillar). See Anttonen (2000: 167).
6. Translation of Agricola’s verses by Dr Ellen Valle, University of Turku.
SUGGESTED READING
Anttoncn, V. 2012. “The Sampo as a Mental Representation of the Mythic Origin of Growth: Towards a New Comprehensive Theory”. In Mythic Discourses. Studies in Uralic Traditions (Studia Fennica Folkloristica 20), Anna-Leena Siikala Frog & Eila Stepanova (eds), 171-87. Helsinki.
Honko, L. 1963. “Finnische Mythologie”. In Worterbuch der Mythologie, vol. II, H. W. Haussig (ed.), 261-371. Stuttgart.
Lahelma, A. 2008. A Touch of Red: Archaeological and Ethnographie Approaches to Interpreting Finnish Rock Paintings (ISKOS 15). Helsinki.
Salo, U. 2006. Ukko: The God of Thunder of the Ancient Finns and His Indo-European Family (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 1). Washington, DC.
Siikala, A.-L. 2002. Mythic Images and Shamanism: A Perspective on Kalevala Poetry (FF Communications 280). Helsinki.