Ukko

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A wedge of dark stone turns up in a plowed field in Tavastia, its edges ground smooth, far older than the man who finds it. He does not take it for a tool. He takes it for the head of a bolt, driven into the earth by the old man of the sky in some long-past storm, and he carries it home and keeps it under the threshold against fire and ill luck. The stone is the work of a Neolithic hand that had vanished from the country before the Finns who farmed there had a name for themselves. The reading laid over it belongs to a different world entirely, a world in which the thunder is a person, and the person has a name, and the name is simply the word for an old man.

That word is ukko. It means an old man, a grandfather, an elder; the ordinary thunder-word, ukkonen, is its diminutive, the little old man muttering and cracking above the fields. The northern Finnic peoples did not, in the main, give their high powers proper names of the kind a Greek or a Norseman would recognize. They gave them titles, kinship-words, the names of what they were and did. Ukko is the old man of the heavens, the one whose weather governs whether the grain comes up, and across the documented record he stands as the foremost of the weather-powers, the lord of the thunder and the rain.

Genealogy

The oldest written notice of Ukko, and of the Finnic gods generally, is a hostile one. In 1551 Mikael Agricola, the reformer and first Lutheran bishop of Turku, the man who gave the Finnish language its written form, set down in the preface to his Finnish translation of the Psalms a list of the powers the people had worshiped before the faith reached them. He arranged it as a rhyming inventory: twelve gods of the people of Hame, the Tavastians of the inland forests, and twelve of the Karelians to the east, each named with a line or two on what they were thought to govern. It is a churchman’s catalog of error, written to be deplored, an exhibit of the idolatry the new church meant to root out. It is also the founding document of the study of Finnic religion, and very nearly everything that follows has to argue with it.

Among the Tavastian powers Agricola sets Ukko apart. Where the other figures get a line or two, Ukko draws something closer to nine, the longest entry in the list, which is itself a kind of testimony to his standing; the standard reference notice of the god treats this 1551 record as the earliest written account of his worship, and as a document whose exact reading remains disputed. He governs the weather and the harvest; the rain and the growth of the grain are in his hand. Agricola records, with disapproval, that when the spring sowing was done the people drank to Ukko, a toast over the seed-corn for the season’s increase, and he names a communal festival held in the god’s honor. The account is brief, secondhand, and shaped by the writer’s contempt for what he describes. Read against the grain, with the contempt subtracted, it preserves the outline of a working agrarian cult: a sky-power addressed at the two hinges of the farming year, the sowing and the reaping, for rain and for the grain.

The rest of what is known comes from much later, and from a different kind of source: the oral poetry. Through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century the Finnic countryside, above all in Karelia, still carried a vast body of sung verse in the old trochaic meter that would come to be called the Kalevala meter, the runo-song or runo-laulu, performed by singers who held thousands of lines in memory and by the village tietaja, the “knower,” the wise-man whose sung incantations, the loitsut, were the working magic of the community. In this material Ukko is everywhere as the weather-power invoked at need: the one called on for rain in drought, the maker of the storm, the holder of the thunder. He is named in the great charm-poems and in the epic verse, and it is from this oral archive, gathered by collectors over generations and preserved in the immense corpus later cataloged as the Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot, the old folk-poems of the Finnish people, that his living character has to be reconstructed.

Reconstructed is the operative word, and it carries a problem the modern study has never fully resolved. The sources are late, Christianized, and partial; the gods come down through a churchman who despised them and through folk-singers whose own faith had long since shifted. Whether Ukko was, in pre-Christian times, a genuinely supreme god, an over-god above the rest, or simply the most important of a loose company of weather- and nature-powers, is contested, and the contest turns in good part on a single nineteenth-century editorial decision, which is taken up below.

The deeper genealogy, before any writing, can only be inferred. The thunderer is an old northern figure, shared widely, and Ukko’s developed cult bears unmistakable marks of long contact with the god’s neighbors. The most telling is linguistic. One of Ukko’s epithets is Perkele, a word that in modern Finnish has decayed into the common curse for the devil but which derives, through prehistoric borrowing, from the Baltic thunder-god: the Lithuanian Perkunas, the Latvian Perkons. The borrowing points to a deep and early entanglement between the Finnic peoples and their Baltic neighbors, an entanglement in which the shape of the thunder-god traveled across the language barrier. Later, the cult absorbed a further layer from the Germanic north, from the Norse Thor, whose hammer and whose storm-mastery left their print on Ukko’s own. The comparison to the Indo-European thunderers — the Baltic Perkunas, the Norse Thor, the Slavic Perun — runs through every modern treatment, and it is a just comparison, for the thunderer is genuinely a common northern inheritance. But the comparison can mislead. Ukko is the chief weather-god of a Uralic, non-Indo-European people, and his character is the product of a long Finnic accommodation of borrowed material, not a Finnish edition of Thor. He is his neighbors’ kinsman, not their copy.

The thunder, the storm, and the field

Ukko’s instrument is the thunder, and the thunder is rendered as a struck blow. His weapon is named, across the songs, as a hammer or an axe: Ukonvasara, Ukko’s hammer, and Ukonkirves, Ukko’s axe. When he strikes, the blow is the lightning and the noise the thunder. The hammer invites the obvious comparison with Thor’s, and the comparison is partly sound and partly the product of the very Germanic borrowing that shaped the later cult; the axe-form may be the older, for the thunder-weapon across the north is as often an axe as a hammer. The bolt itself, the thing that comes down, has its own names: Ukon vaaja, Ukko’s wedge, Ukon naula, Ukko’s nail.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, “The Defense of the Sampo” (1896), a scene from the Kalevala. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Here the field-stone returns. The wedge-shaped polished tools that the Finnish soil gave up — the stone axes and adze-heads of the Neolithic peoples who had farmed and hunted there before, washed clean by heavy rain or turned out by the plow — were taken for exactly what the names say: Ukko’s wedges, the very heads of his bolts, driven into the ground where the lightning had struck and worked slowly back to the surface. The ukonkivi, the thunderstone, was thus a real object with a sacred reading, gathered up and kept, set under the house or in the wall against lightning and fire and the evil eye. It is one of the cleaner cases of a whole archaeological horizon — a vanished people’s toolkit — absorbed into a living cosmology as the litter of a god’s storms.

The same eye read the sky after the rain. The rainbow was ukonkaari, Ukko’s arch, the great curve the old man set across the heavens when the storm had passed — not a bow he draws, but an arch, an architecture, the visible shape of his weather laid down over the cleared air. The detail is small and exact and characteristic: the powers of this world are read off the land and the sky directly, in the stone and the arc and the cloud, not narrated in a temple.

There were no temples. The cult of Ukko, so far as it can be recovered, was a cult of the open field and the sacred grove, conducted at the turning-points of the agricultural year. Its central observance was the feast Agricola already names, known in the tradition as the Ukon vakat — Ukko’s bushels, from vakka, a bushel or measure, a wooden container — or in the singular Ukon vakka. It was a communal spring or early-summer offering, made above all when drought threatened the young grain: the village brought together food and, characteristically, ale, the vakka of drink, and gathered to feast and to call on Ukko for rain and for the increase of the crops. The rite belonged to the whole community and to the season; it was an act of the farming year, the field’s petition to the weather that ruled it, the same petition the spring seed-toast made over the sown corn. Described from the worshippers’ own side, the Ukon vakat is not a magic procedure but a meal eaten in the god’s company and toward his favor, the social form of a people’s dependence on a sky they could not command.

Ukko did not stand entirely alone. The tradition gives him a consort, named in Agricola as Rauni, whose identity is one of the genuine puzzles of the field: some scholars have taken her for a separate fertility-goddess, the earth or the rowan to Ukko’s sky; others read the name as an epithet of Ukko himself or a corruption in transmission, so that it is not certain there was a goddess there at all. The feminine sky- or earth-power addressed elsewhere as Akka, the old woman to Ukko’s old man, belongs to the same uncertain region. The state of the evidence does not permit a clean genealogy of Ukko’s household; it permits only the honest statement that the sources are thin and disputed at exactly this point.

What the sources do support is the centrality of the weather itself. Ukko is not a god of stories in the way the Finnic culture-heroes are. He does not, in the bulk of the material, do deeds and have adventures; he makes his presence felt, as one careful summary puts it, almost entirely through natural effects — the storm breaking, the rain falling, the bolt coming down. He is a god one experiences as weather and addresses as a person, which is a different and in some ways older kind of divinity than the narrated heroes who share the songs with him: Vainamoinen the eternal singer whose sung word orders the world, Ilmarinen the sky-smith who hammered out the dome of heaven and forged the wondrous Sampo for the dark Northland of Pohjola, Tapio the lord of the forest who owns the game. Among them Ukko is the bare power of the sky, the weather behind the weather, closer to a force than to a character.

Reception and afterlife

Three witnesses carry Ukko forward, and each shapes him as it carries him.

The first is Agricola’s list, the founding written record, with all its hostility built in. Everything later either rests on it or contends with it. Its value is that it is early, dated, and specific — 1551, the Tavastian weather- and harvest-god, the spring toast, the feast — and its limit is that it is a single brief notice by an enemy of the cult, which later scholarship has had to handle critically at every point. Much of the wider list, the modern study has concluded, names not gods at all but local guardian-spirits and figures of folk legend; Ukko is among the few entries that hold up as a genuine and major deity. The hostile churchman, read against himself, turns out to be the most reliable witness there is to the old religion, precisely because he had no motive to invent its powers and every motive to record them as they were in order to condemn them.

The second witness is the runo-song of Karelia and Finland, and the great nineteenth-century work that grew out of it. Between 1828 and 1844 the physician and folklorist Elias Lonnrot traveled the Karelian backcountry collecting the oral verse from its last great masters — among them Arhippa Perttunen, reckoned the finest of all the singers — and from this gathered material he composed a continuous epic, the Kalevala, first in the shorter “Old” version of 1835 and then in the expanded “New” version of 1849, the fifty cantos that became the national epic of Finland.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, “The Forging of the Sampo” (1893), illustrating the Kalevala. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The Kalevala’s relation to the old religion is the load-bearing problem of the whole subject, and it must be stated plainly. The epic is not an ancient pan-Finnic scripture, and it is not a fixed mythology that lay waiting to be transcribed. It is Lonnrot’s selection and arrangement of genuinely old oral song — the songs themselves are authentically traditional and centuries deep — bound into a continuity that the tradition never possessed, with connective verse of Lonnrot’s own composition, estimated at a small fraction of the whole but decisive in shaping how the material reads. To take the Kalevala’s ordered narrative for the pre-Christian Finnic myth is to mistake a great editor’s synthesis for the thing he worked from.

Nowhere does this matter more than for Ukko. In the Kalevala Ukko is addressed as Ukko ylijumala — Ukko the over-god, the supreme god — and given a lofty, almost monotheist elevation above the other powers, a height that suited the nineteenth-century moment, with its hunger for a dignified national antiquity and its half-conscious assimilation of the old sky-father to the Christian God. The folklorists were quick to question it. Julius Krohn, the founder of Finnish folklore study, disputed the reading of Ukko as a true supreme ruler of the pantheon, holding that the elevation owed more to Lonnrot’s arrangement than to the pre-Christian cult, where Ukko was the foremost of the weather-powers but not plainly a monotheist’s high god. The caution has held. The careful modern statement is the hedged one: Ukko is the chief weather- and sky-god of the documented tradition, very possibly its most important single power, but “supreme god” is a claim that the folk material does not straightforwardly bear, and that owes a real debt to the era of national reception. It became one strand of that reception in turn, carried into the paintings of Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the wider Finnish national-romantic art that made the Kalevala a founding image of the nation — a use of the old songs that is itself part of Ukko’s afterlife, and not to be confused with the songs.

The third witness is the comparative and ethnographic study that set Ukko among his kin. The thunderer comparison places him beside the Baltic Perkunas, the Norse Thor, the Slavic Perun, and the placing is sound as far as it goes: these are cognate figures of a shared northern world, and Ukko belongs in their company. The same comparative eye recovers his nearest relative northward, the Sami thunder-power Horagalles, whose very name is a Sami borrowing of the Norse “Thor-karl,” Thor the old man — the same fusion of the elder-title and the thunder-god, formed at the Norse contact, that gives Ukko his own old-man name and his Thor-marked hammer. Yet the comparison cuts both ways, and this is where the modern caution earns its keep. To read Ukko through Thor or Perkunas is to risk dressing a Uralic god in Indo-European clothes that fit him only because he borrowed them — to mistake the long history of contact for an identity of origin, and to lose what is particular to him: the field-stone read as a bolt, the arch set over the cleared sky, the bushel of ale carried out against the drought, the bare weather addressed as an old man. The kinship is real and the borrowing is deep. The god under them is the Finns’ own.

→ Related: Vainamoinen · Ilmarinen · Tapio · Beaivi · Ukonsaari · Astuvansalmi · Taatsi · Varikallio · The Sami · The Karelians · The Mari · Pohjola