Paper short abstract:

I examine the communication between forest and human in Finnish-Karelian-Ingrian folk poetry. The mythical world of oral poetry includes a remarkable number of instances of communication with the non-human, most of it constituting dialogue with natural entities in day-to-day life.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I introduce the communication between forest and human in Finnish-Karelian-Ingrian folk poetry. The poems are published in the volumes of The Ancient Poems of the Finnish People (Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot in Finnish: SKVR), a representative compilation of runic songs collected mostly from Finland, Karelia and Ingria during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (the oldest dating back to the 16th century). The mythical world of oral poetry includes a remarkable number of instances of communication with the non-human, most of it constituting dialogue with natural entities in day-to-day life. Some of this dialogue also directly engages with the forest revealing itself to be an independent actor, one whose morality or intentions remain largely unfathomable to its human interlocutor. On the other hand, SKVR includes many poems that feature a human communicating with natural entities such as birds, for lack of any reliable human relationships. In some of these poems, the ability to partake in this anomalous interaction is regarded as a special talent: interspecies understanding is seen as a gift.

The forest is often a place for erotic encounters in men’s hunting poetry, and a potentially dangerous place for women in epic poems. Although the forest generally appears in women’s lyric poems of sorrow and worry as a place of refuge, it can also be a place where women’s sexuality is expressed. While the interpretative focus in the article is folkloristic the intention is posthumanistic, proposing that the forest – with its other-than-human entities – gazes upon its human visitors. This leads us to ask a pertinent question: What does the forest think of us?