Louhi and Lapland Witches: Northern Magic in Myth and History
Louhi: Hag Queen of Pohjola
In the Finnish epic Kalevala, Louhi rules as the dreaded hag-queen of Pohjola, the far northern realm of darkness and sorcery. Also called the Hostess of Pohjola, she is portrayed as an old yet formidable wise-woman – a witch-queen wielding fearsome magic. In folklore terms Louhi is “a cross between a folkloric witch and a hag,” gifted with potent spells and shape-shifting powers. As mistress of the North, she commands the elements: in one tale she hides away the Sun and Moon in a cave, casting the world into darkness until the heroes win them back. She conjures thick fogs (praying to the mist-goddess Ukko’s daughter, Udutar) to thwart her enemies, freezes the seas solid by enchantment, and even sends plagues and a monstrous bear to terrorize the folk of Kaleva. When enraged, Louhi can assume fearsome shapes – at one point she transforms into a gigantic winged predator and swoops down upon Väinämöinen’s ship, attacking the heroes in the form of a great eagle or dragon of the air.
Sammon puolustus (The Defence of the Sampo) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1896) portrays Louhi shapeshifted into a giant eagle.
Louhi’s role in myth is as sovereign of the Northland and a constant counterforce to Kaleva’s heroes. Väinämöinen, the wise old bard, Ilmarinen the smith, and Lemminkäinen the adventurer all contend with Louhi’s cunning. She is by turns a dangerous adversary and a grudging benefactor. When Väinämöinen is wounded and adrift, Louhi tends and rescues him – but only on the condition that he forge a magical mill called Sampo as payment. Louhi covets the Sampo’s power to bring prosperity, and with her command of spells she bargains shrewdly, withholding the reward of her daughter’s hand until impossible conditions are met. Like a fairy-tale crone setting tasks for a suitor, she orders Väinämöinen to perform three impossible labors (from plowing a field of snakes to building a ship from splinters) to win the Maid of Pohjola. Louhi’s own beautiful daughter – the Maiden of Pohjola – is an object of desire in many stories, yet the hag-queen does not yield her lightly; even the bold Lemminkäinen is sent off to hunt monstrous beasts at Louhi’s behest as a bride-price. Ever calculating, Louhi honors only those bargains that advantage Pohjola. When Ilmarinen crafts the wondrous Sampo for her, she hosts a great wedding feast for him, slaying an ox so huge that “a squirrel ran a month along its back” in preparation. But once empowered by the Sampo, Louhi reneges on sharing its riches, provoking war between Pohjola and Kalevala. In the epic’s climax, Väinämöinen and his companions steal the Sampo from Louhi’s vault, pursued by the enraged witch-queen taking to the sky in monstrous form. Louhi’s wrath shakes heaven and earth – she hurls rocks from the clouds until the Sampo is shattered at sea, unleashing its magic but depriving both sides of its full bounty. Even after this clash, the defiant hag of the North continues to plague Kaleva’s people, sending sickness and stealing fire, until Väinämöinen finally reverses her spells.
As a character, Louhi embodies the archetypal witch-mother – wise in knowledge of the old gods, ruthless in defending her domain. Scholars note that Elias Lönnrot, in compiling the Kalevala (1835–49), drew together many separate folk tales of northern wise-women and female shamans into the single figure of Louhi. She thus stands as a mythic archetype of the Northern witch-queen, comparable in some ways to figures like the Slavic Baba Yaga or the Norse völva. Like Baba Yaga, Louhi is an ancient crone who can aid or curse, commanding magical servants and forces of nature. Like a völva (seeress), she is respected and feared, dwelling in a distant land and safeguarding primeval secrets. In Finnish myth Louhi’s shamanic might is formidable: she chants powerful incantations, knows the art of ritual singing (a skill Finns believed could work magic), and can even call spirits to fight for her. Yet for all her malice toward Kalevala’s heroes, Louhi is not a mere villain; she is a wise woman of the old world, upholding the interests of Pohjola and testing the worthiness of heroes. Her presence in the epic highlights the tension between the familiar south and the enchanted, hostile north. Louhi is essentially the personification of the unknowable North, a guardian of its treasures (like the Sampo, or the celestial lights) and a mistress of witchcraft that rivals the male heroes’ own magic. In the end, though Louhi is outwitted and her hoarded magic is dispersed, she remains a towering figure in Finnish lore – the Hag of the North, forever an image of female power and sorcery on the edge of the world’s light.
Louhi illustrated by Nicolai Kochergin.
Finns and Lapps: Magic and Witchcraft in the Far North
Across Norse and Germanic tradition, the far north – the lands of the Finns and Lapps (Sámi people) – was long imagined as a realm of uncanny magic. Early saga literature uses the term Finnar for the Sámi and sometimes for Finnic peoples in general, not clearly distinguishing between the two. Both groups were stereotyped as skilled sorcerers and practitioners of witchcraft in the eyes of their southern neighbors. To medieval Scandinavians, these northern folk were “other”, living in wilderness and darkness, and so they became characters of mystery – much like the witches and wizards of later fairy tales. In Icelandic sagas, Finnr (and the female Finna or Finnkona) usually means a Sámi person, often one with magic powers. Saga writers frequently portrayed Finns/Sámi as shamans, seers, and spell-casters: people who could see the future, shape-shift, or summon winds. One saga relates how the Norwegian King Olaf encountered fierce “Finns” on the Finnish coast, who whipped up a storm with sorcery to drive away his ships. The saga’s verses even use a unique word Finnlendingar (“Finnlanders”) for these foes, underlining the connection between the land of Finland and magic-wielding natives. In other tales, Norse heroes or kings seek out Finns to learn occult wisdom – reflecting a belief that wisdom in rune-craft or seiðr (Norse sorcery) came from the north. Indeed, a Norwegian medieval law even warned against “believing in witches or Finns,” casually linking pagan magic and the Sámi people as equivalent evils.
This conflation of “Finn” and “Lapp” as northern magicians persisted into later folklore. The Laplanders (Sámi) in particular gained a legendary reputation for wizardry. The Sámi were practitioners of shamanism – their noaidi (shamans) used drumming and trance to heal, divine, and curse – and to outsiders their rites looked like witchcraft. As one 16th-century writer noted with alarm, “Finns and Lapps [were] particularly able sorcerers”, masters of spells and secret arts. Old legends claimed these Arctic magicians could shoot magical arrows on the wind or send spirits flying over great distances. For seafarers, the notion of Lapland witches selling wind became commonplace: it was said a Sámi woman could tie up winds in a knotted cord, releasing a breeze or a gale for the right price. Such stories were popular because they dramatized the wild northern weather as literally under the command of Sámi witch-folk. Even in the English imagination, “Lapland witches” became proverbial for powerful magic – poets like John Milton evoked them dancing with the night-hags during lunar eclipses. By the 17th century, this image was so entrenched that learned Europeans wrote of Lapland as a hive of witches, and the phrase “Lapland witch” appears in Shakespeare and Defoe as shorthand for a sorceress of dread potency.
Behind these fantasies lay a mix of respect and fear for the real-life Sámi noaidi. In Sámi culture, the noaidi were usually men (though women could also be healers and seers) who entered trances by drumming and chanting joiks (spirit-songs). They were believed to negotiate with spirits, cure illnesses, control hunts, and sometimes curse enemies. To Christian outsiders, these rites were diabolical. During the era of witch hunts, Sámi sorcerers – male and female – were indeed prosecuted. Nordic witch trial records show that Sámi men, famed for wind-making and weather spells, were tried and executed for sorcery in the 1600s. One famous case in Norway (1627) recounts a Sámi shaman named Quiwe Baarsen who admitted to conjuring a wind for a ship’s captain, only for a storm to wreck the vessel; he was burned at the stake for this act. Another Sámi man, Lars Nilsson, was condemned to death in Sweden for practicing the old religion – sacrificing to ancestral gods – in hopes of reviving his grandson. Sámi women too could be targeted: a healer named Gunilla was accused of witchcraft in 1665 on the logic that if she could heal, she could also kill with magic. (She narrowly escaped execution by refusing to confess.) Such trials highlight the gendered twist in northern magic: within Sámi society, magic was a respected craft often led by men, but in the folklore of their neighbors, it was frequently recast as the work of wicked witches, who in European tradition were usually women. The term “witch” itself carried feminine connotations, so the idea of the “Lapland witch” fused the Sámi shaman with the old crone of fairy tales.
It is clear that “Finns” and “Lapps” served as a mythic shorthand for sorcerers in Nordic lore. Part of this arose from genuine cultural memory – the ancient Finno-Ugric peoples had deep shamanistic traditions (even the Christianized Finns of the south retained many spells and charms in folk practice). The Norse, coming from a warrior culture with their own magic (rune magic, seiðr, etc.), viewed the shamanic rites of the north with awe. By casting northern neighbors as wizards and witches, they acknowledged the mysterious spiritual power those people were believed to wield, even as they labeled it dangerous or ungodly. Over time, the lines blurred between Finn and Sámi in legend – both were simply the otherworldly folk of the farthermost North, dwellers in a land of snow, midnight sun, and aurora-lit skies, where strange gods still held sway. From the Finnish witch Huld who, according to saga, killed the Swedish king Vanlandi by sending a nightmare to crush him, to the unnamed “Lapp sorceress” of seafaring lore who could call up winds, the idea of northern magic-wielders became a staple of Scandinavian storytelling. These figures straddle the line between history and myth: on one hand, wise and cunning people with knowledge of nature’s secrets; on the other, shadowy figures onto whom southerners projected their fears of the unknown. In sum, “Finns” and “Lapps” in older usage often meant more than an ethnicity – it meant magicians of the distant wilds. Through their image, the North was painted as a land of enchantment and witchcraft, enriching the folklore of Europe with a distinctively arctic strain of magic.
Primary & Literary Sources:
Elias Lönnrot. The Kalevala: The Epic Poem of Finland (compiled 1835, expanded 1849).
English translation (various editions, public domain): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5186
Bonser, Wilfrid. “The Mythology of the Kalevala, with Notes on Bear-Worship among the Finns.”
Folklore, Vol. 39, No. 2 (1928), pp. 113–144.Link: JSTOR
Bonser, Wilfrid. “The Kalevala as a National Epic.”
Folklore, Vol. 76, No. 2 (1965), pp. 91–102.Link: JSTOR
Gay, David. “The Creation of the Kalevala, 1833–1849.”
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1997), pp. 59–75.Karkala, Alphonso. “Transformation of Folk Narratives in the Kalevala.”
Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2 (1986), pp. 191–200.Link: JSTOR
Sámi, Finnish, and Northern Witchcraft Sources:
Tolley, Clive. Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, Vol. I–II. FF Communications.
(Referenced for Finns/Sámi as magical figures; not openly available online but cited in academic circles.)
Hagen, Rune Blix. “The Shamanic Powers of the Lapland Witches.”
Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1997), pp. 75–89.Link: JSTOR
Wiklund, K. B. “Sami Shamanism.” In Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia.
(Classic study on Sámi noaidi traditions; limited availability online.)
Hansen, Lars Ivar and Bjørnar Olsen. Hunters in Transition: An Outline of Early Sámi History.
Open access via Museumsforlaget
Niemi, Einar. “The Finns in Northern Scandinavia.” In Scandinavian Journal of History, Vol. 15 (1990).
(Discusses blurred ethnic terms like “Finns” and “Lapps” in early usage.)
Skorpen, Asbjørn. “Witchcraft and Magic in Nordic Culture.”
Included in Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, Vol. 53 (1997).
(Summary of witchcraft imagery in Scandinavia and Lapland.)
Kvideland, Reimund and Henning K. Sehmsdorf (eds.). Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend.
University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Link: WorldCat Record
DuBois, Thomas A. Nordic Religions in the Viking Age.
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Price, Neil. The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.
Oxbow Books, 2019.
Link: Publisher's site
Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson. Under the Cloak: The Acceptance of Christianity in Iceland with Particular Reference to the Religious Attitudes and Beliefs of the People.
(For comparative Norse seiðr and Finnish magic traditions.)