143:) are a body of traditional literature in the Finnic languages whose purpose was to effect magical change on the world. They were most often used to ward off diseases and injuries and to ensure economic prosperity in farming, hunting, fishing and cattle-raising, though spells were used in various social situations and everyday tasks. Such incantations were in widespread use from the first extensive documentation of Finnic-language cultures around the late eighteenth century through to the advance of modernisation in the early twentieth; one marker of this popularity is that more than 30,000 verse spells were collected from Finland and Karelia and published in the series
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208:, though the most elaborate charms concerned external injuries, such as snakebites, burns, cuts, or debris that got into the eye or under the skin. Fewer economic spells—992—were collected; these relate to herding, fishing, hunting, and farming. Spells used in social interactions, such as wedding- and love-spells, account for a mere 253. Short spells used in various situations of everyday housekeeping also existed (183 examples). The seers known as
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166:-metre ceased to be a form for new compositions, the language and motifs associated with it ossified, encouraging the collapse of older charm traditions. The perceived practical usefulness of charms promoted their survival for longer than other genres, but texts became short, mixed with prose, and witnessed the collapse of traditional genre distinctions.
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Already by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Finnish folklorists noticed the vitality and distinctiveness of North
Karelian incantations compared with Western Finnish ones. Unlike in western Finland, there was a strong tradition in this region that charm-texts were not effective in themselves,
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In western
Finland, as widely in European charm traditions, the utterance of an invocation was considered to work mechanically, with the charmer's main goal being to repeat the spell verses correctly. These traditions intimately combined Christian and traditional ideas. Spell motifs which are found
346:
Oral Charms in
Structural and Comparative Light: Proceedings of the Conference of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research's (ISFNR) Committee on Charms, Charmers and Charming. 27--29th October 2011, Moscow/Заговорные Тексты В Структурном И Сравнительном
193:, which sought to exercise control over illnesses or similar forces by expounding their aetiologies; thus to cure a snakebite a charmer might sing the origin of the snake, to cure a burn they might sing the origin of fire, and so forth.
200:). The most frequent purposes for incantations in this region were the healing and prevention of both external injuries and internal pains, infectious diseases, rashes and mental disorders (accounting for 1989 texts in the
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in a full and archaic form in eastern
Finland and Karelia appear in nineteenth-century Western Finland in an abbreviated form. These changes were partly due to the adoption in the west of poetic forms other than
349:, ed. by Tatyana A. Mikhailova, Jonathan Roper, Andrey L. Toporkov and Dmitry S. Nikolayev (Moscow: PROBEL-2000, 2011), pp. 147–54 ISBN 978-5-98604-276-3.
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In the period 1816–1970, over 4,200 examples of spells were collected from North
Karelia (of which over 3,400 have been published in
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Map showing the distribution of the Finnic languages, approximating the area where Finnic incantations were found
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also had a tradition of incantations relating to their own healing rites (105 examples).
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Key scholars who collected charms in the first half of the nineteenth century included
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but specifically when performed by a specialist who exercised an inner power known as
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Rakhimova, Elina, 'Solar
Imagery in Finnish Charms of the Kalevala Metre', in
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253:. Their successors in the second half of the century included
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Mythic Images and
Shamanism: A Perspective on Kalevala Poetry
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Traditional form of medicine in the Finnic-speaking world
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Ulla Piela, 'Loitsut 1800-luvun
Pohjois-Karjalassa',
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