Talk:Kalma (folklore)

Kalma is not a deity

References for this article don't seem trustworthy, I don't know why some people think kalma is anything else than just a word for death. Kalman väki refers to 1) the spirits of dead people or the living dead, 2) magical power related to death that causes and heals illnesses, 3) spirits and sprites affiliated to death that aren't dead people. Niinajuulia (talk) 13:59, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree with Niinajuulia. The article relies solely on one singular source that doesn't seem very trustworthy. I'm Finnish and have done some research into Finnish mythology and folk beliefs and have never even heard of a deity or goddess by the name of Kalma in any remotely trustworthy source. Kalma literally means death in Finnish. It is sometimes a force or the personification of death whose power may be called upon in some spells for example, but they aren't a deity. Kalma also doesn't mean "stench of corpses", it just means "death" (at least in modern Finnish, but I honestly doubt it ever did).

I think this article should be deleted entirely. I noticed that there are Wikipedia articles about this in other languages too, and the German one seemed to be just a shortened version of this one, with the only source being the exact same as well. It looks like the false information has had time to spread far and I hope it is stopped eventually. Avaruuskatkarapu (talk) 16:59, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

I have done some online research on the subject and here's what I found:

I firmly believe that Godchecker’s article on Kalma, which is the only source for this article, is not reliable. It has a section for references, but it is completely empty. I could not find any reliable sources in Finnish or English to confirm the claims made in the article by searching for them online. I think the fact that even the Finnish Wikipedia doesn’t have an article about a goddess called Kalma (even though it has articles about basically all other deities in Finnish folklore) should be a red flag to those who might doubt me.

The only source that could be considered reliable that calls Kalma a goddess is Patricia Monaghan’s Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines, but that part in the book on page 214 (which I was able to find through Google Books, I don’t have the whole book) states that ”Whether or not this figure existed mythologically, or was created from a common noun of feminine gender, is not established” I don’t know what ”common noun of feminine gender” is being referred to here, but either way, the existence of Kalma as a goddess is left unclear.

She also claims in the book that the word kalma refers to the odor of a corpse. There is a phrase in Finnish ”kalman haju” which translates to ”the smell of death”, but kalma all by itself is not, in the vast majority of cases, a word that refers to smell. The dictionary of Finnish dialects by the Institute for the Languages of Finland (https://kaino.kotus.fi/sms/?p=article&word=kalma:1&sms_id=SMS_2f2b8e09dd9f08d287bf1548ac244f7d ) defines kalma as (and this is my translation of the Finnish site):

1. death (as an event or personification*); the omens of death (especially as a smell**);deceased; tuonela***

2. use related to group 1.

a. a magical force that can be caught from the deceased, the clothes of the deceased, the location they were held in etc. that causes illness or even death if one does not take precautions against it. Often ”kalma is caught” etc.

b. the stain that an approaching death puts upon a person: "kalma in the eyes (on top of the eyes, on the face)".

c. visit "the kalmas"etc.= the graveyard, the grave

d. objects or dirt taken from a graveyard as magical items

e. plural: the folk of manala***

f. used when bemoaning or cursing

• in case someone gets confused, deities can sometimes be considered personifications of certain natural phenomena for example, but not all personifications are deities, like in this case. An example on the page: "On kuin kalman käsistä karannut"= "(someone) is like they escaped from the hands of kalma (death)" when talking about someone who looks pale.
  • again, in the examples given on the site, the word kalma was mostly not used independently to mean the smell of death. There was almost always a word that actually referred to smell attached, for example "kalman käry"="the stench of death" or "kalma haisee"="death smells (in whatever place we're talking about)". There was, however one example from Rovaniemi in which it was used independently, I assume, to refer to the smell of death:

"Mie arvasin, että jo on valmis, ko kalma tuli porstuasa vastaan"= "I guessed that it was over because I ran into kalma at the porch".

It's also possible that maybe they were talking about seeing ghosts or something like that. Idk it's not entirely clear.

• • • the underworld in Finnish folklore, the names manala and tuonela seem to be pretty much interchangeably used.

There were other, more obscure uses for the word found in some parts of Finland listed on the website, but they were unrelated to this topic and I won't translate them here.

Another article in English that claimed kalma was a goddess was an article on the Finnish folklore Fandom wiki, which basically just repeats what this Wikipedia article says. There were no sources cited on that article either. There were also a couple of other similar unsourced texts written by random people online, but that in my opinion that doesn't mean anything.

https://antroblogi.fi/2018/11/kun-kuolleista-tarttui-kalma/ This is a website/blog where some Finnish anthropologists write about different things relating to their expertise. According to this article by Kaarina Koski, who’s a docent in folkloristics, kalma was like a force, something you could catch from the dead if you mishandled corpses or offended the dead in some way, almost like a disease.

https://www.taivaannaula.org/2009/07/13/555/ This article from Taivaannaula (a Finnish organisation that collects information about Finnish traditions and folk beliefs) also supports my and Niinajuulia’s view. Kalma was something you could catch from the dead, causing adverse effects to the person who caught it. Kalman väki (the power/the folk of death) were spirits and sprites associated with death. Now, granted, the article is from 2009 and no sources are cited here either, but I’ve heard from other people that the information provided by the organisation is at least somewhat reliable.

Spells and folk poetry I found from SKVR (An archive full of old folk traditions from Finland, Karelia and other nearby areas kept by the Finnish literature society) also don’t refer to kalma as a goddess, but as the kind of force causing sickness that the dictionary, Kaarina Koski and Taivaannaula were talking about, or it’s just used as a word for death. An example from Kärsämäki, Finland:

”Kyläläinen kun sattu tulemaan taloon, jossa oli ruumis, sanoi hän saman:’Rauha eläville, lepo kuolleille’ ettei kalma tarttuisi.” -SKVR XII1 3733. (Kärsämäki. Keränen, E. 6.-83.)

My translation:

”When a villager happened to come in a house with a corpse, they said the same: ’Peace for the living, rest for the dead’ so that they wouldn’t catch kalma.”

Now, the texts in SKVR were written down by researchers in the 1800s or early 1900s, who went around collecting folklore, spells and traditions from regular people, so it’s possible that they might’ve missed a nuance or two when writing these things down. However, a thing to note about every single one of the Finnish texts, even the ones outside SKVR, that the word kalma is always written in lowercase letters, not uppercase, which would also suggest that kalma was not considered a deity. There is a lot of material to pore over in SKVR and I’m not planning on reading all of it, so it's possible that there's a text somewhere that proves me wrong. I personally think it's unlikely. If you do find a reliable source to contradict my claims on SKVR or somewhere else, please tell me.

In a nutshell, I believe that the source used for this article is unreliable and the claims about a supposed goddess of death called Kalma in Finnish folklore are at the very least unverifiable and most likely false. I am probably going to propose the deletion of this article soon if someone doesn’t find reliable sources for the information in this article. Another option for this article in theory would also be a complete reworking, where it would need to be about the concept of kalma in Finnish folklore or something like that, but I don't know if that would be too niche for the English Wikipedia or if it would require the deletion of this article and the creation of a new one anyway.

Either way, I think that this article shouldn’t exist in its present form, because it is spreading unverifiable claims. This goddess is likely completely made up and deserves no article on Wikipedia. Avaruuskatkarapu (talk) 21:09, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't know what happened to the formatting in my previous comment. Sorry if it makes reading difficult for someone, my bad. The asterisks I put on the dictionary definition were supposed to lead to other asterisks after that section for some further explanations, but they seem to have caused accidental indentation in the text. Whoops. Avaruuskatkarapu (talk) 21:19, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

There are secondary references regarding this goddess. Not a PROD candidate. Redtigerxyz ^Talk 06:23, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi, I didn't propose this article for deletion, even though I said I might in my earlier comment. Someone else has done it. I have changed my mind about needing to delete this article and I think it just should be improved, as it has been, luckily. What sources are you talking about? Avaruuskatkarapu (talk) 18:47, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I did the PROD and the rewrite. The refs mentioned above were two general encyclopedias about deities. I found one of them useful: Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines refers to Abercromby's The pre-and proto-historic Finns : both Eastern and Western, with the magic songs of the West Finns as its source for Finnish mythology. It thought it unnecessary to cite a tertiary source, so I replaced it with a direct cite to Abercromby. The second source, Encyclopedia of Ancient Deities misspelled all the Finnish deities and did not cite its sources clearly, so I removed it.

I also added reference to Kaarle Krohn's and Matthias Castren's works. The former would have more discussion about kalma, which could be used to expand the article.

The article probably should not focus on the 'Goddess' aspect like it did previously, but provide a more general discussion on how the dead were perceived in the Finnish folklore, tell about kalmanväki etc. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 20:19, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi, I'm back and have dug deeper into this subject. Most of this comment I wrote before this article was thankfully re-written by Jähmefyysikko, so it won't really apply anymore to the article at its present state, but I hope it can explain why the changes were made to people who may be interested in this topic. Tangents and rambling included. So:

Where does the claim about kalma being a deity come from then? Patricia Monaghan's Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines cites the Kalevala as a source, but also Abercromby 1,2, which I are 1 The Pre- and Proto-historic Finns, both Eastern and Western, with the Magic songs of the west finns, Vol I and II (both from 1898) by John Abercromby. Volume 1 is Abercromby's writings on Finnish mythology. Volume 2 consists of translated folk poetry, spells and stories but it doesn't have information on where exactly they were collected. I went through these as well, looking for any mention of kalma, and I did find some, but funnily enough, Abercromby never referred to Kalma as a deity, a personification of death at most, and also used he/him pronouns for kalma.

This book is a particularly interesting source, since it's from 1898 and it also talks about what "cranial and physical differenes" there might be between different ethnic groups, with Abercromby using these differences as part of his research and reasoning process. Here are a few quotes from the preface to Volume 1. When he talks about "Finns" here, he's referring to all Finno-Ugric groups.

"All the Finns live nearly under the same latitudes, and in pre- and proto-historic times, which are not so very remote, the differences in customs, religious and other beliefs, could not have been very great. This is important; it allows us to supplement what is missing or defective in one Finnish group by what is more complete in another, with far greater certainty than when dealing under similar circumstances with the Aryan-speaking groups. "

"In the first five chapters of the first volume I have tried, with the combined aid of craniology, archaeology, ethnography, and philology, brought up to date, to sketch as succinctly as possible the pre- and proto-historic history of the Eastern and Western Finns, showing the various stages of civilisation to which they successively advanced after contact with higher civilisations, at different periods of their evolution from neolithic times to the middle ages."

Modern folkloristics has luckily come up with better methods of research than craniology and I think that it's very strange that Monaghan would use such a source for her book. But I guess more modern sources and research into Finnish mythology in languages other than Finnish are probably pretty scarce, so that's why she used it (and probably why it has been used in this Wikipedia article after the re-write). And not to say that Abercromby can't have been right about some of the things he's said about Finno-Ugric folk beliefs, but I'd take his research with a grain of salt regardless due to his use of pseudoscientific methods.

I looked through the other versions of this article and the Swedish, (the Swedish article has been edited and more sources have been added, thanks to user LittleGun!) German, Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Arabic and French Wikipedias also seem to have used the exact same sources that I think aren't super reliable. The Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Arabic and French articles also got information from some other page called TUONI on angelfire.com as well, but I couldn't access it, because the antivirus software on my computer thinks it's a harmful website and I don't want to risk it. The Portuguese article has only one unsourced sentence which claims that Kalma is a god married to Tuonenakka and the father of Loviatar (if Google translate is to be believed).

The Greek version of this article had another source which was Carol Rose's (research member at the University of Kent, according to the publisher's website on the book) Giants, monsters, and dragons: an encyclopedia of folklore, legend, and myth. I was able to find a snippet of page 348 through the search function on OpenLibrary which spoke of Surma, and in which Kalma is claimed to be a goddess.

"This [Surma] is the name of a monster in the legends of Finland. Surma is described as a pair of vast jaws with rows of huge fangs attached to a voracious, neverending gullet. This being was the guardian to the gates of the underworld, where goddess Kalma reigned."

The references used for this part were:

(133) McLeish, K. Myths and Legends of the World explored. London: Bloomsbury Press, 1996

(139) New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology. London: Book Club Associates, 1973

(Funny side note, on pages 138 and 198 of Giants, monsters and dragons, Rose claims that Joukahainen and Louhi were "Frost Giants"(???). I know that there are giants in the Kalevala for example, but Joukahainen or Louhi weren't ones. I'm not sure where the frost part came from either, I haven't heard of any Frost Giants in the Kalevala. She also refers to the Balkan states as "Fino-Ugric"[sic] on page 209. (She probably meant Estonia, which is a Baltic country, not Balkan, but Finno-Ugric in culture and language. Latvia and Lithuania are also Baltic, but not Finno-Ugric). I think she got some things mixed up while writing.)

I found Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology on scribd.com. Larousse:

"As for Death, she was personified by Kalma, who reigned over the graves. It should be pointed out that in Finnish, the word kalma means 'the odour of a corpse'. On the threshold of the abode of Kalma stood the monster Surma, personification of fatal destiny or of violent death..."

This is from the section that talks about the divinities of Kalevala. The book also states later that "The Kalevala must not, then, be regarded as an exact reflection of the basic beliefs of the Finno-Ugric race" and "Actually the divinities of the Kalevala are only vaguely sketched and even the relationships between them are impossible to establish"

So the Larousse cites the Kalevala as a source on this section. There was also something called Lapp Life and Customs in the sources for Finni-Ugric [sic] mythology, but that's about the Saami people and isn't related to this at all.

I do agree with the Kalevala not being a reliable source on the various beliefs of the Finno-Ugric peoples, just because the Kalevala only covers Karelian, Finnish and a little bit of Ingrian Finnish folklore and there are so many other Finno-Ugric peoples in the world too. There is no "Finno-Ugric race" that shares basic beliefs. The point about the vagueness of deities, or whether or not something can be considered a deity or not, I will get into later.

I was able to find the e-book online and borrow Myth: myths and legends of the world explored (1996). This is what it said about kalma:

"Kalma ('corpse-stink'), in Finnish mythology was the goddess of Death and decay. In the Upper world she haunted graves, snatching the flesh of the dead; in Tuonela, the Underworld, she lived in an invisible country guarded by the flesh-eating monster Surma. No one ever saw her: she made her presence felt in smell alone, and turned the bodies of her victims from visible flesh and bone to a breath of corruption which hovered briefly above the grave before vanishing forever."

People/corpses being turned to "breaths of corruption which briefly hovered above graves" by kalma is not something that happened afaik, but I can't be entirely sure what McLeish was talking about, because there weren't any cited sources or a references section in the book. In the introduction McLeish does mention a few people who did research for the book or commented on his writing, but the lack of direct sources is a dead end in this case.

I'd also like to point out that in the book itself, McLeish is called an "author, translator and playwright". Bloomsbury's got a page (https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/author/kenneth-mcleish/) with a description of McLeish, in which they say that he studied Classics and Music at Worchester College, Oxford. So he's not an expert in mythology or folklore. Well, to be fair, neither am I, but it's still worth pointing out.

The only thing left to read now is the Kalevala. I happen to have a copy at home, which I have read years ago, but I was too lazy to do it again, so I ended up using Avoin Kalevala (Open Kalevala), which is basically an annotated online version of the Kalevala with additional background info and a glossary page. It has been made by a group of researchers (Niina Hämäläinen, Reeta Holopainen, Marika Luhtala, Juhana Saarelainen and Venla Sykäri) and it's published by the Finnish literature society. It is also peer-reviewed. Here's the explanation of kalma in the glossary (found here http://kalevala.finlit.fi/erisnimet):

"Kalma tarkoittaa Kalevalassa personoitua kuolemaa, haudanhaltiaa, mutta myös hautaa. Itämurteissa kalma on laajasti 'hauta, hautakumpu', mutta sanalle tunnetaan myös maagisvivahteisia merkityksiä, esimerkiksi 'Manala; Manalan haltia; vainajan aiheuttama paha tauti."

My translation:

"Kalma in the Kalevala refers to a personified death, a haltia of the grave, but also a grave. In the eastern dialects [of Finnish] kalma is widely 'grave, burial mound', but there are also magical meanings known for the word, for example 'Manala; haltia of Manala; a bad disease caused by a dead person."

There was also an explanation of Surma:

"Surma, runollisesti personoitu kuolema. Lönnrot on katsonut surman personoiduksi olennoksi, kun se esiintyy Kalman, paholaisen, Lemmon tai taudin yhteydessä; sana on tällöin kirjoitettu isolla alkukirjaimella. Kansanuskomuksissa kuolema ja tauti käsitettiin ihmisen ulkopuolella oleviksi, vaaniviksi olennoiksi."

My translation:

"Surma, a poetically personified death. Lönnrot has viewed surma as a personified creature when it shows up alongside Kalma, the devil, Lempo or a disease; the word is then spelled with an uppercase first letter. In folk beliefs death and disease were conceived of as beings prowling outside of the human body."

I read all the poems where the word "kalma" was mentioned. One of them was the 36th poem. There was an annotation on the word kalma and I'll copypaste it here:

"Kalma, Kalevalassa myös 'personoitu kuolema, haudanhaltia' (13:155−156; 27:4) (Turunen 1979).

Itämurteissa kalma on laajasti 'hauta, hautakumpu', mutta sille tunnetaan myös maagisvivahteisia merkityksiä 'Manala; Manalan haltia; vainajan aiheuttama paha tauti, syöpä; kuolevan silmissä havaittava värin muutos (kuolemankalma); päällyskerros, kalvo, home tms.'"

So according to the researchers' annotations, "Kalma is also a personified death in the Kalevala, or a haltia of the grave (13:155−156; 27:4) (Turunen 1979). In the eastern dialects [of Finnish] it is widely 'grave, gravemound' but magical meanings for it are also known 'Manala [=the underworld]; haltia of Manala; a bad disease caused by the dead, cancer; the change in colour in the eyes of a dying person (kuolemankalma); a top layer, membrane, mold and such.'"

Other annotations on kalma were basically the same as this one. I think it's also important to mention that it's pretty common for folk poetry and the Kalevala to personify things, but those personifications don't necessarily always mean that the thing was worshipped as a deity, it might just mean that they were using poetic language. For example at one point in the Kalevala there is a personification of a strong wind called Puhuri, but it's just that.

"Puhuri tarkoittaa väkevää tuulta olennoksi personoituna (Turunen 1979). "

This was in the annotations on the phrase "Pakkanen, Puhurin poika" in the 30th poem in Avoin Kalevala.

The Kalevala is the first thing any Finnish person probably thinks about when they hear the words "Finnish mythology". We go through the overall plot, characters, history and the cultural significance at school. Many of us have read it at some point in our lives. It has been dissected and analyzed by experts so many times I'd be surprised if there were any Finnish folklore experts who hadn't read it at least once. If there was any evidence in the Kalevala to suggest that kalma was a goddess, then surely someone would've mentioned it somewhere in Avoin Kalevala or in some other source that is relatively easy to find. The Kalevala just doesn't seem to say what Monaghan, Rose and McLeish think it says.

Even if the Kalevala did claim Kalma was a goddess in Finnish folklore, we'd need some other source to confirm it, because most of the poems and stories in the book have been altered by Elias Lönnrot and a large part of them are actually Karelian folklore. There are many similarities between Finnish and Karelian cultures and languages, but they are still different in many ways and shouldn't be mixed up like Lönnrot and many others in his time did. Many still mix them together into a mishmash that's served as "Finnish" in the present day, because they were told that the Karelians are just a tribe or subgroup of Finns and that their folklore and culture is ours. When you try to look up something about Finnish folklore, it's not very rare to come across some Karelian tradition, deity or belief that has just been re-packaged as "Finnish".

(Of course then there are Finnish people who are called Karelians, but that usually refers to Finnish people who live in the regions of North and South Karelia and speak the local dialects of Finnish. Many people who are Karelians in Finland also identify as Finnish in addition to their identities as Karelians. Additionally, sometimes the line between Eastern Finnish and Karelian cultures genuinely gets a bit blurry, but this is a complicated topic that I'm not going to unpack completely here because I don't really feel qualified to do so.)

But essentially Lönnrot and others like him thought that Karelian culture was just a more "primeval and pure" form of Finnish culture and not its own thing (See: Karelianism). That's why Karelian folklore was used in the Kalevala. At the time, Finnish national identity was still forming, and many over here wanted to prove to the world that "hey!! look!! we're a proper group of people with our own awesome history just like the rest of you great European peoples!!". And the Kalevala did solidify the national identity and image of Finland, but it was done in a way that left the general public (in Finland and elsewhere too apparently) believing that the parts Elias Lönnrot edited, got from the Karelians or made up entirely were 100% authentic Finnish mythology, while ignoring a lot of other folklore that was actually Finnish.

Of course there is much that is mostly in its original form in the Kalevala, but also a lot that isn't. Many stories and characters were combined and altered for it to have any kind of coherent plot. The language and wording of the poems was also edited. Lönnrot also removed nearly all references to Christianity, which had resulted from the syncretism of Christianity and folk beliefs in Finland and Karelia, from the poems, except from the ones at the very end of the Kalevala. It's genuinely a bit sad that so many people think that the book's basically all there is to Finnish folklore. Luckily there's been more talk about this in recent decades and people becoming more aware of the nature of the Kalevala.

My sources for the parts about Kalevala and Lönnrot include Avoin Kalevala, articles by Kalevala-seura (the Kalevala Society) and Suomen Kirjallisuuden Seura (The Finnish Literature Society) if anyone's curious. They are in Finnish, though.

http://kalevala.finlit.fi/

https://kalevalaseura.fi/mika-on-kalevala/

https://matkallakalevalaan.finlit.fi (multiple articles about the Kalevala, it's origins, characters and Elias Lönnrot)

So when making or editing articles about Finnish mythology, I don't think people should base them entirely on the Kalevala and insinuate that it's an authentic Finnish mythological story. Likewise, it's good to be a bit skeptical of researchers or authors who seem to examine the Kalevala uncritically as a collection of authentic mythological tales and not as the work of Elias Lönnrot. Obviously there are things about Finnish mythology that one can infer from it, but I think that kind of research is maybe better left for the experts who know its origins, where all the poems and stories have come from and what was changed and how. Monaghan, Rose and McLeish however don't seem to be very familiar with these things or at least don't aknowledge them when using the Kalevala as a source on kalma as far as I can tell.

I was looking through Päivystävä folkloristi's (a blog by three post-doc researchers of Finnish folkloristics) recommended reading list regarding Finnish and Karelian beliefs when I found another place where a misunderstanding could've happend regarding kalma. Its source is explained in an article called Outoa tuntematonta väkeä: Näkökulmia väkeen tuonpuoleisen edustajana by Kaarina Koski, doctor in folkloristics, from the 2003/1 edition of Elore. Quote:

"M.A. Castrén liitti teoksessaan Föreläsningar i finsk mytologi (1853) suomalaisten uskomukset luonnonvoimien palvontaan, mutta hänen mukaansa "kypsymätön ihminen" on kyennyt mieltämään nämä voimat vain ihmisenkaltaisina, persoonallisina. Näin ollen hän käsitteli myös väkiä personoidussa muodossaan olentojen joukkona ja kalmaa persoonallisena hautojen haltijana."

My translation:

"M. A Castrén in his book Föreläsningar i finsk mytologi [Lectures on Finnish mythology] (1853) connected the beliefs of the Finns to the worship of natural phenomena, but according to him the "immature person" has only been able to conceive of these forces as humanlike, personified. Due to this he also handled väki in its personified form as a group of creatures and kalma as a personified haltija of graves."

I think that Castrén's writings have possibly influenced some folklorists at the time and maybe led some people to think that there is a deity called Kalma in Finnish folklore, even though there doesn't seem to be. (Kaarle Krohn also disputes Kalma being a deity as Castrén apparently thought, as was added to the article by Jähmefyysikko) Language barriers limit the sources that any researchers have access to, so perhaps that is one reason that books like this from around 170 years ago are used as sources on Finnish mythology in other countries.

All of the English books that I mentioned are also large encyclopaedias of folklore from all over the world with hundreds of deities or other mythological beings talked about. They can't have spent too much time researching every single being, which may have allowed more chances for misconceptions to form in this case.

The word haltia or haltija (either version is correct, though nowadays haltia is more often connected to mythological creatures and haltija to other things), doesn't really have a clear-cut translation to English. I think that the term might be another source of confusion especially among researchers who don't speak Finnish as their first language and it might've lead to someone confusing the personification of death for a deity.

Literally "haltija" means someone who posesses something or is in control of it. When spelled without the letter j, haltia usually nowadays refers to mythological beings instead. Halti(j)a can also mean "elf" (like the elves in Lord of the Rings for example), "sprite" or sometimes "fairy" (the fairy godmother from Cinderella is hyvä haltijakummi/hyvä haltiatar in Finnish). Sometimes creatures that are usually referred to as gods are also referred to as the "haltia" of their domain in folklore. For example, the forest god Tapio is sometimes called "metsänhaltia"=haltia of the forest. The glossary in Avoin Kalevala does this sometimes as well. For example, Ahti is at one point called the haltija of the sea (merenhaltija), but also the god of water (vedenjumala) at another. (In Finnish 'jumala'=god and 'jumalatar'=goddess)

However, haltijas aren't always deities and can just be other sorts of mythological creatures too. On the Avoin Kalevala glossary page, there is Hiisi for example, which is considered to be a haltia, but it is not generally considered to be a deity as far as I'm aware. Different places and phenomena (forests, bodies of water, homes, death/graveyards/churches etc.) each have their own haltias in Finnish folk beliefs and people gave them offerings to appease them or grant the people making the offerings good luck for example. In a nutshell, haltija is complicated word which can be translated to multiple completely different words in other languages depending on the context.

The one thing I am still extremely curious and confused about is the insistence in many of these books that kalma, if it were a deity, would be female. I have no idea where that has come from, since I've not once found anything to suggest that even as a personification of death, kalma would be female or gendered in any way. Maybe it has something to do with translation, since Finnish has no gendered pronouns or grammatical gender, but some languages have only gendered pronouns and on top of that, grammatical gender. idk this is just speculation on my part.

Finally, if there really was a goddess called Kalma in Finnish mythology reigning over such significant things as death and the underworld, then surely it wouldn't be hard to find some reliable sources mentioning her, even outside of ones regarding the Kalevala? What comes after death is one of the most central questions that basically any religion or set of folk beliefs will attempt to answer at some point, so if there was a deity of death in Finnish mythology, why don't any Finnish sources aside from one guy from 170 years ago, whose claims about kalma were disputed by others, mention them? It just doesn't make any sense.

Kaarina Koski and all the others she mentions in her article seem to think of kalma as the kind of force that I talked about in my previous comment and kalman väki as the spirits of the dead or as beings related to death, whose power can be harnessed in magic and spells. Never a deity.

I also borrowed Itämerensuomalaisten mytologia by Anna-Leena Siikala (she was professor emerita of folkloristics at the university of Helsinki) as an e-book and searched through it. Kalma was mentioned a few times in the book, but not as a goddess, it was called a "demon of sickness" for example. I could find many more such examples in many other sources, but this comment is already way too long, so I'll stop now.

So, thanks to Jähmefyysikko for rewriting this article! I also wanted to say that the people who wrote the other versions of this article did the best with what sources they had available. Language barriers are huge in more niche topics like this. Misconceptions about some random things in Finnish mythology aren't really that big of a deal, I'm just personally very bothered by misconceptions in general and want to correct them when possible.

Also, I'm still a fairly new editor at Wikipedia, so I don't know how everything works around here, but is it possible for some people to comment on the Wikipedia articles in the other languages that I mentioned earlier that they probably should find other sources? I can speak some German and Swedish, so I've commented on their articles about it, but I can't speak any of the other languages that this article is written in. Avaruuskatkarapu (talk) 19:44, 9 April 2024 (UTC)