Hiisi

Hiisi is the chief of the forest demons in this account of Finnish mythology: a figure identified with evil, linked to the serpent’s origin, and blamed for human suffering. His importance lies both in that broad mythic role and in a specific act of interference during Wainamoinen’s boat-building, when Hiisi helps direct a hatchet against the hero’s knee.

Identity and Character

Hiisi is identified as the Finnish devil and is also given the names Juntas, Piru, and Lempo. The account describes him as the chief of the forest demons, marking him out not as one spirit among equals but as their leading figure. Its language is emphatic: Hiisi is cruel, horrible, hideous, and bloodthirsty, and he is understood to have a hand in all the evil done in the world.

This characterization makes Hiisi an explanation for misfortune as well as a supernatural antagonist. The most painful diseases and misfortunes that afflict mortals are said to emanate from him. Evil therefore appears not as an isolated event but as a pervasive force with a named source. Hiisi gathers that force into one recognizable figure, whose malignity reaches from bodily suffering to the wider troubles of human life.

Origin and Mythic Associations

The account places Hiisi’s coming into the world alongside Suoyatar’s. It connects him to the serpent through a particular act of creation: Hiisi forms the serpent from Suoyatar’s spittle. The association gives his evil a concrete mythic expression. Rather than merely being named as an abstract power, Hiisi is connected to the origin of a dangerous creature, and the serpent becomes one of the forms through which his malign influence can be understood.

His identity as Lempo also links him to the account’s discussion of love. A commentator, Castrén, proposes Sukkamieli as the love-goddess, deriving the name from stockings and their supposed softness and tenderness. The text rejects that explanation as far-fetched and modern, and instead identifies Lempo, the evil demon, as the ancient Finns’ love-deity. It suggests that this association reflects a conception of love as an overwhelming passion bordering on insanity, mysteriously incited by an evil enchanter. Because Hiisi is elsewhere said to bear the name Lempo, the episode brings his demonic identity into the account of human emotion: love, too, can be imagined as a force that unsettles ordinary control.

Hiisi and Wainamoinen’s Wound

Hiisi’s mythic role becomes action in the account of Wainamoinen’s failed boat-building. On the evening of the third day, Hiisi takes hold of the hatchet while Lempo takes its crooked handle. The falling axe is turned aside, changing the course of the work and bringing the tool against Wainamoinen’s knee. The episode thus gives Hiisi a precise, practical role in the hero’s injury rather than leaving his influence at the level of general reputation.

The account then assigns the agents distinct parts in the harm: Lempo guides the sharpened hatchet, while Hiisi severs the veins. Blood flows from the wound. These brief actions make the demon’s hostility legible through an interruption of skilled labor: the boat is not completed without danger, and the hero’s work becomes the occasion for an injury. The scene does not replace Hiisi’s broader association with illness and misfortune; it dramatizes that association in a particular encounter with Wainamoinen.

Narrative and Thematic Role

Hiisi connects the account’s descriptions of mythic belief to the poem’s unfolding action. In the descriptive passage, he is the source associated with serpents, diseases, and misfortunes; in the boat-building episode, the same demonic power enters the hero’s immediate circumstances through the hatchet. The movement from general attribution to a specific intervention gives the figure continuity across explanation and narrative.

The name Lempo also gathers two aspects of the account that might otherwise seem separate: supernatural evil and the dangerous intensity attributed to love. In both, harm is associated with a force that acts upon human beings rather than with wisdom, law, or justice. Hiisi’s significance is therefore less that of a fully developed individual character than of a concentrated mythic agency. He embodies the account’s way of naming destructive forces, while his part in Wainamoinen’s wound shows how that agency can enter a hero’s labor and redirect its outcome.