‘He demands either the immediate sacrifice of a horse on this spot, or the surrender of some other man’s life,’ answered the brother-in-law.
These were hard terms. To procure a horse at once was impossible; and who was likely to volunteer to give his own life in order to save that of the boy?
Then the legend says that the old father determined, out of love for his son, to offer his own life, and to die himself, that his son might live. [[47]]
‘If my son dies,’ he said, ‘then the fire on my hearth goes out. I should have no more pleasure in anything in this world. I am old, and have not many years to live. Therefore let me die, so that these years may be given to my only begotten son, and his life may be long and happy in this world.’
When he had taken this resolution, he kissed his son’s forehead, and, with the firm resolution of sacrificing his life, the old man went out in the darkness of the night to the idol, and fell on his face at its feet.
And the legend says that, wonderful to relate, the son was better in the morning, and regained his health, but the father lay dead before the altar of the idol. The firm belief in the truth of the brother-in-law’s message, and his own self-sacrificing resolution, had broken his old heart, and probably the message about it caused a change for the better in the son’s illness, and practically saved his life.
Unnas sacrificed, as was the custom at that time, a full-grown draught reindeer (a ‘Kjöre-ren’) at his father’s grave. For the Finns, who belong to the Greek Church, have a beautiful belief that every person, man or woman, young or old, even the greatest malefactor, is shown such mercy from our Lord that his soul, after death, is allowed to drive about for seven days with the reindeer which have been sacrificed at his burial. He is thus enabled once again to revisit all the places to which he had travelled during his life. He thus lives again, for a short time, the whole of his previous life. He is reminded of everything (that has happened) from the earliest days of his childhood. He recalls all the sorrows and joys which he has ever known, the love and hatred which he may have nourished, the friendship and enmity and the good and evil (which have made up the experiences of his past life). As a dragon-fly over a pool, his soul flutters from place to place, even to the most distant and hidden by-places, and lingers at each for a moment, so that he can have an opportunity for sorrowing, forgiving, conciliating, making good again, or begging forgiveness for what he has done; and then, when all has been revisited and briefly lived over again, he is set before the judgment-seat of the Most High, and receives his unalterable sentence—guilty or not guilty. [[48]]
