In some form or other all the tales in this book may be found in the various folklore collections made by Eero Salmelainen, one of the patriotic young scholars who followed in Lönnrot’s footsteps. His books were sponsored by the Society of Finnish Literature and used in its campaign to bring back the Finnish language to the Finns at a time when Swedish was the official language of the country.
Full of local color as these stories are, it would be vain to pretend that they are not, for the most part, variants of stories told the world over. All that I can claim for them is that they are dramatic and picturesque, that they are told with a wealth of charming detail which is essentially Finnish, and that they are certainly new to the generality of English readers. The Three Chests, so characteristic in feeling of a country famous for its lakes and marshes, is the variant of a German story which Grimm gives as Fitcher’s Bird. Of The Forest Bride I have found variants in the folklore of many lands. There are several very beautiful ones in the Russian; in other books I myself have retold two, one current among the Czechs and one among the Serbians; Grimm has two different versions in The Three Feathers and The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Cat; and Madame d’Aulnoy has used the same story in her elaborate tale, The White Cat. There is a well-known Oriental version of Mighty Mikko in which the part of the fox is played by a jackal and I am sure that Mikko’s faithful retainer, though neither city-bred nor polished, is after all pretty closely related to that most debonnaire of Frenchmen, Puss in Boots. Perrault probably and Madame d’Aulnoy certainly are in turn indebted to Straparola. And so it goes.
The little cycle of animal stories included under Mikko the Fox will of course instantly invite comparison with the Beast Epic of Reynard the Fox. The two have many episodes in common and both have episodes to be found in Æsop and in those books of animal analogues, widely read in mediæval times, Physiologus and the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsus. The Reynard as we have it is a finished satire on church and state and in its present form has been current in Europe since the twelfth century. It was thought at one time that the animal stories found in Finland were debased versions of the Reynard stories, but scholars are now of opinion that they antedate Reynard and are similar to the earlier simpler stories upon which the Reynard cycle was originally built. This makes the little Finnish tales of great interest to the student. Needless to say I do not present them for this reason but because they seem to me charming merely as fables. The animals here are not the clerics and the judges and the nobles that the Reynard animals are, but plain downright Finnish peasants, sometimes stupid, often dull, frequently amusing, and always very human.
I have taken one liberty with spelling. I have transliterated Syöjätär, the name of the dread Finnish witch, as Suyettar. I have been unwilling to translate by the insufficient word, bath-house or vapor bath, that very characteristic institution of Finnish family life, the sauna, but have retained the Finnish word, sauna, allowing the context in each case to indicate the meaning.
P. F.
New York
June 19, 1922
