Tales from a Finnish Tupa is a collection of Finnish folk and fairy tales originally published in 1936 and with several reprints since. These tales are drawn from three sources: Eero Salmelainen’s Suomen Kansan Satuja ja Tarinoita (1852), Iivo Härkönen’s Suomen Kansan Satuja, as well as from a Finnish American informant named Margaret Luomajoki Hankila, who is also a member of the family of this volume’s translator, Aili Kolehmainen Johnson. These tales are arranged thematically into three generic sections: Tales of Magic, Droll Stories, and Fables. The tales are accompanied by black-and-white illustrations by Laura Bannon, with seven previously unpublished colorized illustrations included in the center of the book. The book ends with an afterword by co-author James Cloyd Bowman as well as a guide to Finnish pronunciation and a glossary of Finnish-language terms used in the book.
The opening section, Tales of Magic, features twenty stories that can be categorized as fairy tales. These are mostly tales of poor youths engaging in quests to improve their fortunes, to find lost family members, or to find a spouse (typically a princess). They succeed through the aid of magical helpers or through defeating a magical foe. The next section, Droll Tales, presents three humorous tales and two tale cycles about clever tricksters and slow-witted foils, including the troll Peikko, and the people of Holmola [sic], who, among other things, attempt to fill bags with sunshine in order to light up their homes. The final section presents eighteen animal fables, most of which concern themselves with the trickster fox and his foils, bear, wolf, and rabbit.
Though the book was written with a juvenile audience in mind, it does have value for the folklorist. First, the vast majority of the tales are quite faithful translations of stories from the literary folk- and fairy-tale collections of Eero Salmelainen and Iivo Härkönen. There are, as Bowman admits in his afterword, several concessions to English language literary tastes, but these are slight and easy to identify with the help of even a novice reader of Finnish, through comparison with the source versions. This feature also makes this volume useful for literary and translation scholars. Folklorists will recognize a number of international tale types and motifs, including Bluebeard (ATU 312, “Jurma and the Sea God”), The Animal Bride (ATU 402, “The Mouse Bride), and others. There are also elements of Kalevala characters and tales in a few of the stories, including “The Wooing of Seppo Ilmarinen,” which is a prose-form condensation of the epic hero’s search for a bride.
What this book is lacking for the folklorist is context. This new edition would have been the perfect opportunity to include a foreword that made this book richer for a modern audience. The original 1936 foreword, written by John Wargelin, Finnish American scholar and former president of Suomi College (Finlandia University since 2000), is omitted in this latest version, but it is not replaced with anything new. An updated foreword could situate the 1936 publication in its original context as a representation of ethnic folk literature in America, much like the 1922 collection, Mighty Mikko: A Book of Finnish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, which featured several of the same stories, also translated by a Finnish American into English from Eero Salmelainen’s collection. It could also clarify the sources of each tale for the reader, and it could explicate the roles and backgrounds of the authors and translator. Bowman, for instance, was a popularizer of American folklore as literature who taught at Northern Michigan University, which is located in Upper Michigan, a region boasting the largest Finnish ethnic communities outside of Finland. Bianco was the author of the classic children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, and Aili Kolehmainen Johnson was a well-respected folklorist in her own right, who in the 1940s played an important role in the fieldwork for Richard Dorson’s Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers. In addition to this historical context, the reason behind the latest reprint would be another useful contextual detail. Why does this book breathe new life now?
In any case, Tales from a Finnish Tupa remains an engaging tale collection that will certainly be appreciated by modern audiences in its latest form. The addition of new color prints by the illustrator is a welcome update in this new volume, and the glossary and pronunciation guide help to maintain the accessibility of the tales for those who don’t speak Finnish. It will certainly find audiences among those who love to read folk and fairy tale collections avocationally, and among folklorists who can use this text as a resource in a number of areas of inquiry.
Works Cited:
Richard M. Dorson. Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, 3rd Edition, ed. James P. Leary. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.
Parker Fillmore. Mighty Mikko: A Book of Finnish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.
Iivo Härkönen. Suomen Kansan Satuja. Helsinki: Valistus Öy, 1921.
Eero Salmelainen. Suomen Kansan Satuja ja Tarinoita. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjaillisuuden Seura, 1871.
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[Review length: 836 words • Review posted on November 15, 2018]