One of the first words I learned in the Duolingo Finnish course was velho. Duo translates it as “wizard,” but the sentences make the context more clear. Examples:
– “We love our wise velho.”
– “The Swede is a Viking and the Finn is a velho.”
– “The shaman is Sami, and the velho is Finnish.”
– “The velho walks through the quiet forest.”
– “The American velhot (plural) play basketball.”
While the English translation is consistently wizard, the Finnish has is no indication of gender and the connotations in Finnish are always positive.

A Finnish velho is wise and in the forest. That’s what Duo indicates.

In the Norwegian novels about Forest Finns, the men and women who know the old ways – who can cure with herbs, for example – are called trolls. In Finnish, I expect, they would have been velhot.

Translation poses a challenge. What should I now call one who followed the old ways, who knew of plants that cure pain, who could offer advice to address emotional distress, who could tell the old stories?

Shall we call them “witch” – as people did to excuse burning and drowning of humans? Often, evidence shows, those murdered people were midwives and healers, or simply odd people. Some, I learned from the film Burning Times, had one blue and one brown eye.

Shall we now call them “wizards”? That brings Harry Potter to mind. So, what about “sorcerer”? I see dancing brooms and magic wands.

This is not velho.

The Norwegian preference seems to be to call them “trolls.” But nowadays, for many that word will imply a boulder-sized, hunchbacked lump of a being, someone dwelling in caves.

So, for this writing, I will call her/him/them velho. The big rocks they honored (worshiped near) were called “trollkirker” or “troll churches” in Norwegian.

In the Norwegian novel about Forest Finns, A Tree Grows in Mostamägg, both Kaisa (an aged woman) and Noppis-Matti (an aged man) are referred to by other characters as trolls. Kaisa is said to know “the other book” as well as the Bible that she frequently quotes. She is sought out for medical and emotional cures. She offers both herbs and sound psychological advice. Her godson, Jussi, says she must be a troll because she has a pouch around her waist. Actually, she has coins there that she hopes will eventually get her buried in the Christian churchyard. However, others assume she carries in it earth from the graveyard to empower curses. When a bear kills a cow, she is accused of having overpowered the bear and forced it to that action. While people come to Kaisa when they need help, they have come to denigrate their troll-elders, their velho.

Kaisa herself knows the troll pine where people push wooden stakes into the bark to ask for blessings. She knows of curses too and, once, after her husband became drunk and neglected their child so that the child sank into a bog and died, she made a “knot” with some of his clothing and threw it into a stream. She wished on it that he’d be able to make no more children. When, soon after, he died, she struggled mightily with her conscience even though she knew she had not wished for his death.

Britt Karin Larsen, the author, spoke to many Forest Finns to get authentic reports of their lives. She presents Kaisa as wise, clear-headed, and complex. Kaisa is an old woman I aspire to be like.

Maybe I can be a culture-crosser like she was. She is one of the characters who most fervently urges younger Finns to conform to the demands of the Swedish Lutheran church. She spends her meager savings and her physical energy to get young people educated in Swedish, she quotes the Christian scriptures, she urges parents to get their children confirmed. As I see it, she does this because she is focused on trying to make sure that those children survive. Her own child died. She refuses to accept the deaths or the persecution of other children.

I think that she also uses the dominant religion as a way to cover over and protect the older customs she adheres to. Inside her, both are honored. Inside her, both also conflict. She ponders. She suffers. She holds her distress privately because she is the responsible elder.

With that, I arrive at a possible partial understanding of my own Forest Finn ancestors. The fictional Kaisa is of the same time period and place as my great-great grandmother Marta. My great-grandmother Lisa and my great-grandfather Lars would have been young people with elders like Kaisa around them.

Were any of these ancestors also velho?

Starting nearest to me, I see Kaisa’s dual authority in my own mother. She was a gardener, a gatherer of herbs, a healer. She was also a fervent Christian. So determined was she in both of those things that she pushed Christianity and herbs down people’s throats (literally in the case of “green drink”). She was called a “health food fanatic” and a “quack.” These are kinder words for something similar to “witch.”

Where, I have wondered, did Mom learn to garden and pick berries, to can, to plant and forage herbs? Her mother couldn’t have taught her because she died before Mom was two. Her step-mom never planted anything and refused to allow Mom to “mess up” their family yard with a garden, also wouldn’t allow Mom a pet.

But until she was four, Mom lived with her grandmother Lisa. Lisa had been born in Finn Forest in Sweden, the oldest of Marta’s surviving children. Lisa, like Lars whom she married, almost certainly knew some Kaisa-type velhot in the woods. Lisa gardened, and Mom gardened with her. Lisa plowed up the fields and planted right alongside Lars, lifting up her skirts when the ground was muddy. Lisa gave Mom her first Bible, the one pictured above.

Small things I was told that could carry over the conflicting attitudes people had about velhot:
– Lars’s father and other of his relatives were said to have been crazy (according to paperwork at the Fergus Falls hospital for the insane); could this have been what the younger people came to call those who had been velho?
– My step-grandma told us that Lars was a heathen. Could this mean that he held more to the old ways than to Christianity?
– Lisa founded a church where the women could speak (preach) and dance and talk in tongues. While this is decidedly Christian, it includes elements of the older Finnish traditions – women being wise as much as men, dancing, and talking in other languages (perhaps, I think, in Finnish).
– Lars, according to what others told Mom, refused to go to the church that Lisa and her sisters created; he went into the woods and fields and drank instead. Might this be what a velho with no community or tradition to back him up might do?
– Mathew, the only son who survived Lisa, said that the family was cursed. I heard this often enough to know that Mathew believed in old country curses, even if he did not believe in old country blessings.

Mom was introduced to gardening and gathering and making herbal concoctions, evidence seems to indicate, by her Finnish Grandma Lisa. It was also Grandma Lisa who taught Mom to that the Bible could offer guidance and protection.

In both Great-grandma Lisa and in Mom, the velho was hidden. The Christian, in an unorthodox way, was allowed to be more public. Maybe after death, though, the velho spirit has burned free, joined the Christian hand-in-hand.

Great-Grandma Lisa seems free and wise to me when I speak with her now and when she answers. Her Bible often gives me good guidance when, oracle-style, I open it at random after asking a question.

After her death, my mother appeared to me in the dream. She stood by the kitchen sink, glowing. When I asked what she was doing, she replied, “I am doing what we women have always done. I am making a potion.” That is not a word she would have used when she was alive, but in my dream she spoke it with glowing joy.

How then, do we descendants learn to be velhot, to be ones who know what we are becoming and who are at peace with the rocks and trees? How can we spring greenly from both traditions – the Christian and the velho both?