The Last Rune Singer and the Art of Facing the Unknown

This essay uncovers five secrets of Mythical Finland that once enabled ancient people to survive the North’s harsh extremes. The same insights can still help modern humans live more flexible and abundant lives, even when surrounded by great uncertainty.

Because the territory that is now Finland was among the last parts of Europe to adopt agriculture, money, organized religion, and writing, its oral tradition preserved a storehouse of prehistoric wisdom and lifeways that had vanished elsewhere, sometimes millennia earlier.

The five secrets are:

1. Seasonal Wisdom — Week-based chronology and omen-reading

2. Talkoot — Intense temporal cooperation and the feasts of work

3. Multipurpose minimalism, preparedness, and rhythms of maintenance

4. Synty deep origins—valuing time-tested knowledge of the old

5. Mythic geography and personifying the unknown

And I finish with a bonus section explaining the significance of bear worship.

The photo of Petri Shemeikka, one of the last true rune singers playing kantele. Photo by C.W. Alopaeus, 1905

1. Seasonal Wisdom — Week-based Chronology and Omen-Reading

In today’s world, work is largely uniform and year-round, and supermarkets stock every imaginable item no matter the season. For ancient Finns, however, food and materials were bound to nature’s rhythms. In the North’s intense environment, the peak moment for a resource could last only days, such as the brief rise of spawning smelt, or at most a few weeks, like gathering leafy birch branches for fodder.

Migratory birds returning from the south was an important sign.

Some of the opportunities required traveling hundreds of kilometers. Thus, their overriding challenge was to be in the right place at the right time. Much like the Pareto principle, most of a year’s supply of a resource might be taken in just a handful of intense days.

To master timing, Finns relied on week-based chronology and omen-reading. Weeks were tallied backward to four decisive thermal milestones, such as mid-summer and mid-winter, while rhymes and runes stored the tasks and omens suited to each week.

In the Finnish mythology, the mythical Sampo cycle and the heroes’ feats proclaim the need to work in harmony with the seasons. Smith-hero Ilmarinen, Forger of the Skies, succeeds only with the help of the Daughter (spring) of the Hag of the North (winter). His trials, ploughing a snake-filled field, felling the bear of the underworld, catching the pike of the underworld, mirror chores for which the correct timing in the old world was the early spring.

Ilmarinen capturing the Pike of the Unknown with the help of the Daughter (spring) of the Hag of the North (winter)

Omen-reading was crucial, because no two years were alike. Birch buds the size of a mouse’s ear signaled that morel mushrooms were emerging; a “hunger-stone” appearing in a drought-shrunk lake foretold frost, because less water meant a weaker thermal buffer. Omens, personal intuition, sharpened by handed-down lore, helped people decide which task to tackle next.

Hunger-stone predicted famine as the thermal buffer of the water could not prevent night frosts.

Today’s corporate annual cycles and software-development sprints echo this old seasonal wisdom, breaking work into intense week-long bursts. Also, as humanity reaches for the stars and planets like Mars, the old principles of living of the land become again of high value.

I myself have created two personal applications inspired by the principle of seasonal wisdom and week-based chronology: the Book of Weeks, which lists seasonal chores and omens for every week and grows wiser each year; and the 1-Week-1-Day Projects, creative endeavors finished with eight hours of effort spread across a week - time I carve out in early-morning sessions.

2. Talkoot — Intense Cooperation and the Feasts of Work

Talkoot were cooperative, intensive work-bees held precisely when nature opened a fleeting window. People competed in how much and how well they worked, and hosts thanked helpers with the best food and drink, trusting that favors would be returned.

Opening drink set the mood.

A single concerted push also reaped economies of scale. These work-feasts reinforced the season’s vital labors as cultural touchstones.

Salmon spawning was an important short-term natural phenomenon.

Modern life is starkly different: partying often feels pointless, and work is a continuous slog. Life’s challenges are often tackled alone or with institutional aid. Hackathons come closest to the old talkoot spirit.

Houses were built through talkoot. This provided an important safety net, for example, when a fire destroyed someone's home.

A few friends and I have revived the old-style talkoot tradition: we rotate from yard to yard, handling each household’s chores, like maintenance tasks in the garden and small construction projects together. And the mood shifts the moment we share the traditional opening drink.

3. Multipurpose Minimalism, Preparedness, and Rhythms of Maintenance

A plague of possessions burdens modern households, yet we may depend on a single tiny component shipped from the far side of the world; a short disruption empties store shelves. The ancients minimized upkeep by favoring multipurpose tools and supplies and by preserving goods.

Evenings, especially during winter time were used for maintenance.

These upkeep and preservation tasks were timed carefully to minimize conflicts and maximize synergy with harvesting, foraging, and hunting, and to let nature’s own forces complete the work effortlessly.

Properly dried grain keeps virtually forever, yet can become countless dishes. A puukko-knife, an axe, and birch bark met many needs; dwellings were built for adaptability and repair. Knowing how to make one’s own tools also meant knowing how to improve them.

Puukko-knife and hand-axe were the key age-old tools of the ancients Northerners. With these tools almost anything could be built.

On journeys, multipurpose gear lightened loads and answered surprises: small freshwater boat’s sail and mast doubled as punt-poles and lean-to frames. To capture this spirit, we can devise The Law of Versatility, which states that:

The more purposes a tool already has, the more likely it is to be suitable for new purposes and to be helpful in unexpected situations.

Tupa cabins' functional storage below and above afforded for great flexibility and multiple different functions for the dwelling (illustration by Samuli Paulaharju).

In our day, programming is such a multipurpose skill, letting its master craft custom tools at will.

Personally I’ve applied this principle to small construction projects in the backyard: trying to build structures for purposes I can’t yet foresee. As a general ideation trick, ask how an idea might solve several problems at once.

4. Synty Deep Origins—Valuing Time-Tested Knowledge of the Old

Our era idolizes youth and novelty, a symptom of too little uncertainty. In the Finnish mythology, the aged Väinämöinen sings the young Joukahainen into a mire because Väinämöinen embodies time-tested knowledge.

 Väinämöinen sings the young Joukahainen into a mire.

In the harsh ancient North, a person reached old age only if they possessed and could share the right time-tested knowledge needed for survival. All the fools were weeded out by the challenges of life.

Synty was a term used to describe the type of knowledge that includes the understanding of the origins of things. This kind of knowledge the Eternal Bard Väinämöinen possessed.

Without writing, memory was sacred; lore was transmitted as runo-poetry-songs with rich symbolism. Just in time, collectors preserved the world’s largest body of runo-poetry from Finnish oral tradition, before the tide of history and modernity washed the tradition away.

Over 100 000 separate oral poetry texts were collected from the last surviving rune singers before the tradition died.

The so-called Lindy effect says that the longer an idea, skill, or principle has lasted, the longer it is likely to remain in use. As a modern example, the wisdom of the time-tested knowledge is captured for example in the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) classification developed by NASA.

As personal practical application, I have noticed that gardeners and builders can learn a lot by visiting abandoned homesteads: what plants, structures, and solutions have endured decades of neglect? Another application is Myth Mining - a technique I use to find practical modern answers hidden in folklore and mythic tales.

5. Mythic Geography and Personifying the Unknown

Today we can travel thousands of kilometers in hours; the same restaurants, shops, and products await everywhere, and information flashes around the globe. The ancient North was the opposite: no roads with messages moving at a slow walking pace.

For ancient Northerners, distance equaled the passage of time and also the unknown: a stage for dangers and rewards beyond one’s knowledge. Height mattered, for from a hill you could “see into the future,” glimpsing past the veil of the unfamiliar.

Height mattered, for from a hill you could “see into the future,” glimpsing past the veil of the unfamiliar.

The integrated understanding of time, distance and unknown may also explain why the tietäjä or shaman sent the illness far away to the edge of the world on the back of a swift spirit animal. In this way, the illness was moved beyond one’s own control in to the realm of the unknown, allowing the person to accept whatever was coming and prepare for all possibilities.

Likewise, perhaps the role of pilgrimage in the medieval agrarian world was to expose people to the unknown and thus strengthen their intuitive sense of connection to something greater than themselves. A sort of spiritual technology.

This entwined view of time, distance, and mystery also underlies Finnish beliefs in haltija-spirits and deities. In folklore these beings dwell out of sight, usually in remote, hard-to-reach places—the realm of the unknown itself. Deities such as Tapio, Ahti, and Mielikki personified forces crucial yet beyond human control.

Personification of the unknown was crucial for survival as it fostered humility, respect, and attentive listening toward the phenomena on which survival depended, like hunting or fishing or maintaining a prosperous homestead. A favorable relationship was upheld with offerings and cultivating humility and reverence in places like in the dark warmth of the sauna.

In Finnish culture, the sauna is considered a sacred place, and it is associated with many rituals and beliefs.

Traces remain whenever people confront something partly beyond their grasp: a mountaineer treats the peak as a personality; an old-machine mechanic speaks to the engine; businessfolk “listen to the market’s signals.”

I’ve found that two curiosity-based outdoor practices I devised under the name Samota Running, discovery runs and as-the-crow-flies treks, cultivate an intuitive grounded sense of knowledge limits, a sort of intuitive Popperianism born of continual contact with the unfamiliar.

The Great Immonen Boulder

Another experiment more related to the ancient haltija spirit worship is the tenhotin, an offering of the great Immonen Boulder. Tenhotin is a bouquet of seven alder twigs tied with red wool. I’ve found that even today such a symbolic sacrificial gesture of humility can tune the mind properly.

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By weaving these five strands, seasonal wisdom, talkoot cooperation, multipurpose minimalism, respect for time-tested knowledge, and mythic geography, into our modern lives, we may yet recover the resilience our ancestors honed beneath the northern sky.

BONUS: Explaining Bear-Worship

The bear was a sacred animal for the ancient Finns. I propose that this is partly explained by an implicit pattern, where the bear is seen as a proxy for how well the environment can sustain humans, too.

The bear has been a revered animal, and it was believed to have originated from the sky.

The logic lies in the similarity between the diets of humans and bears. Thus, a well-fed, plump bear signals that the environment is also suitable for human habitation. A hungry bear signals scarcity and may become dangerous, attacking people and livestock.

My suspicion is that a large bear’s annual caloric needs may even correspond to those of a small human family.

References and influences

• Finnish mythology, Kalevala, and the collections of the oral traditions.

• Works of historians and folklorists such as Kustaa Vilkuna, Martti Haavio, Matti Kuusi, Samuli Paulaharju and Anna-Leena Siikala.

• Works and writings of Nassim Taleb.

• Works and writings of Francis Heylighen.

• Works and writings of Stewart Brand

• Works and writings of Charles Camarda