Synty

Did You Know?

• Literary adaptations of synnyt appear in the Kalevala, including the origin of oak and arrows in Runo II, flax in Runo IV, iron in Runo IX, and the serpent in Runo XXVI.
• The first substantial scholarly collection of synty poems was Elias Lönnrot's 1880 edition, Suomen kansan muinaisia loitsurunoja.
• A large part of Lönnrot's edition was translated into English by John Abercromby in The pre- and proto-historic Finns (1898).

Meanings of synty

The term synty derives from syntyä ('come into existence, be born') and carries meanings such as 'birth', 'origin', and 'aetiology'. In Kalevalaic poetry, synty could denote the mystical power of a tietäjä, sometimes synonymous with luonto and translatable as 'fundamental essence'. It could also mean 'god' or 'creator', often in the collocation suuri synty ('great synty'), or refer to other abstract divine power. In Karelian lament poetry, the plural synnyt and its diminutive form syntyiset (Karelian syndyzet) were used of divine powers, the abode of the dead, the dead themselves, and icons; these usages may be a loan-translation from Russian rod ('family') and roditeli ('parents'). The term synty is used with varying specificity to denote poems within a wider body of Finnic incantations, which might also be called 'formulas', luku ('passage'), sanat ('words'), or virsi ('verse').

Use of synty-poems

Knowing synnyt was a characteristic branch of knowledge for traditional healers called tietäjät, who believed that knowing the origin of things allowed control over them. Healing spells might include words like 'Kyllä tunnen syntymäsi' ('indeed I know your origin'). Earlier scholarship held that synnyt were primarily recited as prefaces to charms, like a historiola, to enhance effectiveness, possibly as part of diagnosis. More recent work suggests that the synty element is usually central rather than preliminary, and its primary context was healing physical injuries and wounds where no illness agent like a witch was involved; synnyt might also be used in hunting rituals. There is debate over whether synnyt were recited or sung, and whether the distinction is meaningful. In Western Finland by the eighteenth century they were recited, but may have been sung in the seventeenth; some evidence exists for performance by pairs of singers, and the tradition has been compared with North Germanic galdr.

Early evidence

The earliest attested synnyt appear in documents from the 1650s: the minutes of the parliament of Vaasa for 26 August 1657 record aetiological poems for iron and fire, and court records from Vaasa on 30 June 1658 record one for a magical shot (pistos), and on 5 July 1658 in Isokyrö for cancer, iron, and fire. The first scholarly discussion of synnyt is in the fourth fascicule (1778) of Henrik Gabriel Porthan's De poësi Fennica. The term synty next appears as a genre term in Christianus Erici Lencqvist's 1782 dissertation, where he quoted lines from a serpent origin poem (Kärmen syndy). Cristfried Ganander's Mythologia fennica defined synnyt as 'ancient histories of fire, the snake, stone, all trees; spoken over injuries and wounds by the superstitious'.

Topics of recorded synnyt

The Suomen kansan vanhat runot editions list around 131 topics for synty texts, 114 categorised as syntyloitsut ('synty-charms'), in a total of around 6900 individual records. The ten most popular subjects among the incantation synnyt are iron (862 examples), snake (714), fire (690), sprain (539), snakebite (290), stabbing pain (260), tree (219), cancer (180), ointment (175), colic (137), rickets (135), cowshed-snake (125), and sauna steam (108). Among other categories, the most important are epic texts on the world (455) and kantele (371). The earliest attested synnyt from Ostrobothnia in the 1650s are on topics that later ranked in the top ten: cancer, stabbing pain, fire, and iron.