Folklore · Great Hunger

The great hunger years

In Finland they are called suuret nälkävuodet, the great hunger years. Between 1866 and 1868 about 270,000 people died, roughly 150,000 more than in normal years. That was about 8.5% of the whole population, and up to a fifth in the worst parishes.

How it happened

The summer of 1866 was extremely wet. Potatoes and root vegetables rotted in the fields and the autumn grain could not be sown properly. When the stores ran out, thousands took to the roads to beg.

The winter after was hard and the spring never really came. May 1867 in Helsinki averaged +1.8 °C, about six degrees below normal and the coldest May since records began in 1829. In many places lakes and rivers stayed frozen until June. Midsummer was warm and gave people hope, then frost in early September killed the crop. The harvest was about half of normal, and by that autumn people were dying by the thousands, of hunger and of the typhus that followed it.

The worst-hit regions were Satakunta, Tavastia, Ostrobothnia and North Karelia. Help came late. The government did not want to borrow, and by the time a loan was taken in late 1867 grain prices in Europe had already risen.

Bark in the bread

When the grain ran out, people stretched what flour they had with pettu, the inner bark of the pine, dried and ground. The song starts there:

Later it counts the dead:

The song is not a history lesson. It puts the three years into one winter and speaks as the hunger itself, the guest "at every famine, every grief". The numbers above are the real ones.