Rotwurm Folklore

Folklore · Into the Hollow of a Stone

The stone does not weep

Old Finnish healers did not try to destroy pain. They sent it somewhere it could do no harm: into a rock, into deep water, into a place no sun reaches. A stone was the best place, because a stone feels nothing.

A piece of one such charm has survived as a Finnish children's rhyme:

Mene kipu kiven kolohon,

alle paaen paakkuraisen;

ei kivi kipuja itke,

paasi vaivoja valita!

Go, pain, into the hollow of a stone,

beneath the clodded boulder;

the stone does not weep for pains,

the slab does not lament its aches!

That is the song's first verse, line for line. The full charms behind the rhyme are kipusanat, "pain words", said over someone who is hurting. One of them was sung by Anni Hynninen in Hiitola, South Karelia, and written down by Johannes Häyhä in 1880. It is in the SKVR collection (Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot, the Old Poems of the Finnish People) as poem XIII3 9040.

Why a stone

Lines 13–16. The English is ours.

Ei kivi kipuja itke,

Paasi vaivoja valita,

Vaikka paljo pantaisihin,

Määrättä mätettäisihin.

The stone does not weep for pains,

the slab does not lament its aches,

however much is laid on it,

heaped on without measure.

Those two first lines are in the song nearly as they are:

Go, pain
Into the hollow of a stone
Beneath the clodded boulder
The stone does not weep for pains
The slab does not lament ailments!

The hollow

Lines 34–43 describe the hole itself, bored through a stone on top of the pain mountain, and what happens to the pains put in it.

Kivi on keskellä mäkeä,

Reikä keskellä kiveä,

Jok' on väätty vääntimellä,

Puhkaistu purasimella;

Siihen kivut kiskotahan,

Pahat vammat vallatahan,

Tuskat tuimat tungetahan,

Pakkopäivät painetahan

Öin yrittämättömiksi,

Päivin pääsemättömiksi.

There is a stone in the middle of the hill,

a hole in the middle of the stone,

twisted out with an auger,

pierced through with a bore;

into it the pains are dragged,

the evil wounds are forced,

the fierce torments are crammed,

the days of aching pressed down,

never to stir by night,

never to get out by day.

Lönnrot put the same "the stone does not weep" lines into the Kalevala, poem 45, where Väinämöinen sends the plagues of Kalevala away.

The song keeps the charm's shape, one command and one place per verse. Each verse sends a different thing away (pain, dread, grief) and names one more place that will not carry it back: the stone, the frozen tundra, a rootless birch.

Later in the same charm the healer calls on Kiputyttö, the pain maiden of Tuonela, who grinds the pain stone where three rivers run. That passage became She Grinds.

Sources