Rotwurm Folklore

Folklore · She Grinds

The pain maiden at the three rivers

She Grinds is built on a Finnish healing charm. In it a healer calls on Kiputyttö, the pain maiden of Tuonela, the land of the dead, to take a sick person's pain and grind it away.

The version quoted here was sung by Anni Hynninen in Hiitola, South Karelia, and written down by Johannes Häyhä in 1880. It is a kipusana, a "pain word": a charm said over someone who is hurting. It is kept in the SKVR collection (Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot, the Old Poems of the Finnish People) as poem XIII3 9040.

The verses the song comes from

Lines 44–55 of the charm. The English is ours and stays close to the original word order.

Kipu tyttö Tuonen neiti,

Kipunatar kiltti piika!

Jok' istut kipukivellä

Joen kolmen juoksevassa,

Jauhaen kipukiveä,

Kipuvuorta väännätellen:

Käy kivut kereämähän

Kitahan kiven sinisen

Tahi vieretä vetehen,

Sysäite meren syvähän,

Tuulen tuntumattomahan,

Päivän paistamattomahan!

Pain girl, maiden of Tuoni,

Kipunatar, kind serving-girl!

You who sit on the pain stone

where three rivers run,

grinding the pain stone,

turning the pain mountain:

come gather up the pains

into the maw of the blue stone,

or roll them into the water,

push them into the deep sea,

where no wind is felt,

where no sun shines!

The song opens with three of these lines whispered in Finnish: Kiputyttö, Tuonen neiti… Jauhaen kipukiveä… Kipuvuorta väännätellen… The rest of the lyric is English, and it keeps the charm's places. The three rivers become the confluence she sits at, and "the maw of the blue stone" survives almost word for word:

Where three black rivers find their mouth
and the ice-tongue licks the stone
she is seated at the confluence
grinding silence into bone

Into the maw of the blue stone
into the throat of the deep earth
swallow every wound I carry

What the rest of the charm does

Kiputyttö is not the first helper the charm calls. Before her comes Kivutar, "the good mistress" of pain, asked to wrap the pains in her skirts, sift them through a sieve and carry them to the top of the pain mountain. There they are boiled in a tiny iron pot. Then comes a hole bored through a stone, where the pains are locked away. After Kiputyttö the healer calls on Ukko, the sky god, to bring health and let the sick person rest "without feeling the torment".

Elias Lönnrot put a version of the Kiputyttö verses in the Kalevala, in poem 45, where Väinämöinen heals the people of Kalevala from the plague Louhi sent them.

The stone hole from the same charm is the image behind another rotwurm song, Into the Hollow of a Stone.

Sources