ABSTRACT
Birds have been important to northern cultures and cosmologies from prehistory to historical times, as indicated by archaeological finds as well as folklore and related material. Among the Finno-Ugric peoples, the Milky Way was conceptualized as a huge flock of migratory birds, each star in it representing a human soul on its way to the otherworld that lay beyond the horizon. In northern Fennoscandian archaeology, avian symbolism appears in a various kinds of media through times. Parts of birds have been used to furnish burials, avian imagery features prominently in rock art (particularly in Karelian rock carvings), and Neolithic pottery features various direct and indirect references to birds, including egg-shaped ceramic vessels, water-birds as a decorative element, and the use of feathers as temper.
Birds have always comprised a part of northern hunter-gatherer subsistence and, perhaps more importantly, served as a rich symbolic resource. Water birds feature in the very birth of the world in Finno-Uralian mythologies – and with possible material references in the Neolithic world – and migratory birds have been intertwined with the cyclical character of life, which is particularly prominent in high latitudes. Migratory ducks and swans, arranging in huge numbers in the spring, have signified spring and new life, while birds leaving to the south in the autumn have symbolized death and the coming of lean months of the winter – again reflecting the perception of the North as the world of extremes and contrasts. Certain birds have been regarded as symbols of the North even beyond the northern world. In myths concerning the Hyperborean Apollo (i.e. Apollo of a northern origin), which go back to Homer and Hesiod, the god of light left Greece in the fall to spend the winter in the far North and returned in the spring in a chariot drawn by northern swans. In shamanistic understandings, travels to the upper world often take place in the shape of a bird, whereas divers such as the common goldeneye were associated with the subaquatic lower world. Birds thus play an important role in northern cosmological notions as messengers binding together different worlds – both real and imagined, geographical and spiritual.
