Joulu-yön tarina by Larin-Kyösti is a collection of short stories written in the early 20th century. The pieces blend folklore, moral fables, and everyday Finnish life, shifting from wintry mysticism and Lapland legend to satirical portraits of peasants and petty officials. Central figures include an old fisherman awaiting a gentle death, a young Sámi who discovers the joik, and villagers and clerks whose small vices and quiet hopes are tenderly, sometimes bitingly, observed.The opening of the collection unfolds through varied vignettes: an aged island fisherman, Jurkka, welcomes Christmas-night death after a luminous vision of his “life-tree,” and is later found peaceful, a storm-shattered rowan branch beside him. A lonely Sámi, Juoksa, sees the northern lights, meets a radiant haltia, finds the joik, wins a bride, and carries song across a previously mute Lapland. A Siberian prisoner, Iivana, loses his tame mouse to a cruel guard—an old rival—and curses him; years later, a vast mouse horde devours the guard as Iivana, now with his wife, senses it in a dream. Comic realism follows as tobacco-obsessed Moona-Matti pilfers others’ leavings until a stablehand’s prank with tainted smoke humiliates him into treating the crew and softening his habits. A stern parable shows Pekka, a long-serving farmhand gifted a smallholding by a kind pastor, ruining it, blaming his benefactor, and returning as a bitter vagrant to demand compensation—only to be turned away. Finally, a late-night st…
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