Kalma
In Finnish folklore, Kalma is a personification of death or the grave. The word kalma means 'a grave, the smell of a corpse, a corpse'. According to Matthias Castrén, there are folk poems in which Kalma refers to an underground deity watching over the elves and other folk (väki) of the underworld Tuonela.
↻ synthesized from 2 sources
When
- First attested
- 1500 CE
- Attested period
- 1500 – 2020
- Historical notes
- Documented in 19th-century folklore collections.
Relationships
- co occurs with
- Mana
- parent of
- Kalman impi
- sibling of
- Loviatar, Kipu-Tyttö, Kivutar, Vammatar
Mentioned by
Sources
Source passages
“In Finnish folklore, Kalma is an abstraction or a personification of death or the grave. The word kalma means 'a grave, the smell of a corpse, a corpse'. It has cognates in other Uralic languages. In Samoyed languages kolmu or halmer means 'corpse' or 'the spirit of a dead person'.”
#12694 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001
“She is the mother of Kipu-Tyttö, Kivutar, Vammatar, Kalma, and Loviatar, as well as numerous plagues, diseases, demons, and monsters.”
#13108 · extracted by anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5