Sielulintu - Soul Bird
Sielulintu ‘Soul Bird’ is a very important part of Uralic folklore and mythology. Birds in general have been seen as signs, sometimes about death, sometimes something else. Sielulintu however, is a different kind of bird than our typical birds; it carries a soul on it’s breast or sometimes, it is a soul in bird form. This kind of folklore about this bird is found all over in Finno-Ugric and Uralic tradition.
In Finnish tradition, when the soul of a human leaves the mortal body, it takes the form of a bird. This soul was the Ruumissielu ‘Body Soul’, which left the body after death. These birds are called soul birds, whom travel north, to the Alinen ‘a place under’. It was believed that Alinen was a place somewhere in the north and that the dead lived there. The wandering of the soul birds was seen as a light ring in the sky, the Milky Way (in Finnish Linnunrata ‘way of the bird’).
Sielulintu is also the name of Sugri ry’s web newspaper. Sugri is the student organization of students who study Finno-Ugric languages at University of Turku, in Finland.
