Respecting the giants of Finnish mythology, Castren is silent, and the
following notes are gleaned from the Kalevala, and from Grimm's
Teutonic Mythology. "The giants," says Grimm, "are distinguished by
their cunning and ferocity from the stupid, good-natured monsters of
Germany and Scandinavia." Soini, for example a synonym of Kullervo,
the here of the saddest episode of the Kalevala when only three days
old, tore his swaddling clothes to tatters. When sold to a forgeman of
Karelia, he was ordered to nurse an infant, but he dug out the eyes of
the child, killed it, and burned its cradle. Ordered to fence the
fields, he built a fence from earth to heaven, using entire pine-trees
for fencing materials, and interweaving their branches with venomous
serpents. Ordered to tend the herds in the woodlands, he changed the
cattle to wolves and bears, and drove them home to destroy his mistress
because she had baked a stone in the centre of his oat-loaf, causing
him to break his knife, the only keepsake of his people.

Regarding the heroes of the Kalevala, much discussion has arisen as to
their place in Finnish mythology. The Finns proper regard the chief
heroes of the Suomi epic, Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkainen, as
descendants of the Celestial Virgin, Ilmatar, impregnated by the winds
when Ilma (air), Light, and Water were the only material existences.
In harmony with this conception we find in the Kalevala, a description
of the birth of Wainamoinen, or Vaino, as he is sometimes called in the
original, a word probably akin to the Magyar Ven, old. The Esthonians
regard these heroes as sons of the Great Spirit, begotten before the
earth was created, and dwelling with their Supreme Ruler in Jumala.

The poetry of a people with such an elaborate mythology and with such a
keen and appreciative sense of nature and of her various phenomena, was