Kalma in Charm Poetry

Kalma belongs to a specific genre within the collected Finnish oral material: the loitsu, or charm, in which illness is treated as an intrusion that can be named, addressed directly and commanded back to where it came from. In charms recorded from nineteenth century singers, a sickness is often personified as something Kalma has sent out of the ground, and the healer's words work by identifying that origin and ordering the affliction back into her territory, the grave, rather than by describing a myth about her in the way a narrative episode would. This charm material was collected alongside the narrative poems that became the Kalevala but represents a different register of the same oral tradition, closer to practical ritual speech used by healers than to storytelling, and it survives in large nineteenth and twentieth century collections of recorded variants rather than in the more famous literary compilation.

A typical charm structure names the affliction, recounts or invents an origin for it, and then commands it back to that origin by name, a three part pattern folklorists have identified across many of the healing charms collected from the same singers, with Kalma supplying one of the most common origins invoked for illnesses connected to death, decay or the graveyard specifically.