Louhi is the axis of the Kalevala's moral geography. The world of the songs is divided between Kalevala, the settled, ordered home of the heroes, and Pohjola, the cold, dark North that is at once a real far country, a land of the dead, and a storehouse of the powers the heroes lack. Louhi rules Pohjola as its matriarch and sorceress, and nearly every quest turns on her: she sets the tasks, holds the daughters the heroes want, receives the Sampo and refuses to give it back, and when it is stolen she pursues in the form of a giant bird of prey, sending storms, plague and darkness and hiding away the sun and the moon. She is a formidable antagonist rather than a simple villain, a shaman-queen whose power matches the heroes' own, and the recurring war between Kalevala and Pohjola gives the epic its through-line. Recent scholarship has pushed back against reading Louhi simply as a villain.
A 2018 study by the folklorist Kaarina Kailo reads her through an ecofeminist lens as a shamanic nature-spirit whose power over weather, animals and the elements echoes the Sami noaidi, the shaman-figures of the neighbouring Arctic tradition, and stands closer to older, female-centred northern religious authority than to the fairy-tale witch she can seem in a straightforward retelling. On this reading Louhi's ferocity in defence of Pohjola is less malice than the fierce guardianship of a matriarch protecting a hard northern land and its resources.