Shooting stars, and flying sparks

In ancient Estonian belief, a shadowy figure in the dark sitting on the roof of a shed, or a tongue of flame flickering into the hearth recalls the firebrand, or tulihänd. The word can also mean a lendtäht, or “flying star”, and the idea extends to sparks in the fire.

If a tulihänd got into the home, the head of the family had a tough road ahead, to feed it with good food – on pain of an untimely death, or fiery destruction of the home - and to keep it in meaningless work to distract it from stealing anything of value.

Spinning grains of sand into a continuous thread, carrying water in a sieve, building a ladder out of bread, and emptying water out of a bog were examples of tasks fit to occupy a tulihänd.

Also termed pisuhänd, and later, kratt, (from Swedish skratt, meaning “laugh”) this edgy spirit could also bring wealth into a family - by stealing from others. The tulihänd is a possible answer to the question: why do they have it, and we don’t?

Folkorists identify the long “period of slavery” - from the early 1200s to the national awakening of the mid-1850s - as a heyday for kratid. Andrus Kivirähk makes a point of the times in his mythical novel, Rehepapp ehk November (2000), “The thresher, or November”.

“We have nothing to pay for anything with,” the rehepapp says. “Everywhere, there is wrongdoing. Our lives are like that, hanging constantly from a spider’s thread. The forest is full of monsters and wolves, disease lies in wait in every shrub, the plague can strike at any moment, the lord of the manor commands as he likes.

“Our lives are likewise stolen from us, and every day we resort to every possible ruse and trick to steal from another, just to stay alive until morning.”  

For his part, the rehepapp was endowed with almost magical properties. Kivirähk’s Sander was the village wise man and adviser on all sorts of troubles, who could outwit the old devil, and knew how to master his resident kratt.

Old sauna whisks, discarded wagon wheels, tattered rags, old rake handles and oven racks were among the jetsam of Estonian peasant homes out of which to fashion a kratt. This process involved shedding drops of blood at a certain phase of the moon, benefiting the householder, but at the price of their soul.

An owner could sell this kratt – an object of dark magic - or bequeath it to descendants, and thereby escape a hellish fate by transferring that to others.

In the 1980s dad got hold of an Estonian songbook, which Estos in Australia had put together to use at their gatherings. We learned some of the songs as kids, and I figured out the guitar chords to others later on. Some may be very old tunes.

One, in a call-and-response style, is called Tulihänd, and it concerns a farm lad who is invited to a party by the lord of the manor, a Baltic German. There, he meets a young lady he takes a fancy to, and is then confronted by the baron, a very large man.

“Then I flew like a tulihänd – response: ‘well, tell us more’ - and got my trousers caught and ripped on a tree stump (känd).”   

From the chorus, it’s not clear whether a tulihänd had anything to do with this misfortune, and the song ends before the singer’s fate is known.

In 1938 Eduard Tubin composed Estonia’s first ballet, titled Kratt, and the theme is present in Eduard Vilde’s 1913 satire, Pisuhänd, which contrasts the destinies of an inspired “artist of life” (elukunstnik, probably carried over from German, Lebenskünstler), with that of a failed architect and poet.

Today the word kratt is associated with a species of slime mould, a bright-yellow, snotty sort of fungus that is very common in Estonia, and the verb krattima describes a child’s actions when playing tricks on others.

The moral of the story – if there is one - could be to watch out for creosote build-up in the chimney, to avoid the type of fire you don’t want at home.