| Names: | Liekiö  Liekkiö   Liekkiöin
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Liekkiö, liekiö or liekiöin is a term which appears in multiple contexts in different ways.
Usually, in Western Finnish folklore, liekkiö is a grey bird (sometimes invisible) which bothers travellers by mimicking them and screaming. It is said to have been born from an unbaptized child killed by its own mother. (The kind of post-birth abortion which was performed before birth control or abortions were available. It was not rare at all though the authorities frowned upon it.) Old Swedish sources present liekkiö as "a ghost", and Lenqvist (1782) called it a demon, though some sources also state that it didn't physically hurt anyone.
Interestingly, the oldest mention of "Liekkiö" is Mikael Agricola's from 1551: "Liekkiö controlled grasses, roots and trees, and other such things" like a god. This has caused plenty of confusion. Some have suggested this was a misunderstanding caused by the idea that dead children were buried in forests.
Maybe so! I have another theory, too. Among Forest Finns, a similar bird was called Loho or Luukka... except that Loho/Luukka was also a raven who brought wolves with her and lived on the hill of death... aka Louhi! If Louhi, as the ruler of the Underworld, was understood to be below ground (and she sometimes was) it would explain why "Liekkiö" is connected to roots. Well, don't take this as an absolute fact, it's just a theory. And who knows, maybe the connection to birds and the similarity of the names could've led these two unrelated figures to be connected with each other, that's also a possibbility.
| Liekkiö, variants | Often thought to come from liekki "flame". |
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Only in Finnish, sorry. This is the source material.