Tuonelan

Tuonela is the Finnish mythological underworld, the realm of the dead in Finnic folklore. The name comes from Tuoni, the god of death, with a suffix indicating a place. In traditional belief, Tuonela is a distant, shadowy domain separated from the living world, often imagined as cold and remote. The dead dwell there, and the realm is sometimes linked to a river of Tuoni or to a gate that leads to the other side. In some accounts it is ruled by the goddess Tuonetar.

In the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic compiled by Elias Lönnrot from older oral sources, Tuonela is a concrete setting where the dead reside and encounter the living in stories. A famous episode tells of Lemminkäinen, who is killed in Tuonela by the maidens of the realm; his mother travels to Tuonela to retrieve his severed body parts and revive him by magic. Other episodes depict attempts to travel to Tuonela, illustrating the boundary between life and death.

In later use, Tuonela remains a symbol of the underworld and the afterlife in Finnish literature, art, and music. It is distinct from Christian conceptions of hell, representing a pre-Christian Finnic conception of the realm of the dead.