A strange, steamy dream of folklore, warmth and chilling horror

Alongside the traditional religions found worldwide, Finland has an additional one: the sauna. So deeply embedded in Finnish life, its rituals take on an almost spiritual significance – one given chilling form in Aki Mäkiaho’s Sauna Elf.

Sauna Elf is the last remaining manifestation of a once-common pantheon of household spirits: the Byre Elf, the Fire Elf, the Mill Elf and the House Elf. Each watched over its domain, upheld through generations of careful tradition. Respect them and they protect; neglect them and the consequences are brutal. Forget Harry Potter’s Dobby – these are not benign companions. Anger them, and you risk retribution as visceral as flayed human skin strung up in the forest as a warning.

Modernisation has all but erased these figures, centuries of folklore overwritten by contemporary life. Yet Finland’s enduring love of the sauna has allowed this particular spirit to survive – albeit uneasily, as traditional wood-fired spaces give way to sterile electric cabins.

Each sauna, in turn, is watched and recorded. The elf maintains a hidden sauna book, chronicling conversations, misdeeds and small acts of human folly. It is a private record of behaviour and consequence, laced with its own quiet warnings – though most bathers remain blissfully unaware it exists.

Mäkiaho structures the novel as a journey through one such book, guided by the elf itself. For a being to whom time is irrelevant, centuries of steam-filled existence blur into one. Ancient and modern collapse together, bound by a shared reverence for the sanctity of the sauna.

That sanctity is not abstract. The story is framed by a rural sauna where transgression is met with bloody purification. To modern sensibilities, the idea of ‘defilement’ may seem obscure, but through the elf’s eyes the sauna is sacred space – violate it, and you must be cleansed.

What follows may sound religious, but it feels older than that. Beneath the ritual lies something more elemental: a connection between nature, wellbeing and belief. Mäkiaho doesn’t shy away from brutality either, drawing in the violence of the Reformation with unflinching clarity – atrocities carried out in the name of enlightenment and salvation.

This could be heavy going, but the novel never lapses into dogma or preaching. Instead, it observes. We experience events through a force trying to understand a world in transition, one that is steadily discarding tradition in favour of something more secular and material.

It’s a compelling conceit, and one Mäkiaho handles with confidence. The narrator – a mainly unseen, shifting presence – can take physical form or inhabit human bodies, but most often exists as steam itself, drifting unseen through the action. The effect is intimate and faintly unsettling, drawing the reader into the heart of the sauna while never quite offering comfort.

For those outside Finland, the rituals of the sauna may seem strange, but Mäkiaho’s story is resolutely universal. This is no simple struggle between good and evil; its morality is fluid, like steam slipping through the air. Wrongdoing is punished, but innocence is lost in the process.

The question – ‘Is there a God without Satan, Heaven without Hell?’ – lingers unanswered. Perhaps it is the wrong question entirely. This is not a story of organised religion, but of older forces: of living in balance with the natural world, and finding meaning in its quiet, everyday rituals. A strange, steamy dream of folklore, warmth and chilling horror that lingers long after the heat fades, Sauna Elf is a distinctive addition to Nordic literature. Beware – after reading, you may find yourself glancing beneath the sauna bench, just in case.

Sauna Elf, written and translated by Aki Mäkiaho, is published by BoD