Under the North Star

In the Häme village of Pentinkulma, the tenant farmer Jussi Koskela clears a bog into a croft, and over three generations the simmering injustice between landless crofters and their landlords swells into the catastrophe of the 1918 Finnish Civil War, which tears the community apart. Linna's national trilogy is rooted in the real countryside of southern Finland he came from: the reclaimed farmland, the parsonage and manor, the workers' hall, and the front and reprisals of the war that split the young nation.

Jussi

The Koskela croft

The bog

The trilogy opens with the crofter Jussi Koskela draining and clearing a worthless bog into good farmland by sheer stubborn labour, only to hold it as a tenant at the parson's pleasure. Linna's famous first line and this founding act set the whole saga's theme, the land wrested from nothing by the poor, and never quite their own.

The opening chapters

inspired by Pentinkulma is Linna's fictional village, drawn from his own Urjala in the Häme region of southern Finland; the Koskela croft is sited in that real countryside.

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