· Crayfish season, when summer diners sing boisterously over mounds of red crustaceans, is a reminder of the lyric's importance in Finnish culture. The Kalevala, the 19th-century folk epic that crystallised national resistance to Russian rule, was compiled by Elias Lönnrot from ancient runes sung from memory in the eastern forests of Karelia. The Kalevala inspired not only Sibelius but JRR Tolkien, whose Middle Earth and elfin tongue tapped Finnish myths and language. So it's fitting that the $27m stage version of The Lord of the Rings, which premiers in Toronto next spring, will have music by Värttinä, the a cappella group of four Finnish women whose folk revival impressed the show's co-composer, AR "Bombay Dreams" Rahman. Karelian Bollywood? A rival, perhaps, to the craze for Finnish tango.
· Tove Jansson wrote her last cult Moomin book for children in 1970, but lived till 2001. English-speakers were reminded of her later adult fiction by the reissue two years ago of her 1972 novel The Summer Book. Its publishers, Sort Of Books, are now working on a short story selection, and the novel Fair Play. In Jansson's Helsinki penthouse studio-turned-museum, her niece, Sophia Jansson (the model for the six-year-old granddaughter in The Summer Book), tells me the elliptical fiction often explores relationships among artists, but leaves much unsaid. Tove grew up in a Bohemian household with a sculptor father and graphic artist mother, while her lifelong partner was the woman artist Tuulikka Pietilä. They spent time on the rocky islet in the Gulf of Finland where The Summer Book is set. And, says her niece, she still answered 2,000 fan letters a year by hand.
· Once a snowy substitute for St Petersburg in cold-war spy movies, Helsinki is inspiring its own Nordic crime fiction. Matti Yrjänä Joensuu is a serial novelist and a criminal investigator for Helsinki PD. Softly spoken, he says The Priest of Evil, which Arcadia publishes next spring, centres on a fanatical priest who brainwashes teenagers into carrying bomb-filled backpacks. Joensuu, who believes the police officer's "ringside seat" on society can lend prescience, says, "the priest believes there is only one way to think. So do suicide bombers and superpowers."
· Notwithstanding Brecht's contention that the Finns are "silent in two languages", Swedish is the mother tongue of one in six Finns. The protagonist of Finland-Swede Kjell Westö's superb thriller, Lang - published by Harvill Secker in May - is a Finnish TV celebrity drawn into a crime of passion. Matti Rönkä, however, prefers crime writing to crime. Born near the Russian border, he writes of Helsinki's Russians, who suffered for their Finnish roots in the Soviet Union but migrated, after its collapse in 1991, to a Finland in recession, and the lure of crime and drugs. Like Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins, says Rönkä, his Russian-born hero straddles fault lines in a riven city. For more on Finnish literature www.finlit.fi/fili.
