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Aarno Karimo (born Aarno Hasselqvist; 29 December 1886 – 13 March 1952) was a Finnish illustrator, painter, writer, and army major. He is remembered above all for the four-volume illustrated history of Finland Kumpujen yöstä ("From the night of the burial mounds", 1929–1932), for his work on an illustrated edition of the national epic Kalevala published posthumously as Kuva-Kalevala, and for founding Hakkapeliitta, the weekly magazine of Finland's Civil Guard (Suojeluskunta). His writing and visual art were closely tied to the nationalist and Greater Finland currents of the interwar period.^[1][2]

Karimo was born in Parikkala in eastern Finland, then part of the Grand Duchy of Finland under Russian rule. His parents, Sanfrid Hasselqvist and Ida Matilda (née Forsblom), farmed at Alahovi by Lake Argusjärvi. He used the family name Hasselqvist until 1906, after which he went by Karimo.^[2][1]

After attending a co-educational school in Lappeenranta,^[1] he enrolled at the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society (Suomen Taideyhdistyksen piirustuskoulu) in Helsinki, held his first exhibition in 1907, and subsequently studied under Akseli Gallen-Kallela. He spent two years studying in Saint Petersburg.^[2][1] In 1914 he married Aino Olivia Lindqvist.^[2][3]

From around 1910 Karimo worked in Viipuri as an illustrator, columnist, and theatre critic for the newspaper Karjala, and also painted portraits.^[2][1] Alongside this he contributed political cartoons to satirical magazines such as Ampiainen, Velikulta, and the leftist Piiska. His caricatures most often targeted Russian politicians.^[1]

During the Finnish Civil War of 1918, Karimo served on the White side as a battery commander on the Karelian front.^[2][1] The experience marked a turning point in his work: the war and the cause of Finnish independence shaped much of his subsequent writing and painting.^[2] According to his own account, many of the sketches that became his Civil War illustrations were first drawn at the front on scraps of paper and cigarette packaging.^[2]

From 1919 to 1925, Karimo served as district commander of the Civil Guard in Viipuri — Finland's largest border district and a sensitive command, given the unsettled border with Soviet Russia in the early 1920s.^[2][1] In 1919, with Colonel Adolf Aminoff and the Jäger captain Urho Sihvonen, he organised the first anniversary celebrations of Finland's "War of Independence" in Viipuri, an event that became part of the city's public life until the end of the 1930s.^[1] He took part in committees that drafted the Civil Guard's regulations, and is credited with initiating its district structure.^[2] He was also active in support of the independence movements of related Finnic peoples, taking part in the campaigns in Estonia, East Karelia (both White Sea Karelia and Olonets Karelia), and Ingria. In 1923 he was sent as an expert to Hungary, Poland, and Latvia to advise on the organisation of voluntary defence work.^[2]

In 1926 Karimo founded Hakkapeliitta, the weekly magazine of the Civil Guard, and served as its first editor-in-chief. He designed the publication's full-colour covers, which were unusual in Finnish magazine publishing of the period.^[2][1] He left the editorship after roughly a year, in 1927, worked briefly at the publishing house WSOY and on the General Staff, and from then on supported himself as a full-time writer and artist.^[2][1]

Karimo's science-fiction novel Kohtalon kolmas hetki ("The Third Moment of Fate", 1926) imagines a future war between Finland and Russia in 1967–68, in which a technologically superior Finland — aided by former enemies of Russia — emerges victorious.^[1][4] The novel had first appeared in serialised form in Hakkapeliitta.^[1] It draws explicitly on Greater Finland ideology and contains overtly antisemitic and racialised passages.^[1]

His travel book Germaaneja (1930), an account of journeys through Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Germany, voices admiration for German society and, in passages on the so-called "Jewish question", reproduces motifs of contemporary Nazi propaganda.^[1]

Karimo's principal work was the four-volume Kumpujen yöstä (1929–1932), a series of historical narratives covering Finland from prehistoric times to the 1918 Civil War. Each volume combined short fictional episodes with Karimo's own full-colour paintings and decorative illustrations; the set ran to roughly 1,450 pages.^[1][2] The title is taken from Arvid Genetz's 1889 poem "Karjala".^[1]

The work proved a commercial success and became a familiar fixture on Finnish home bookshelves during the 1930s, expressing the era's interest in a heroic national past.^[1] Politically, it was recommended reading for the youth wing of the far-right Patriotic People's Movement (IKL), the so-called "Blue-Blacks".^[1] A number of original paintings made for Kumpujen yöstä were sold to private collectors through an exhibition at Galleria Strindberg in the 1930s; other paintings and drawings entered the collections of the National Museum of Finland and the Military Museum of Finland.^[1][2]

In addition to his book illustrations, Karimo produced oil paintings on Civil War themes that were purchased by the Finnish state and were already regarded in the 1920s as part of the national heritage; they are now held by the National Museum and the Military Museum.^[2] Among his other commissions were a large painting on a Delaware theme for the Finnish-American institute in Hancock, Michigan, and a three-part monument in honour of Finnish farmers, unveiled in 1935 in the villages of Rautu, Pyhäjärvi, and Metsäpirtti on the Karelian Isthmus.^[2]

In the autumn of 1939, on the eve of the Winter War, Karimo designed the official mobilisation posters, and during the war he produced propaganda prints intended to sustain morale on the home front.^[2] The Winter War Commemorative Medal of 1940 was based on his design, as were other military decorations and a number of ex libris bookplates.^[2]

At the start of the Continuation War (1941–1944), Karimo headed the General Headquarters bureau for decorations and badges of honour. His designs included the Mannerheim Cross, the highest Finnish military distinction; he also designed the marshal's baton presented to Marshal Mannerheim, a hollow staff containing the document of his appointment.^[2][1] After the war he designed merit crosses and medals for the Finnish sports movement.^[2]

The political climate of post-war Finland — shaped by the Moscow Armistice and the influence of the Soviet-led Allied Control Commission — was no longer favourable to Karimo's overtly patriotic and far-right output. Following an order of the Control Commission, several of his works were removed from public libraries; Kumpujen yöstä was reissued in 1953–54 in an abridged edition in which much of the original patriotic and violent material was toned down.^[1][2]

In his last years Karimo concentrated on an illustrated edition of the national epic Kalevala. He had prepared for the project over several decades, drawing on impressions gathered during early-twentieth-century travels in Finnish and Russian Karelia and in Ingria.^[2] He died in Helsinki in 1952 before the work was complete. He had finished the full-page colour plates and most of the vignettes; the artist Hugo Otava (1889–1967) completed the remaining smaller illustrations according to Karimo's sketches. Kuva-Kalevala, containing some 2,500 illustrations, was published by Pellervo-Seura beginning in 1953.^[2][1]

Although Kumpujen yöstä was widely read in interwar Finland and Karimo's Kalevala illustrations have remained among the best-known visual interpretations of the epic, his literary work has been largely passed over by later literary historians; standard surveys of Finnish literature do not generally discuss him.^[1] The far-right and antisemitic strands in his writing have been examined in more recent scholarship on Finnish historical fiction, the Greater Finland ideology, and early Finnish science fiction.^[1]

• Tykkimiehen muistelmia Karjalan rintamalta (1919)
• Kohtalon kolmas hetki: Suomen ja Venäjän sota vv. 1967–68 (1926)
• Valkoinen armeija (1928)
• Peninkulmia nielemässä (1929)
• Kumpujen yöstä, vols. I–IV (1929–1932)
• Germaaneja: matkatarinoita sekä piirroksia Ruotsista, Norjasta, Tanskasta ja Saksasta (1930)
• Armfeltin lähetti (1933)
• Miehiä ja miehenalkuja (1936)
• Karjalan nousu 1918 (1937)
• Kuva-Kalevala (1952–1953, completed posthumously)

• Aarno Karimo's art at Artnet
• Petri Liukkonen, Aarno Karimo, Books and Writers

Category:1886 births Category:1952 deaths Category:People from Parikkala Category:Finnish illustrators Category:Finnish painters Category:Finnish male writers Category:Finnish military personnel Category:Finnish science fiction writers Category:Finnish magazine founders Category:Finnish anti-communists