The Brides They Carried Through Mud

In the old Surrey town of Dorking — where the Romans once drove Stane Street through the chalk, where five-clawed hens still haunt the coat of arms like some heraldic riddle, where Dickens scratched the first pages of Pickwick at the White Horse inn and Nelson kissed Lady Hamilton farewell before sailing toward his death at Trafalgar — in this town, on the ninth day of March, in the year two thousand and twenty-six, a Finnish man named Teemu Touvinen ran four hundred metres through hay bales, mud, and the cheerful violence of spectators armed with water buckets, carrying his girlfriend Jatta Leinonen upside down upon his back, her legs crossed before his face like a living visor, and won a barrel of ale.
Let us pause here. Let us hold the image as one holds a talisman.
The hold they used is called the Estonian Hold. The carried one hangs inverted, clinging to the carrier's torso, head dangling near the small of the back — a posture that recalls, with unsettling precision, the Hanged Man of the Tarot, the twelfth arcanum, suspended between heaven and earth, seeing the world reversed. Leinonen herself confessed: "I was afraid that I was going to fall because it was slippery." One imagines Odin on Yggdrasil, who hung nine nights upon the wind-torn tree and whispered to himself: "ek veit at ek hekk / vindga meiði á" (I know that I hung / on a wind-swept tree). The wisdom gained through inversion. The truth visible only when the world is upside down.
But the legend that spawned this sport is darker than its carnival surface suggests. In the forests of nineteenth-century Finland, near the village of Sonkajärvi, there lived a brigand called Herkko Rosvo-Ronkainen — Ronkainen the Robber — who trained his men by making them carry heavy sacks upon their backs through the woods. Some say the sacks were grain. Others say they were women, stolen from neighbouring villages, wives already married and carried away screaming on the backs of strangers. The Finnish word for this practice carries no euphemism: eukonkanto, wife-carrying, plain and brutal. What is now a sport, cheered by tourists and covered by CNN, was once a synonym for abduction.
And here we arrive at the ancient knot that literature has never untangled: the carrying of the beloved. Is it rescue or theft? Devotion or possession?
Consider Aeneas fleeing Troy, his aged father Anchises upon his shoulders, the burning city behind them, his wife Creusa lost in the smoke. Virgil tells us: "cessi, et sublato montis genitore petivi" — I yielded, and lifting my father, sought the mountains. The one he carries, he saves. The one he does not carry, he loses. The act of bearing another body is always a choice, and every choice is also an abandonment.
Or consider the legend of Saint Christopher, the giant who carried travellers across a river, until one night a child climbed upon his back and grew heavier with each step, heavier than the world itself, for the child was Christ, and to carry him was to carry all of creation. The weight of love is always greater than the weight of the body.
In Dorking, the rules state that the carried person must weigh at least fifty kilograms. Those who weigh less must wear a rucksack filled with flour or water to reach the minimum. There is something profound in this bureaucratic detail — the insistence that the burden be real, that the weight not be faked. As if the organisers understood, perhaps unconsciously, what every myth has always known: that carrying without weight is merely performance, and performance without sacrifice is empty.
The Finns have a word — sisu — that has no precise translation but gestures toward a kind of stubborn, almost irrational endurance, the will to continue when continuation seems pointless. It is the quality that carried Finland through the Winter War, when a nation of fewer than four million held off the Soviet army in temperatures of minus forty. Touvinen, sprinting the final fifty metres with Leinonen inverted upon his back, her fingers digging into his waist, the crowd roaring and spraying water — this, too, is sisu, though dressed in comedy rather than tragedy.
And yet Dorking itself is no stranger to the weight of history carried through unlikely vessels. The five-clawed Dorking chicken, the town's living emblem, is said to have arrived with the Roman legions two thousand years ago — a breed carried across an empire on the backs of soldiers who also carried their weapons, their gods, their laws, and their loneliness. Columella, the Roman agricultural writer, described in his De Re Rustica a five-toed fowl of extraordinary hardiness: "gallinae quinae digitorum" — hens of five fingers. Two millennia later, the descendants of those hens still scratch the Surrey soil, oblivious to their own antiquity.
Dickens, too, carried things through Dorking. He carried characters — Pickwick, Sam Weller, the whole riotous parade of English eccentricity — and he set them loose in the coaching inns of this town, where the ale flowed and the stories multiplied like the five claws of the local hens. There is a line in The Pickwick Papers that feels, today, almost prophetic: "There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat." Replace "hat" with "wife" — carried upside down, legs akimbo, through mud and hay bales — and you have the Dorking Wife Carrying Race in a single sentence.
Nelson, too, carried something out of Dorking: a farewell. At the inn now called the Burford Bridge Hotel, he said goodbye to Emma Hamilton before departing for Trafalgar. He would never return. Every departure is a kind of carrying — one carries the memory of the beloved into the unknown, and the weight of that memory is sometimes heavier than any body.
So here is what happened in Dorking, Surrey, on a Sunday in March: a man carried a woman through obstacles, and won a barrel of ale. But what also happened — what always happens, whenever one human being lifts another and runs — is that a thread was pulled from the vast tapestry of myth, and for a moment, in the laughter and the mud, the old stories flickered back to life. Ronkainen's bandits in the Finnish forest. Aeneas with Anchises on his burning shoulders. Christopher staggering under the weight of a divine child. And a Finnish couple, twenty-eight years old, grinning and covered in mud, holding a barrel of English ale between them like a grail.
"It's feeling really, really good," said Touvinen.
One suspects Aeneas, had anyone thought to ask him, might have said the same.
Claudius, the Carrier