Mikael Agricola (1510 – 1557) is seen as the father of written Finnish and Finnish literature who created the basis for the written language and who wrote the first books printed in Finnish. He was the Bishop of Turku and a reformer and a student of Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther.

In Germany during the 1500s a movement had begun to arouse interest. It was known as the Reformation and it called for modernization of the Catholic church. Wittenberg became the centre of this movement and it was where Martin Luther was influential. Undergraduates from Finland also travelled to the university in Wittenberg to study. Among them in 1536 was Agricola. He returned to Turku with a master’s degree in 1539 and took up the position of headmaster of Turku school. In 1554 he was appointed as the Bishop of Turku.

Among the ideas of the Reformation was that the bible should be made available in the language of the common people. Translating the New Testament into Finnish is held to be one of Agricola’s greatest achievements. He had already started work on this before he left for Wittenburg and continued with it in Germany. He also translated and wrote other works in Finnish. His first book was Abckiria (1543) an ABC book containing the basics of reading and Christian studies.

Agricola wasn’t the first person to write in Finnish and individual religious texts in Finnish had appeared earlier. Agricola’s oeuvre was nonetheless significantly more extensive and of greater literary value than earlier attempts.

The Finnish language did not have established rules at that time so Agricola had to create solutions for using the language in this way. He took example from Swedish, German and Latin. His text exhibits features borrowed from these languages, for example in the sentence structure.

Agricola either invented or borrowed countless new words. A part of these never took root in Finnish, but some 60 percent of the words he created are still in use.