Chapter Two

The Finnish tradition, specifically, abounds with intersections in text, textile, and the feminine realm. Textile crafts are integral to Finnish culture, both traditionally and in the design-oriented Finland of today. Historically, all “women in all the northern countries knew how to weave cloth,” on looms “of that old-fashioned model, in which the warp is in an upright position.” [1] This is similar to the ancient Greek warp-weighted loom that Fanfani and Harlizius-Klück have researched extensively and link to the structure of Greek verbal arts, as seen in the previous chapter. [2] The spinning and weaving of fabric to dress and decorate bodies and homes was an important practical and cultural activity. Though long winters, activities such as weaving provided ways to stay productive and active indoors, and traditions of rag-rug weaving ensured that no material went to waste.

Even as Finland industrialized, textile-making remained a women’s activity; the textile industry was a top employer of women into the 1910s and in 1930, eighty percent of jobs in the industry were held by women. [3] Of course, these statistics are deceptively simple, and the history of working women in Finland is not without injustice and oppression; from the factory floor to gallery walls, Finnish women, too, fought for recognition of their textile craft labor.

Throughout a long history of foreign rule, Finns struggled to maintain their language and define their own cultural identity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a push for a unified Finnish national identity revived interest in folk-arts, stemming from a Romantic idealization of rural life and folk-culture. In 1879, Fanny Churberg, originally a painter, turned towards what she designated the “applied arts” and founded the Friends of Finnish Handicrafts. “Fennomania,” or the craze for all things related to the perceived genuine Fennic culture, was at the heart of Churberg’s organization that aimed at finding and developing a “Finnish style” based on folk art traditions. [4] In this world of pastoral and domestic bliss, crafts and folklore are central tenants of life; singing is primarily a men’s activity, and handicraft the women’s chore and pastime, as is painted in this idyllic scene, written by Churberg: Weaving and singing are tandem crafts, drawing on tradition and imagination to create beauty from the homely. Weaving is an act of pure creation, almost devotional in its transcendent simplicity.

Concurrent with traditional domestic handicraft is the husband’s oral performance of the “Kalevala’s ancient verse.” The Kalevala is originally a mythology and oral-poetic tradition native to Karelia, an ancient, dynamic set of characters and stories unified in the unique rhythm and repetition of the verse. During the Finnish National Movement, this tradition was claimed as the Finnish heritage, to be used as a foundation for the language and culture of a new nation. Elias Lӧnnrot’s 1849 Kalevala text, drawn from the stories and performances of the folk-poets, came to represent the movement and continues to shape Finnish identity today, a century after independence.

The Kalevala is a rich tradition to examine not only for its wide influence and dramatic story, but for the complex issues of recording oral traditions it presents. “The ambiguity between the Kalevala as a published work and the Kalevala as an oral folk expression through the runo-singers” [6] is emblematic of the challenge at the heart of oral poetry scholarship. When no two performances are exactly the same and each singer has their own version of the myths and stories, how can one define a canon? When a tradition is by nature oral, can written text do it justice? Lӧnnrot’s Kalevala has become the epic poem of Finland, inspiring countless works of art and becoming a pillar around which Finnish nationalism was built. The characters and stories from the larger folk tradition live on primarily in the narrative which Lӧnnrot curated, which is a limited selection that collapses characters and plots to serve a cohesive narrative. As Thomas A. DuBois, scholar of Finnish folk poetry, aptly explains: In creating an epic “according to literary standards current among European Romanticists,” [8] Lӧnnrot made a nationally, and internationally, intelligible narrative that did not rely on having an audience familiar with the characters and stories of the ancient folk tradition. Since then, Lӧnnrot’s Kalevala has been integrated back into traditional singers’ repertoire, reshaping the tradition. [9]

Although the work of other scholars and poem-collectors, such as Thomas A. DuBois, provide a more academic archive of the oral tradition, I use Lönnrot’s Kalevala as I am more interested in the Finnish identity and society that this text promotes and helped to shape, not in the one from it is drawn. Indeed, collections of poems from the same tradition show great discrepancies in Lönnrot’s version and the extent to which it is a curated collection with a nationalistic goal. As Elias Friberg, a translator of the text, acknowledges:

While this curated, and perhaps forced, story line that splices together many voices is far from a perfect documentation of the larger Kalevala tradition, it is the version that Finns today know, and has been a seminal part of developing a Finnish identity in the past two centuries. The Kalevala is part and parcel of the traditional Finnish culture it transmits; “amidst all this folkloristic material the Kalevala stands out as unique, as the representative work of the Finnish national genius.” [11] Far from a documentation of Finnish cultural history or memory, Lönnrot’s Kalevala was a text designed and destined to shape a national Finnish identity, “a view of the past to be taken as a view of the future.” [12] Soon after its publication, the Kalevala became a pillar of Finnish history, studied in schools and celebrated on a yearly Kalevala Day. [13] It both represents and has created “an ethnic memory for the Finns, at the root not of our history, but of our historical consciousness.” [14]

The Finnish language, at the heart of the project to create a Finnish identity and part of the impetus to record the Kalevala as a uniquely Finnish folklore, is linguistically complex and unrelated to most languages. Thus, the translator of the Kalevala is faced with a task that is immensely difficult—not only is the poetry rooted in a very specific cultural milieu and symbolic imagery, it is also structured, in meter and repetition, in ways that are entirely inorganic in English. One of the most defining elements of Finnish folk poetry is the trochaic tetrameter and musicality of the repetitive structure, which, as Ants Oras laments, translators of the Kalevala have struggled to capture:

Eino Friberg has fulfilled Oras’s prophecy of such a rendering, providing a translation that is closer to what he deems the “joy” of the poems. An American-Finn, Friberg dedicated himself to the Kalevala, committing much of it to memory and familiarizing himself thoroughly with the weight and rhythm of the text. As Friberg’s editor describes, this translation is “conscious of the fact that Finnish is a quantitative and not a qualitative language, and that, within the apparent regularity of the trochaic tetrameter of the Kalevala line, there are large possibilities for variety.” Friberg captures the playfulness and flexibility embedded in the folk tradition, focusing on “subtle shifts in the metrical structure of its verses, and of the necessity for the binding force of alliteration” rather than literal equivalencies. [16] For these reasons, among others, I use Friberg’s translation in tandem with Lönnrot’s Finnish text.

The Kalevala tradition is one of craft—not only are the stories and style of singing a learned art, but the singing is understood to belong to a world of craft. As the singer in the prelude to the first runo [17] explains, his songs were learned at home: Before he begins to spin his tale, the singer pays tribute to the tradition of song and craft that he has inherited. His songs are part of the shared folklore, for and of the domestic domain, telling of characters and plots well known to his audience. However, these songs are not the exact ones he learned as a child, nor will they ever be sung again in the exact same way. In an oral poetic tradition, each performance is unique, crafted in the moment by the singer—a temporal, physical, and ephemeral thing. As Albert Lord, a pioneering scholar of oral traditions, writes of the singer: There is an internalized structure at the heart of oral traditions that provides the singer with the tools and the potential to generate new combinations.

Lönnrot shares something in common with this singer; this prelude to the Kalevala is Lönnrot’s bow to the rich culture he is drawing from. For “it is erroneous to read the Kalevala as a simple concatenation of fascicles: far from being passive clay to be thrown together arbitrarily, the material was pre-shaped by the generation of runo-singers who had committed it to memory, and thus capable of even larger structures in the hands of the right transmitter.” [20] Through a process of combining, collapsing, augmenting, and editing, Lönnrot created a larger, selective narrative from the wealth of Finnish folklore. While it may not be the “successfully reconstituted original whole, which would bespeak the soul of the Finnish people,” [21] of some kind of singular Kalevala story, it is in line with the inherited language of the Kalevala tradition, now translated from oral to textual. Like the singer, Lönnrot is drawing from a repository of common content and schemas and creating a new moment of storytelling.

To return to the singer who invokes his parents engaged in their crafts—the singer, too, is commencing a crafting activity, a process requiring skill, labor, and time that employs a learned technique but is shaped by the individual’s personal style. His activity is not unprecedented, as singing Kalevala runos necessitates knowledge of the characters and their stories as well as comfort with the trochaic rhythm, which takes years of listening, learning, and training with a master singer. Drawing from the collective cultural memory and his repository of images and phrases, the runo-singer is piecing together a rhapsody, a new combination of similar elements. With each line, he is adding a thread to the unique textile of this telling.

The singer’s craft is mirrored in the stories he tells, where the world is full of crafters. In the Kalevala, the world is a crafted place, shaped by the gods and malleable in the hands of the powerful. The earth itself is created by Ilmatar, the air-daughter and water-mother, crafted from pieces of eggshell and the seawater. After centuries of passive floating and wandering, Ilmatar begins an active, physical process of crafting. “Where she gave her hand a turn” the land was separated from water and “where her foot struck the bottom” grottoes formed; “where her side had scraped the land,” “where she turned her foot,” and “wherever her head touched land” she shaped the land into its present form. By her hand were “made the little islands” and “raised the hidden reefs,” the “pillars for the sky were planted, / Lands and continents created; / on the rocks the writs were written / And the signs drawn on the cliffs” [22] Ilmatar’s earth is a handicraft product, both created and dynamic. It is an artistic object in as much as it is consciously, carefully built into a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts; it is a dynamic product in that it is the proto-form of a changeable, changing landscape that will evolve beyond this temporally finite creation process.

After eons wandering the seas, Ilmatar sets “to work on her creations, / Hastens on her handiwork.” [23] Her process is one of handicraft, of creating with her hands and body. In the Finnish, she “alkoi luoa luomiansa” [24] or, verbatim, “began to create her creation.” Luoda, or “luoa” in the non-standard, antiquated folk-spelling, is the verb to “create,” the same word used in the book of Genesis in Finnish. [25] Luoda is also an important action for weavers, as “luoda loimi” is to warp a loom, the process of threading and tying the warp strings to prepare the loom for weaving. Ilmatar’s creation is not just an act of genesis but a process in which she crafts the Earth out of elements.

With the turn of a hand or foot, Ilmatar shapes the world. What Friberg translates as “where she gave her hand a turn,” “Where her side had scraped the land,” and “Where she turned her foot to landward” are all uses of the verb kääntää in Finnish. Kääntää can mean, among others, to turn or turn over, to invert, or to translate. In the Finnish “kussa kättä käänähytti” [26] (“Where she gave her hand a turn”), the alliterative k, so pervasive in the Finnish language and especially in the Kalevala, creates three folds in the line. The repeated hard sound breaks the softer vowels and t sounds, creating three peaks and emphasizing the longer last word, the turning point from this line to the one that follows. Just as the warp strings press down on the continuous weft to form distinct bumps, so, too, do the k sounds mark three distinct words.

Turning is a fundamental part of weaving: the alternating direction of the shuttle, the turning of the weft thread around the last warp string, the resultant curving, wave-like pattern of an over-under threaded weft. Turning is also a fundamental aspect of poetry, and the turn, or line break, shapes the meaning, reception, and form of a poem. The poet employs this tool, and many others, to shape words into the specific rhythm and form of the poem; the poet turns the weft of imagery through the warp of structure, meter, and rhyme. To turn is to be engaged in translating material into product, thoughts into words.

Not only does Ilmatar shape the earth, but she populates it by creating Väinämöinen, the first man. She, the oldest of creation’s daughters” and “the oldest of all women,” is the “primal mother of all humans.” [27] Humans are the crafted product of the gods, who are in turn the daughters and sons of the God, Jumala, “belovéd father of the heavens” and “paternal ruler of the sky.” [28] This highly familial hierarchy is a kind of craft process in itself: all of creation is the result of craft, tied to some fundamental connection between genesis, progeny and legacy, between naming, claiming, and crafting. The world and its fate are created by the almighty. People are both the product and tools of Jumala’s craft: as the healing man in Runo 9 chants, anointing Väinämöinen’s wounded body: God is skillful, the most valuable and powerful of qualities in this world. It is the “silk of Jumala” that creates and protects us—us, the delicate, textile matter of creation.

This parallel, of a familial structure and a crafting process, is present throughout the Kalevala. From the lineage that the runo-singer invokes before he begins to tell his tale, as explored above, to the many descriptions of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, and daughters-in-law at home, the framework of the Kalevala mythology is one of familial ties, inseparable from the domestic spaces they operate within. Simultaneously, from Ilmatar the ur-mother to the young, new wife, the Kalevala is populated with craftspeople who shape their fate and their environment through the words and objects they manipulate.

Daughters are the domestic crafters, turning raw material into wealth. The goddesses, daughters of the cosmos, are celestial craftswomen—the Moonmaid weaves gold and the Sunmaid spins silver—crafting nature’s precious elements. On earth, daughters are weavers, weaving the cloth that will clothe the family, protecting them from the elements and demonstrating their wealth. A daughter is a potential wife, whose value comes from her skill in making a house a home, providing material comforts for her husband. When the young, presumptuous Joukahainen dares to challenge the mighty singer Väinämöinen, he promises his sister Aino to Väinämöinen in exchange for his release. He entices Väinämöinen like so: As the weavers of textiles and the crafters of the home, women’s worth is partly measured in their skill as craftswomen. The quality of their dress and dowry demonstrates not only the wealth of their family, but the quality of their skill.

Thus, skill is an attractive quality. For example, the fabled Northern Maiden, [31] sought after and fought over as the center of much of the Kalevala’s action, is not only “fair” and “famed afar on land and sea,” but she is a weaver as well. [32] This mystical beauty appears in the sky above Väinämöinen, heard before she is seen. Her activity, her craft, alerts Väinämöinen to her presence as “overhead he heard a humming, / Heard the whirring of a shuttle.” [33] She is “sat upon the rainbow’s rim,” shimmering and radiant, as she weaves a cloth of gold and silver: Her ability to weave “nimbly” [35] is analogous to her replying “skillfully” [36] and “cunningly” [37] to Väinämöinen’s advances with “wily words” [38] and increasingly difficult tasks to foil his quest for her hand in marriage. Aptitude in tactile crafts seems to transfer, at least for women, to skill with words.

Just as the maiden weaves, so too do the words playfully weave an image of her beauty and activity. The flowing lines and rhythmic alliteration mirror the swooping shuttle and bobbing bobbin; the humming heddles and squeaking batten are the constant sound of the machine at work, like the steady meter and small variations always at play. In the original Finnish, the above excerpt reads: With balanced symmetry, the lines of the first four lines above resonate with striking regularity and consonance. The two-word lines of nearly equal length suggest the careful weaving of the Rainbow Maiden that they describe. The set of three-word lines that follow quicken the pace of this verbal throwing of the shuttle back and forth as the description turns to the moving mechanisms of the loom. The pattern of trios in this new stanza is notably interrupted with a line that rings with familiarity. Nearly a repetition of a previous line, this final line ties the image together, drawing the weaving imagery to a close. The aspiratory h and s sounds soften the sharper consonants describing the active weaving as the activity slows, leading up to Väinämöinen’s interruption of the weaving woman.

Word-craft is not only a feature of, and evident in, the words of the runo-singers, but is extremely powerful within the world of the Kalevala. Indeed, words are at the root of power and prowess in the Kalevala. Through words the environment can be manipulated, fates can be changed, and elemental powers can be wielded. Much of the power of the incantations and songs comes from knowing the right words to use. Knowing the name and origin of an object or an element gives the singer power over said object: in several poems, characters compete to demonstrate superior knowledge of the origin of the world or sing to their weapons to be able to wield their full power. As Friberg appends to his translation, in the Karelian culture from which the Kalevala grew there was a taboo against “naming since the person doing the naming thus gained power over the thing named.” [40] This is evident throughout the Kalevala, including in the multitude of names used to identify each character. Within the Kalevala and in the singing of these stories by the runo-singers, “the most powerful magic is in the knowledge of the origin word. To know the birth and breeding of a thing or person, to reveal it, recite it, and name it is to have power over it.” [41]

Väinämöinen, the hero of the Kalevala, is a wordsmith, a singer so talented that he can bend nature to his will with words and sing his enemies into ruin. Born at the origin of the world already as an old man, he is the wisest and most prolific of singers in a world where those with the power of song are closest to the divine. Väinämöinen is the master singer, endowed with the power of the homeros, like the runo-singer is joining together characters, stories, and word patterns he has used before into a new performance of song. Within this song, Väinämöinen is Homer, creating the precise combinations of words that will allow him to shape the world around him.

As the ur-singer, Väinämöinen is in some ways constantly creating and recreating the world. He is the father of all poets, the original singer and source of all stories. He is “always singing, night or day,” in the glades and heaths of his homeland Väinolä, He is the “knower eternal” (82), the “eternal singer” (123), renowned throughout the world.

Väinämöinen is not, however the only character who possesses the power of words. Many others call on the gods to aid them in their ploys, summon the depths of their emotions to lend power to their words, or sing of the origin of materials and objects to gain access to their power. Multiple times in the Kalevala, Väinämöinen is challenged to a singing competition by a daring foe who doubts his power or is fooled by a disguise. When young Joukahainen, a plucky, envious Lappish boy, hears of the “wondrous charms recited, / And that magic songs were sung” in Väinolä, better runos than he knew, “better than his father taught him,” he is incensed (24–9). He is determined to challenge Väinämöinen, despite his parents’ warnings.

When he crashes carriages with Väinämöinen on the road, he demands a “game” of singing in which “He who has the greater knowledge, / He who has the mightier memory” will win the right of way. Väinämöinen feigns a modest talent and entreats the young man to go first, and tell what he knows. As he demonstrates his knowledge of nature and topography, Väinämöinen berates him for his triviality, calling it “childish notions” and “woman’s tattle,” not suitable for “bearded men” (176–77). Again, the young man sings of the world, telling of creation and causing Väinämöinen to accuse him of lying, as he was not there at the origin of the world (which, of course, Väinämöinen was). Angered, Joukahainen draws his sword and taunts Väinämöinen when he will not draw in turn. Väinämöinen is incensed; he will not tolerate being mocked or attacked, and least of all threatened with physical weapons. Väinämöinen sings and the earth shakes—“cliffs were cracking, boulders breaking” (283). He enchants Joukahainen’s sword, crossbow, sleigh, dog, and his clothes into parts of the scenery, elements of nature. Finally, he sings Joukahainen into a quicksand swamp, and the trapped and terrorized young man pleas “Wise Väinämöinen, knower eternal, / Now reverse your incantations / And call back your magic spells!” (331–2). Joukahainen offers all he has as ransom for his life, trying to appease the magician as he sinks into the swamp. Finally, he promises his sister for Väinämӧinen’s wife, an offer that is accepted.

With joy and anticipation of his reward, the old singer undoes the charm: Just as undoing a length of woven textile requires a reversal of the weaving process, a backwards-weaving, so too are charms undone through reversal. As Friberg notes: “charms, good or bad, could be undone if they were reversed, that is, said backwards.” [45] To say, let alone sing, something backwards is, presumably, very difficult. As is captured above, to manipulate the power of words is a laborious process in and of itself, and even more so when it used to undo previous creations. Väinämöinen sings for three hours to reverse his charms, an exhibition not only of the intricacy of the vocal craft, but the staying power of well-crafted magic. Like a well-woven textile, a sound charm is a tightly wound, carefully composed, and sturdy text. To undo such woven rows on a loom requires that each step of the weaving process is done in reverse, an awkward break in the flow of the weaving, and a slower process than creating. This demonstrates that not only is Väinämöinen’s magic packed with power, but is surely also a suggestion of the skill of the singer of the Kalevala poem itself, a testament to the hidden complexities of the warp and weft of the words.

Indeed, in the Kalevala world the craft of language is closely related to manual labor and physical acts of creation. As one recorded Finnish folk poem demonstrates, each word is an important, valuable possession: Later in the poem, Väinämöinen fells the trees that have grown from the bodies of the dead singing ancestors, and at the base of these trees “he found a pair of words— / even as many as three.” [47] Words are the base unit of knowledge and therefore power in this magical world. This transfers gracefully from a state within the text to a commentary on the nature of the oral text itself. Just as Väinämöinen is in need of three specific, missing words, so too is the runo-singer searching for each word carefully. And for each specific singer, this choice will be different. As Lord writes of oral traditions in general: “At all stages in our musings about oral epic we find it necessary to recreate in our imagination not a general but a specific moment of performance. The singing bard must be our guide; and the singing bard is never a type, but an individual.” [48] The runo-singer is a guide, creating, like Väinämöinen, a world to fit his needs, a world that necessarily follows from the word that came before.

Word-smiths are not the only ones with power. Ilmarinen is another important character, a metalsmith who can forge magical objects. Like Ilmatar, his name indicates that he is of the air, connected to the very elemental origins of the world. Like Väinämöinen, his powers have shaped the physical world; Ilmarinen was part of the creation of the earth, for

The birth of the world required the skill of craftspeople, of Ilmatar’s hand and Ilmarinen’s hammer. “When the world was uncreate, / Not a thread of string yet made,” Ilmarinen forged the sky. [50] Thus, Ilmarinen’s craft is another kind of ur-craft. Before the threads of life could come together, the hammer had to shape the world. Nor is this kind of craft unrelated to the power of words. Runo 9 tells the story of the birth of iron, the knowledge of which is necessary to use and mold this strong metal. Words hold knowledge and names carry power, necessary to crafting of magical objects. Ilmarinen’s skill, a combination of his power over his materials and his finesse with his tools, is unique. Though the goddesses may weave precious gold and silver, it is the smithy who can turn these into items of use. As the witch Louhi tells Väinämöinen:

Väinämӧinen’s words and wealth, separately, cannot get him what he wants. For what Louhi wants combines all of these powers in craft. She wants a magic mill, a source of eternal resources, the mythic Sampo. When Väinämöinen cannot fulfill this request, he sends Ilmarinen to do her bidding. For there is none but he who can make it, there is no one else Ilmarinen’s powers come from his ability to craft a powerful object from raw materials of lesser value. Words and objects may hold inherent value, but power lies with those who can most skillfully manipulate them. Thus, the most powerful characters are those who are most skillful in their craft, through which they can harness energy beyond their own bodies to shape the world to their benefit.

The Kalevala abounds in examples of world-building through word and craft, far too numerous for the scope of this project. I will focus specifically on Runo 15, “The Resurrection,” and the relationship and actions related to it, of particular interest for the intricate intersection of themes at this moment in the Kalevala. Craft, magic, family, womanhood, and power all collide in this story of a mother resurrecting her son.

Lemminkäinen is a hot-headed, unruly son, wont to seek out adventure and conflict. Several times in the Kalevala he sets out on dangerous or ill-fated quests, despite his mother’s persistent warning. Proud and self-assured, he seeks success and victory, and will not stand for any doubt of his powers with swords or words. In Runo 11, to prove that he is better than his low-class, poor station in life, Lemminkäinen steals a respectable islander maiden, Kyllikki, for his wife. His new wife brings temporary peace to his home, pleasing his mother and tempering his wanderlust. The young couple makes a pact: Lemminkäinen will obey Kyllikki’s wishes and not go to war, and she in turn will not “gad about the village.” [53] When Kyllikki disobeys in the following poem, Runo 12, Lemminkäinen rushes off to war, to find and fight for a new bride. He vows that he will win one of the renowned virgins of Pohjola, the witch Louhi’s beautiful daughters, to the despair of Kyllikki and “heedless of his mother’s warnings / And against her dire dissuasions.” [54]

Lemminkäinen’s mother wisely warns her son of the foreign powers of the northern people, begging him not to go “without the knowledge of their magic, / Without the skill to match their spells.” [55] His mother knows the limits of his powers better than he, and foresees that his quest will be the “downfall of lithe Lemminkäinen.” She is not swayed by his boastful claims, tempering them so: She is the clairvoyant voice of reason, blunt and unpoetic—clairvoyant, specifically, because her warnings seem to stem from some vision of the future, an intuitive understand of how the various threads of the present scenario will weave together in the future. But, of course, her irrational son pays her no heed, and leaves to meet his doom.

When he reaches Pohjola, Lemminkäinen is presented with a series of near-impossible tasks to complete to win a bride. His final task is to shoot the swan of Tuonela, the river of death, with a single arrow. In Runo 14, Lemminkäinen travels to “Death’s dark river” of “angry rapids” and a “sacred whirlpool” in pursuit of Death’s bird. Death’s herdsman, the blind guardian of the land of death, is expecting Lemminkäinen and rouses “up a water dragon / Stalk of cowbane from the river; / Thrust it through the man’s heart.” [57] While a blind guardian, a sightless cowherd would appear to be oxymoronic, or at least ineffective, there is power in his physical disability. Like Tiresias and Odysseus, this blind man seems to have gained prophetic foresight with the loss of physical sight. Like the wise words of Lemminkäinen’s mother, who is often unpoetic and concise, holding great knowledge, the blind man’s marred sight holds great insight.

The cowherd preempts Lemminkäinen’s approach and deadly quest and is prepared to defend the land of the dead. Though the means of his magic are unclear, it is still related to his craft, of sorts, the craft of cow-herding. As Friberg addends to the text, the blind cowherd “conjures up what appears to be a water-snake but is, in actuality, a poisonous stalk of cowbane or water hemlock.” [58] His task of protecting Death’s cattle presumably makes him aware of the presence of the highly poisonous cowbane that may kill his herd. This knowledge provides fatal power to his defensive attack.

Lemminkäinen, fatally poisoned, agonizes over his actions. He regrets, not the actions that led to this violent situation, but an omission he made at home. He laments: Here, then, is a critical moment of acknowledgment of motherly power. Not only did dismissing his mother’s warnings lead to this fatal blow, but in failing to recognize her as a valuable resource, he does not have the tools to save himself. Lemminkäinen did not respect his mother’s knowledge—not of the world and its people, nor of charms and magic—and thus traps himself. While it could be argued that Lemminkäinen’s mother is also culpable, in omitting to prepare her son with the appropriate charms, she is hardly aware of her own powers. Not only is Lemminkäinen too ill-tempered to be likely to take the time to learn from his mother, but, as will be evidenced below, she does not have full command of her own strength, in knowledge and action, until she is truly desperate.

While Friberg notes, referring to Runo 3, that “throughout the Kalevala women, especially mothers, are treated with high and tender respect even by such disobedient sons as … Lemminkäinen” (Friberg, 367, Note 2 for Runo 3), I argue that this claim is preemptive. The mothers of the Kalevala are indeed powerful, important characters, but “tender respect” is an overstatement of the reception they receive. The witch Louhi, Mistress of Pohjola, protects her coveted daughters from the constant barrage of suitors seeking their hands in marriage. She is a powerful matriarch, a formidable wielder of magic words, and a devious negotiator. However, she is the antagonist of the Kalevala, presenting the greatest challenges and threats to the male heroes and represented as mean, old, and ugly. Other mothers are less powerful, but respected within their domestic domain. Indeed, fathers are far less important than their wives in many of the stories; the goodwill of the mistress of the house is more sought after than the master’s approval. While respect may ultimately be garnered by some of these women, it is not without toil, and it often takes perilous situations for their worth to be acknowledged.

Only in desperation, or even hopelessness, does Lemminkäinen finally acknowledge his mother’s power. His final thoughts are wistfully resigned, knowing that if his mother but knew of his peril, she would save him: Again, Lemminkäinen recognizes the unique powers of his mother. Whether her singularity comes from her knowledge or by virtue of being the only person who would sacrifice her own safety for his, she alone is called for—not the young wife Kyllikki nor any of the gods. Here Lemminkäinen’s instincts prove true, for once, but it is not with hope that he calls out, for he has met his end. His mother cannot save him from the poison or the angry cowherd, who cleaves his body into pieces and throws them into Death’s angry rapids, to “wallow” in the “backwaters” of the Land of the Dead. [61]

Runo 15 begins on cue, “back at Lemminkäinen’s home” where “Mother worries, always wondering.” [62] Mother is tormented with her lack of knowledge, unable to act without something to act upon. She, “even she who gave him birth,” does not know “where her own flesh now is wandering, / Where her own flesh now is flowing.” [63] The reader, or the singer and his audience, are the only ones who know of Lemminkäinen’s violent end, but are powerless to change the ancient tale. This dramatic irony not only fosters sympathy for the Mother, but further differentiates motherhood as a source of power. Without the knowledge the reader has, she cannot but anxiously wait, anticipating the worst. Presumably, had she knowledge of Lemminkäinen’s peril, she alone would be able to act, as flesh and blood of the wounded. Just as the origin of materials is so important to magic in the Kalevala, so too is the mother important to the son, as the source of his life and his only hope for salvation.

Though he neglects to ask his mother for charms to protect him on his quest, he does leave a signal of his safety. To return to Runo 12, when the jilted Lemminkäinen is rushing off to war in retaliation for Kyllikki’s breach of their pact, Lemminkäinen inadvertently enables his own miraculous resurrection. Frustrated by his mother’s persistent warning and her disbelief in his prowess when faced with the Lapps, Lemminkäinen throws the comb with which he is grooming himself against the wall. He venomously pacifies his fretful mother by offering his comb as a morbid barometer of his safety: “Lemminkäinen will be lost / And the noble boy be ruined / When that comb begins to bleed / And that brush turns red with blood.” [64] The comb becomes the vessel for potential news as mother and wife anxiously await Lemminkäinen’s return. In Runo 15 we return to the farm, where Kyllikki spends her days scanning the horizon for her husband’s approaching figure, and “evenings gazing on his comb, / Mornings looking at his brush” hoping for and dreading news. When, “upon a certain day / … / From his comb the blood was leaking, / From his brush the gore was seeping,” Kyllikki is despondent, immediately declaring her husband “vanished” from the world of the living. [65] Her words are of finality, measured declarations of her loss.

When Lemminkäinen’s mother, however, sees the bleeding brush, “her eyes filled up with tears” and she cries out her “misery” and wretchedness. She declares her son not gone, but “overtaken,” “fallen on some evil chance”. Whereas the brush is previously described, in the action of the poem and by Kyllikki, as “leaking” blood and “seeping” gore, the mother finds it to be “pouring” blood and “gushing gore.” [66] Her reaction is more visceral, spurring her to action. Whether she believes he is still alive and can be saved or does not dare hope but needs to know what happened, the Mother leaves at once to find her son. While it takes Lemminkäinen three days by sleigh to reach Pohjola, the Mother “ran and rushed along” and reaches there “soon” by her own power. [67] The urgency of her motherly instinct to care for and know about her son has seemingly made her super-human.

This is further evidenced by the gall and magical powers she seems to acquire in this state of urgency. She rushes to Louhi, the Mistress of Pohjola, and demands to know what ill-fated quest he was sent on. When Louhi claims to not know, the Mother persists, calling Louhi a liar, a bold accusation to make against a powerful character, one who is usually approached with fear and obedience. Not only does she persist, calling Louhi a liar twice, but the Mother also threatens her outright. She first targets Louhi’s possessions, threatening to break her barn door and damage her coveted sampo. When she is still not satisfied with the answer she receives, she threatens to “chant [Louhi] into ruin.” [68] Her desperation has given her not only nerve, but confidence in her chanting abilities, even against the strongest of witches. And perhaps this confidence in her magical skill is not unfounded, for upon leaving Louhi, she resumes her search for her son in animal form. She roams the land, transforming into animals suited for each different terrain; she is first a wolf, then a bear, an otter, a badger, a hedgehog, and finally a hare. Not only is she able to speak to the natural objects and elements around her, which appears to be part and parcel of the Kalevala world, but she has a vitality and an understanding of the natural world that aides her in her search.

When her search is still unsuccessful, she turns to the sun for news of her son: It is the sun that helps the despairing mother to find her son, and heeds her call again when she asks him to shine low and bright on the people of dark Deathland, to tire them out and keep her safe from their evil powers. While the duality of sun/son is not paralleled in the original Finnish, what the above text has translated as “sun” could also be “day”—päivyt in the original, which is alliterative with poika/poikasi (boy or son). Here again we see how Friberg crafts the English language—through homophones and word play, for example—to approximate the playful language and complex structures of the Kalevala.

Before she can retrieve her son’s body, she goes to Ilmarinen to ask for a tool to salvage her son from the River of Death. Ilmarinen makes her a copper rake with “teeth a hundred fathoms long, / Five hundred fathoms for the handle.” [70] Though powerful and seemingly growing in power as her urgency mounts, the Mother is still dependent on the knowledge and skill of others. She cannot exert the same control over the environment as the Sun, and she cannot make the tools she needs, and so she turns to the smith. Her magic and crafting skills are limited to her own body.

Using this copper rake of epic proportions, Lemminkäinen’s mother retrieves the mangled body of her son from the black river. As she reassembles the dismembered body, she incants over the limbs and wounds, calling on the goddesses to weave the broken body back together. It is an incredible moment of overlap between poetic, magical, and physical joining. With a vocabulary of crafting, she begs the gods to tie, knot, sew, and weave the sinews and blood vessels together. She invokes Suonetar, the goddess of blood and veins, asking her to “Come and bind the veins together, / Neatly knit them end to end.” [71] In case it is too much to ask of Suonetar, Lemminkäinen’s mother calls upon the air-goddess Ilmatar, to navigate the arteries of her son’s body and repair the blood vessels. “Take a needle thin as mist, / Threaded with a silken thread, / Sew the bleeding ends together, / Neatly knit with silken fiber” she directs the goddess, her hands stitching together her son’s dismembered body while her words weave together the power of the divine, a rhapsody of knowledge and magic. [72]

As the image returns to the specificity of the body in front of the grieving mother, we can imagine her urgently stitching her son’s wounds with this stream of incantations guiding her. She sends her prayers to the heavens and channels the gods’ powers into her work, hoping for life to return to the mangled body. She has woven a web of charms, has been the homeros force, joining her manual skill and labor with the power of the goddesses she calls upon. It is a moment where the singing is most clearly an incantation, a prayer for strength and success in the face of the impossible.

Research suggests that it is only in the romanticized version by Lӧnnrot that the ill-fated son is resurrected. In another version of Lemminkäinen’s story, sung by a different runo-singer and not collected by Lönnrot, Lemminkäinen’s mother speaks to the dead, asking him if he can still become a full man: Here, the mother’s work is futile, there is no way to bring a soul back to her son’s body; her rhapsody is not successful, the reconstructed body does not reconstruct the soul. If Lemminkäinen’s mother is unsuccessful, the power of craft and motherhood must be questioned. Is her failure due to an imperfect or less skillful weaving process, or was her goal always impossible? If she had recovered her son’s heart from “down there” would he have come back to life; is the soul contained within that heart, or is the life-force extra-corporeal? If her failure is her own doing, then there is a limit to the power of motherly love and the utility of craft. Her labors are unable to undo death and the damage of Death’s river, and thus the gods have the final say.

Not resurrected, Lemminkäinen’s mangled body is just a poor attempt to reconstruct God’s creation, a useless, lifeless mass of limbs. Like a cloth that has been shredded, cutting the natural unravelling pattern of the thread, Lemminkäinen’s body parts can no longer reconstitute a true whole. In Lönnrot’s version, however, the body has merely unraveled, and can still be reworked. Like a textile that has unraveled, but retains the integrity of the component parts, the materials still have the potential to make a whole.

Salvation is possible, but, as with finding her son and raking the river, not by the labor of her motherly love alone. Through her careful knitting and knotting, interweaving her handiwork and incantations to the gods, Lemminkäinen’s mother is able to “put him back together again,” into “his former shape.” [74] But it is just the shape of him, his corporeal vessel, for, “though her magic healed the veins, / Neatly knit the veins together, / Yet she could not give him words, / Could not charm his tongue to talking.” [75] Life, vitality, soul, breath—these are equated to the possession of words, to the activity of talking. In a world where words can shape fate, to lack words is to lack life. The mother, still determined, “put it into words, / She herself declared and said” [76] what it was she still needed, what her powers could not achieve. And through the power of her words, she finds a way to revive her son, “that the man may gain his words, / Break out singing as of yore.” [77]

With the help of a honey bee, she creates a balm with which to anoint her son. She speaks “the spell of waking” [78] and Lemminkäinen awakens, rising from his slumber. “Now he has the words again / To relate what happened to him.” [79] With the return of his words, he is returned to life; with the return of his power to explain himself, so his fate is once again in his own hands. The mother’s first expression is admonishment, telling Lemminkäinen: She indirectly reminds Lemminkäinen of his folly and disobedience. When, however, Lemminkäinen relates how the cowherd vanquished him, the Mother is harsher in her chastising: She is incredulous, frustrated that her massive labor to resurrect her son was caused by a simple ignorance about the dangers of a common water hemlock. She then immediately recites the “charm of origin” [82] for cowbane, turning the moment of resurrection into a lesson. Then she nurses her son back to health, back not only to his former self but “a little better than before / And more gentle than of old.” [83] When she asks her son “anxiously” if there is “anything amiss,” [84] doubting the skill of her craft, Lemminkäinen has the nerve to say he is still pining for the Northern Maiden. This time, however, the mother will not stand for any disobedience, demanding that he forget his ill-fated quest, thank the gods for his good luck, and return home with her. And so he does, setting out “homeward with his mother, / With his most devoted mother, / With his much respected parent.” [85]

The mother’s ultimate power is authority, gaining obedience and respect from her son. All her epic searching, travelling, battling, and creating is for the simple, yet nearly impossible, goal of having her son return home. She succeeds in this, for now, and Lemminkäinen returns home with her, to his waiting wife, alive and well. Though her goals were familial and relied on her domestic knowledge of charms and handicraft skills, her achievements are of divine proportions. She is the only character to resurrect another in the Kalevala, she is the only one who is able to counter Death’s damage. Through her motherhood and through her crafting skill—able to weave both powerful charms and durable stitches—she is able to conquer the strongest magic of all.