Aino's tragedy

At a Glance

• Central figures: Joukahainen, a young singer from the north; his sister Aino, a girl at home by the lake; Väinämöinen, the old sage of Kalevala; and Aino’s mother, who welcomed the match.
• Setting: The forests and shores of Kalevala and the cold waters beyond, in the world of the Kalevala - the Finnish national epic compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian oral poetry.
• The turn: Joukahainen, sinking in a swamp and losing a singing-contest to Väinämöinen, offers his sister Aino as ransom for his life.
• The outcome: Aino, refusing to become an old man’s bride, walks into the sea and drowns. Väinämöinen later catches her as a fish but cannot hold her; she slips back into the water and is lost to him forever.
• The legacy: Aino remained in the water. Väinämöinen was left on the shore with an empty hand and an answer he had not wanted. No feast came of the betrothal. No bride crossed the threshold.

Joukahainen had been boasting again. He was young and he was loud and he had traveled south to the lands of Kalevala to challenge Väinämöinen, the eternal sage, to a singing-contest. His mother had told him not to go. His father had told him not to go. Joukahainen went.

He found Väinämöinen on the road and blocked his sleigh. He sang his best songs - songs about plowing, about roof-beams, about the depth of snow. Väinämöinen listened. Then Väinämöinen opened his mouth and sang back, and Joukahainen’s songs were nothing.

The Swamp

Väinämöinen sang the young man’s sleigh into a lake. He sang Joukahainen’s horse into a boulder on the shore. He sang Joukahainen’s hat into a cloud and his belt into stars, and then he sang Joukahainen himself waist-deep into a swamp. The boy sank to his hips. He sank to his chest. Mud crept toward his chin.

Joukahainen offered gold. Väinämöinen sang him deeper. He offered a field of barley. Deeper. He offered two boats, two stallions, a whole farmstead. Väinämöinen did not stop singing.

Then Joukahainen, with the swamp at his throat, cried out that he had a sister. Aino. Young, beautiful, good with her hands. He would give her to Väinämöinen if the old man would release him.

Väinämöinen stopped singing. The swamp loosened. Joukahainen climbed out, shaking, his clothes black with mud. He said nothing more. He rode home on a horse that was no longer a boulder, in a sleigh that was no longer a lake, and told his mother what he had done.

The Weeping at Home

Aino’s mother was glad. A match with Väinämöinen - the greatest singer in the world, the sage of Kalevala! She laughed and clapped her hands. She told Aino to put on the family’s finest things: the copper belt, the silver brooch, the linen dress that had been her grandmother’s.

Aino wept. She wept in the yard. She wept at the loom. She wept at the shore of the lake where she went to wash her face. Her brother had sold her like a sack of grain, and her mother was pleased with the price. She was to marry a man older than the pines - a man who had been born old, whose beard had been gray before her grandmother was born.

She put on the copper belt and the silver brooch because her mother told her to. She walked into the birch forest. She walked past the first grove and the second. At the third grove, she sat on a rock by the edge of the water and took off the copper belt and the silver brooch and the linen dress. She set them on the stone. She walked into the sea.

The water was cold. It took her ankles, her knees, her waist. She did not turn back. She swam toward a rock that stood out in the waves - a flat stone large enough to sit on. She reached it and climbed up, and the rock sank under her weight, and Aino sank with it. The sea closed over her head.

A hare carried the news. It ran from the shore to the cabin, and Aino’s mother asked it what it had seen. The hare told her. Her daughter was in the water. The copper belt was on the stone, and the silver brooch, and the linen dress, but Aino was gone.

Aino’s mother wept then - wept as her daughter had wept - and the tears ran down her face and became streams, and the streams became rivers, and in the rivers three stones appeared, and on the stones three birch trees grew, and in the birch trees three cuckoos sat and called. One called love, love. One called suitor, suitor. One called joy, joy. But there was no love left, no suitor worth having, and no joy in that house.

The Fish on the Line

Väinämöinen did not forget. He went to the shore with a line and a hook, because Vellamo’s daughters - the water-spirits - sometimes swam there, and he thought he might learn where Aino had gone.

He caught a fish. It was not a salmon and not a trout - something strange, silver-sided, with eyes that looked at him. He drew it into the boat and reached for his knife to clean it, and the fish spoke.

It said it had not come to be gutted on a plank. It had come to be his companion - to sit beside him, to sweep his cabin floor, to keep his fire burning. It was Aino.

The fish slipped from his hands. It fell over the side of the boat and into the water and was gone. Väinämöinen plunged his arms into the sea. He dragged a net through the shallows. He called out across the surface of the water. Nothing answered. He fished that stretch of coast for days and caught nothing that spoke.

He went home without her. He sat in his cabin in Kalevala and was old, as he had always been old, and the place beside him was empty.

The Empty Shore

Väinämöinen’s mother - or her voice, speaking from beneath the waves where she too had gone - told him to stop grieving and go to Pohjola to seek a bride. There were daughters in the north, she said. Louhi had daughters.

Väinämöinen listened. He built a boat and turned his prow toward Pohjola.

Behind him, the copper belt still lay on the stone by the sea. The silver brooch tarnished in the salt air. The linen dress rotted in the rain. Aino did not come back. She stayed in the water, in whatever shape the water had given her - a fish, a spirit, a current running deep below the surface where no line could reach.

Her brother Joukahainen sat in his mother’s house and said nothing about it. He had won free of the swamp. The mud had washed off his clothes. But the thing he had traded to get free - that was still gone, and no singing could bring it back.