Battle with Louhi
At a Glance
- Central figures: Väinämöinen, the eternal sage and singer; Ilmarinen, the master smith; Lemminkäinen, the reckless warrior; and Louhi, the Mistress of Pohjola, sorceress of the dark north.
- Setting: The open sea between Pohjola and Kalevala, in the world of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian oral poetry.
- The turn: After the heroes steal back the Sampo from Louhi’s stronghold, she pursues them across the sea with fog, storm, and finally her own body transformed into a monstrous bird of war.
- The outcome: The Sampo is shattered in the struggle and sinks to the bottom of the sea; only fragments wash ashore, enough to seed the fields of Kalevala but never to restore the mill’s full power.
- The legacy: The broken Sampo remains on the seabed. Väinämöinen gathers what fragments he can from the shore and plants them in the earth of Kalevala, where they bring partial plenty - grain enough, but not the endless wealth the whole Sampo once ground.
The Sampo was already in the boat. Ilmarinen had lifted it from the copper mountain inside Pohjola where Louhi had locked it behind nine locks, rooted it into the living rock with roots that went three fathoms deep. He had worked through those roots with his hands and his knowledge of metals. Väinämöinen had sung the locks open. Lemminkäinen had stood watch with a sword and an inability to keep quiet.
Now they were rowing. The sea was black and flat and the shoreline of Pohjola was falling behind them, and for a little while the three men believed they had gotten away clean.
Lemminkäinen’s Song
Lemminkäinen could not help himself. He never could. The boat was cutting through still water, the Sampo sat heavy in the stern grinding nothing yet but radiating a warmth like banked coals, and the silence made him restless.
He began to sing.
Väinämöinen told him to stop. There were cranes sleeping on the cape of Pohjola, and the sound would carry over that black water like a stone skipped across ice. Lemminkäinen did not stop. He sang louder - some boasting song, something about his own strength and cleverness, the kind of song a young man sings when he wants the world to hear.
The cranes woke. They rose screaming from the cape in a great ragged column, and their screaming woke the dogs in Louhi’s yard, and the dogs woke Louhi.
She went to the copper mountain. She found the locks broken, the roots torn, the chamber empty. The Sampo was gone.
The Fog and the Reef
Louhi did not chase them with a boat. She stood on the shore of Pohjola and called to Ukko, the old god of the sky, and asked for fog. It came - a fog so thick the men could not see the water beneath the oars. The boat stopped. They drifted. The sea made no sound.
Väinämöinen cut his hand and let blood fall into the water. He sang the fog apart - not all at once, but enough to see a boat-length ahead, then two, then ten. The singing took hours. While he sang, Ilmarinen bailed water that had crept in through the hull planks, and Lemminkäinen sat with his sword across his knees and said nothing for once.
The fog thinned. They rowed.
Then Louhi called up a storm. Wind hit the boat broadside and the sea rose in walls of black water. Waves tore the kantele - Väinämöinen’s pike-bone kantele, the first one he had ever made - from the side of the boat and swept it into the deep. Väinämöinen watched it go. He could not reach it. The instrument that had made fish rise and birds settle and trees lean to listen sank into the cold Baltic dark and was gone.
He sang against the storm, but the storm was strong and Louhi’s fury was feeding it. Ilmarinen forged something at the bottom of the boat - a great iron anchor, or a brace, or something to hold them steady. The accounts differ. What matters is they did not sink.
Louhi Comes Herself
When the storm was not enough, Louhi came herself.
She gathered every sword and scythe and rusted blade in Pohjola. She strapped them to her arms. She built herself wings from boat-planks and stretched a cape of dark cloth between them. She put claws of iron on her feet. Then she rose into the air - enormous, a thing like a hawk and a ship and a woman all at once, bristling with metal, her shadow blotting the water beneath her.
She had warriors clinging to her wings and her tail. A hundred men of Pohjola, armed and screaming, riding their mistress like a warship through the sky.
She landed on the mast of the boat. The mast bent. The whole vessel groaned and listed hard to one side.
Väinämöinen looked up at her. He did not sing. He reached under the seat and pulled the steering oar from its lock - a great oak oar, heavy as a beam - and swung it at Louhi’s claws.
The Sampo Breaks
The blow knocked Louhi’s grip loose. She slid from the mast and caught the gunwale with her iron claws. Warriors fell screaming into the sea. Lemminkäinen cut at her with his sword. Ilmarinen struck at her talons with a hammer he had forged that morning from a piece of the boat’s iron fittings.
Louhi held on. She reached into the boat and got one claw around the Sampo.
Väinämöinen swung the oar again. It hit the Sampo and hit Louhi’s claw together, and the claw cracked, and the Sampo cracked, and both broke apart at the same moment.
The Sampo shattered. Pieces went into the sea - large pieces, the grinding mechanism, the lid of many colors, the parts that had made it a thing of inexhaustible plenty. They sank. Some fragments stayed in the boat. Some washed toward shore on the current - small bright pieces, no bigger than a man’s fist.
Louhi screamed. She had one piece in her broken claw, one piece only, and she rose back into the air with it and flew north. Behind her the warriors of Pohjola were drowning or swimming or clinging to wreckage.
What Washed Ashore
Väinämöinen sailed the battered boat to the shore of Kalevala. He walked the waterline at dawn and gathered what fragments he could find - pieces of the Sampo scattered among stones and driftwood and stranded fish. They were warm in his hands. They still hummed faintly, the way a kantele string hums after the finger has left it.
He planted them in the earth. He sang over them. The fragments took root. From them came barley and rye and enough grain to keep Kalevala fed, though not the boundless wealth the whole Sampo had once ground.
The pike-bone kantele was gone. The Sampo was broken. Louhi had flown north with her one piece, back to Pohjola where the dark sits half the year.
Väinämöinen walked the shore a long time, looking for more fragments. The sea gave up nothing else. He turned inland, toward the birch forests and the cold lakes, and began to think about building a new kantele - this time from birchwood, strung with the hair of a young girl. But that is a different story. The old instrument was under the sea, and the Sampo was in pieces, and what Kalevala had now was enough, and less than enough, and all there was.