Creation of the world from the cosmic egg

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ilmatar, the daughter of the air, and a goldeneye duck whose eggs become the raw material of the world.
• Setting: The primordial waters before the world exists, as told in the opening runo of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian oral poetry.
• The turn: Ilmatar, weary of the empty sky, descends to the surface of the water and drifts for centuries; a goldeneye finds her raised knee and nests there, and when the eggs roll from her knee and shatter, the fragments become earth, sky, sun, moon, and stars.
• The outcome: The world takes shape from the broken shell and yolk, and Ilmatar sculpts the coastlines, headlands, and sea-depths with her hands and feet, but she cannot bring forth the child she carries.
• The legacy: Väinämöinen, the eternal sage, is born at last from Ilmatar’s womb into the new world - old already, bearded, a singer before he speaks his first word.

Nothing existed yet. No pine, no stone, no shore. The air was empty and the water beneath it was empty, and Ilmatar lived in the air because there was nowhere else to live. She had been there a long time. She could not remember how long. The air offered her nothing - no weight, no texture, no resistance against the soles of her feet.

She let herself fall.

Ilmatar on the Water

She dropped from the upper air and struck the surface of the sea, and the sea held her. It was not land. It was not solid. But it pushed back, and that was something. She floated on her back with her arms spread and drifted.

The wind found her. It pressed against her body and the water pressed from below, and between the two pressures something quickened in her womb. She did not know what it was. She only knew it would not come out.

She carried the child for seven hundred years.

The water around her did not change. No coast appeared, no reef, no sandbar. There was nothing to swim toward and nothing to push off from. She rolled onto her stomach and floated. She rolled onto her back and floated. She raised her knees above the surface to ease the weight of the child and rested them there, bare and round above the waterline, and drifted on.

Seven hundred years is long enough to lose the habit of expecting anything.

The Goldeneye’s Nest

A bird appeared. It was a sotka - a goldeneye, the diving duck of the northern lakes, though there were no lakes yet and no north. It had been flying a long time, searching for a place to lay its eggs, and the surface of the sea offered nothing. No tussock. No reed-bed. No stone.

Then it saw Ilmatar’s knee.

The knee rose above the water, smooth and pale, and the goldeneye circled it once and landed. It built a nest there - grass and down and its own breast-feathers, working quickly the way ducks do when they have waited too long. It laid its eggs. Some tellings say six eggs of gold and one of iron. Some say fewer. The number shifts between singers. What matters is the warmth. The goldeneye sat and brooded, and the heat of its body passed through the shell and into Ilmatar’s skin.

The warmth grew. It spread from her knee down through her thigh and into the bone. It became unbearable. Ilmatar twitched her leg - a small motion, the kind a sleeper makes - and the eggs rolled.

They fell from her knee into the water and broke.

What the Fragments Became

The lower half of each shell sank and became the earth. The upper half rose and became the sky, the dome of heaven arching over the new ground. The yolk, golden and heavy, rolled upward and became the sun. The white, pale and thinner, became the moon. The mottled fragments of shell that were neither upper nor lower, neither dark nor bright, scattered and became the stars.

This was how the world was made: from accident, from a flinch, from a duck that needed somewhere to sit.

The water was no longer featureless. There was now an above and a below, a lit side and a dark side. The sun moved. The moon moved. The stars held still.

Ilmatar floated in this new brightness and looked around.

Ilmatar Shapes the Land

She had been passive for seven centuries. Now she moved. She swept her hands through the water and where her palms pushed, the seabed scooped out into depths. Where her feet kicked, headlands rose from the surface. She pointed her finger and reefs appeared, long ridges of rock just below the waterline where ships would later founder. She turned on her side and the coastlines curved, bay after bay, each one a different shape because she never repeated a gesture.

The Finnish coast with its thousands of islands, its inlets and skerries and hidden channels - all of it came from Ilmatar’s body moving through the water in the first light of the new sun. She sculpted the shallows where salmon would run and the deep places where nets would never reach bottom. She raised the flat rocks where seals would haul themselves out to sleep. She hollowed the lake-beds inland, though she could not yet see what would fill them.

She did all of this while still carrying the child. The child still would not come.

The Birth of Väinämöinen

Thirty more years passed - a trivial span after seven hundred, but Ilmatar felt each one. The child inside her was not an infant. She could feel the weight of him, the density of a grown man curled where no grown man should fit. He pressed against her and she pressed back and neither of them yielded.

Then Väinämöinen spoke. He spoke from the womb - not crying, not screaming, but speaking, asking to be let out. He asked the sun to free him. The sun did not answer. He asked the moon. The moon did not answer. He asked the stars, the Great Bear, to open a way for him, and they did not answer either.

He opened the way himself. He pushed through with his knees and hands and tumbled into the sea, already old, already bearded, already knowing things no one had taught him. The waves took him and rolled him for eight years before he reached a shore - the first shore, a treeless headland that Ilmatar had raised with her foot.

He crawled onto the rock and stood. The rock was bare. The land beyond it was bare. No tree, no grass, no bush. The soil existed but nothing grew in it. Väinämöinen stood on the headland, salt water running from his beard, and looked out over the empty country that was now his to fill.

He had songs for this. He was born with them.