Forging of the Sampo

At a Glance

Central figures: Ilmarinen, the eternal smith; Väinämöinen, the ancient sage and singer; Louhi, the Mistress of Pohjola.
Setting: The dark northern country of Pohjola and its borderlands, as told in the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian oral poetry.
The turn: Väinämöinen, stranded in Pohjola after a disastrous sea crossing, promises Louhi that the smith Ilmarinen will forge a Sampo - a mill that grinds grain, salt, and gold - in exchange for his own freedom and the hand of Louhi’s daughter.
The outcome: After four failed attempts that produced cursed objects, Ilmarinen forged the Sampo on his fifth try; Louhi locked it inside a copper mountain in Pohjola, and Ilmarinen returned home without the daughter he had been promised.
The legacy: The Sampo became the great contested object of the Kalevala cycle - its theft and destruction drove the war between Kalevala and Pohjola that shapes the second half of the epic.

Väinämöinen had been drifting for days. His boat was gone, broken apart in the waters off Pohjola, and he had washed up on a shore of black sand at the edge of Louhi’s country. The old singer was soaked, half-frozen, without his kantele, without provisions. Louhi found him on the beach. She knew who he was. Everyone in the north knew the voice of Väinämöinen.

She fed him. She dried his clothes by the fire. She asked him what he would give for safe passage home, and when he offered gold, she waved it away. When he offered songs, she said she had songs of her own. Then she told him what she wanted.

Louhi’s Price

A Sampo. The word meant nothing Väinämöinen had ever seen. Louhi described it: a mill with a lid of many colors, grinding grain from one side, salt from the second, gold from the third. A thing that would make Pohjola wealthy beyond the counting of it. She said: bring me the smith Ilmarinen, and let him forge it at my hearth. In return, you go home alive, and my daughter goes to the smith as his wife.

Väinämöinen looked at the daughter. She was combing her hair by the fire, and she was beautiful in the way northern women were beautiful - pale, sharp-jawed, silent. He wanted her for himself. He was old enough to be honest about that. But he had no forge and no skill at the anvil, and Louhi was not negotiating.

He agreed. Louhi gave him a sled, and he drove south through the pines toward Kalevala, already turning over in his mind how to convince Ilmarinen to make the journey.

The Trick at the Birch Tree

Väinämöinen did not ask. He knew Ilmarinen would refuse. The smith had no interest in Pohjola, no interest in Louhi’s daughter sight unseen, and no patience for promises made on his behalf. So Väinämöinen lied.

He told Ilmarinen he had seen a wonder on his journey north - a great spruce tree at the edge of Pohjola with the moon caught in its branches and the stars tangled in its crown. Ilmarinen said that was impossible. Väinämöinen said: come and see.

They rode together to the border country. Ilmarinen found the tree. It was real - Väinämöinen had sung it into being on his way south, planting the moon and the stars in its boughs with songs of the deep sky. Ilmarinen climbed to free them. The moment he reached the top branches, Väinämöinen sang again - a wind-song, a storm-song, a song that called the north gale down from the roof of the sky. The wind seized Ilmarinen out of the tree and carried him through the air like a leaf, north and north and north, until it set him down in the yard of Louhi’s farm in Pohjola.

Louhi was waiting. She had ale and bread and salmon. She had her daughter, who looked at Ilmarinen with interest but said nothing. And she had her demand: forge me a Sampo.

Four Failures

Ilmarinen built a forge at the edge of Pohjola. He set up his anvil, gathered his tools, called for bellows-workers from among Louhi’s people. Then he began.

He worked the fire three days. On the first day he looked into the coals and drew out a crossbow. It was beautiful - gold-inlaid, perfectly balanced - but it had a hunger in it. It wanted blood. It demanded one man killed each day, two on feast days. Ilmarinen broke the crossbow across his knee and threw the pieces back into the fire.

On the second day he drew out a ship. Red-hulled, swift, with sails that filled themselves. But the ship made war. It sailed toward battle whether the helmsman willed it or not. Ilmarinen smashed the hull and fed the splinters to the forge.

On the third day he drew out a heifer. Golden-horned, heavy with milk. But the milk came thin and sour, and the heifer would not stand still to be milked. Into the fire.

On the fourth day he drew out a plow. Iron-bladed, sharp enough to cut stone. But it turned other men’s fields - it plowed through fences, through boundary markers, through the neighbor’s grain. Ilmarinen broke the blade and started again.

Each failed object was fine in its craft and rotten in its nature. The forge was testing him, or Pohjola was, or the Sampo itself was refusing to come into being until the making was right.

The Fifth Try

Ilmarinen sent for more fuel. He called the winds to work his bellows - the east wind and the west wind and the south wind, blowing three days without rest. The fire turned white. The coals sang.

On the third day of that burning, he looked into the forge and saw something forming. Not a weapon, not a vessel, not a beast, not a tool. Something with its own shape. He reached in with his tongs and drew it out.

The Sampo. It had a lid of many colors - red, blue, gold, green - that shifted in the firelight. It was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with iron. He set it on the ground, and it began to grind. From one face came grain, pouring out in a pale stream. From the second face came salt, white and fine. From the third face came gold coins, clinking into a heap on the smithy floor.

Louhi took it. She carried it herself, both arms wrapped around it, and she bore it into the copper mountain behind her farm. She set it in the roots of the mountain, locked behind nine locks, and the roots of the mountain grew around it. The Sampo ground in the dark, and Pohjola grew rich.

The Smith Goes Home

Ilmarinen asked for the daughter. Louhi’s daughter looked at him and said she was not ready to leave Pohjola. Louhi shrugged. The girl had her own mind, she said.

Ilmarinen stood in the yard with his tongs still warm. He had forged a thing no other smith in the world could forge, and he was going home with nothing. Louhi gave him a sled, the same courtesy she had given Väinämöinen. He drove south through the pines.

When he reached Kalevala, Väinämöinen asked him how it had gone. Ilmarinen told him: the Sampo is forged, the Sampo grinds, Pohjola has it. Väinämöinen nodded. He had expected this. He had been thinking about it the whole time Ilmarinen was gone - about the Sampo grinding in the dark inside a copper mountain, making another country rich.

He would think about it for a long time. Both of them would. The Sampo sat in its mountain, and Pohjola prospered, and in Kalevala the winters were still long and the grain still thin. The reckoning would come later.