Kullervo's revenge

At a Glance

• Central figures: Kullervo, son of Kalervo; his uncle Untamo, who destroyed Kalervo’s people; Ilmarinen, the smith, whose wife becomes Kullervo’s mistress and tormentor; and Kullervo’s unnamed sister, lost and found too late.
• Setting: The lands of Kalevala and the household of Ilmarinen the smith, as told in runot 31 through 36 of the Kalevala.
• The turn: Ilmarinen’s wife bakes a stone inside Kullervo’s bread; when he cuts it and breaks his father’s knife - the only thing left to him - he sends wolves and bears to tear her apart.
• The outcome: Kullervo finds his family alive but learns he has unknowingly lain with his own sister, who drowns herself; he rides to Untamo’s lands, burns them to ash, and returns to the forest where he falls on his own sword.
• The legacy: No festival marks Kullervo’s name. What remains is the story itself - the darkest thread in the Kalevala, a ruin without redemption, carried forward in the singing because forgetting it would be worse.

Untamo and Kalervo were brothers, and the quarrel between them was older than anyone alive. It began over a fish weir, or a strip of oats - the songs disagree. What the songs do not disagree about is how it ended. Untamo raised men and burned Kalervo’s house. He killed Kalervo’s sons. He killed Kalervo’s people. He took the cattle and the land and the name, and left one woman alive because she was pregnant and he thought a slave would be useful.

The child she bore was Kullervo. He was born into Untamo’s household the way a wolf is born into a pen.

The Boy Who Broke Everything

Untamo tried to use him. He set the infant Kullervo to rock a cradle; Kullervo rocked it until the cradle splintered and the baby inside died. He set the boy to clear a forest; Kullervo felled every tree for a mile, good timber and bad, and left the land bald. He set the boy to build a fence; Kullervo built it so high and so tight no gate could open, and Untamo’s own cattle starved behind it.

Everything Kullervo touched went wrong, but it went wrong with a force that frightened people. Untamo sold him. He sold him to Ilmarinen, the great smith, for the price of a worn-out kettle, two broken scythes, and five blunt sickles. It was not much. Kullervo was not expected to be worth much.

Ilmarinen set him to small tasks. It was Ilmarinen’s wife who decided what work the slave would do.

The Stone in the Bread

Ilmarinen’s wife gave Kullervo the cattle to herd. She baked him a loaf for the day’s meal. Into the loaf she baked a stone - a river stone, flat and hard, pressed deep inside the dough so the crust closed over it and the bread looked whole.

Kullervo drove the herd out to the birch meadows. At midday he sat on a stump and cut into the bread with his father’s knife. It was the one thing he had from Kalervo - a knife with a chipped handle and a blade that had been sharpened so many times it was thin as a fish bone. The blade hit the stone and snapped.

He sat looking at the broken knife in his hand.

The cattle stood around him in the meadow, chewing, patient, stupid. The birch leaves moved. Kullervo did not move for a long time. Then he sang. He sang to the wolves in the forest and the bears in the deep places. He called them by their old names - otso, honey-paw; susi, the grey one. He sang them down from the ridges and out of the swamp thickets. They came.

He shaped the wolves and the bears into the forms of cattle, brown-sided and slow, and drove them home to the yard. When Ilmarinen’s wife came out to milk the herd, she bent to the first cow and a wolf tore her throat open.

Kullervo watched from the tree line. He did not stay.

The Family on the River

He walked east. He walked for days through pine forest and over frozen bog, eating what he found, which was not much. He came to a river and followed it, and on the far bank he found a cabin where smoke rose from the chimney hole.

Inside were his mother and his father. Kalervo had survived. His wife had survived. They had other children - daughters - though one daughter, they told him, had gone out one day to pick berries and had not come back.

Kullervo stayed. He tried to work the land as his father’s son. He failed at it. He cut the nets wrong. He over-salted the fish. He broke the sled runners. His hands, which could call wolves, could not hold a plow straight.

His father sent him to pay the land-tax. On the way home, on a road through the forest, he met a girl. She was walking alone. He did not know her and she did not know him. He took her onto his sled, and they lay together there among the furs with the snow coming down through the pines.

Afterward, as the dark settled, they told each other their names.

She was his sister. The one who had gone out for berries and not come back.

She stood up from the sled. She walked to the river without speaking. The black water took her and she went under and did not come up.

Untamo’s Lands

Kullervo went home. His mother was still alive. She told him not to go, that killing himself would leave a hole in the world the same shape as his grief and no smaller. He did not listen.

He took a sword - not his father’s knife, which was broken and gone, but a sword he found or was given; the songs do not say where. He went to Untamo’s lands. He burned the houses. He killed the men. He burned the barns and the stores and the fences. He left the ground black. Where Untamo’s hall had stood there was nothing but char and wet ash.

He walked back through the forest. He came to the place where he had met his sister - the clearing, the track through the pines, the place where the sled had stopped. The snow had covered everything. There was no mark left.

He set the hilt of the sword in the frozen ground and spoke to it.

Should a man like me die on this blade?

The sword answered. The songs say it answered. It said it would gladly eat guilty flesh, having eaten enough of the innocent.

Kullervo fell forward onto the point.

The Ground Where He Fell

Väinämöinen heard about it later. The old singer said, when the news reached him, that no child should be given away to strangers, that a child raised wrong will never find the right path. He said this in the way of the old - not as advice but as a fact, like saying the ice is thin or the elk have moved north.

The ground where Kullervo fell grew no grass. The trees near it leaned away. His mother wept, and the songs say no one else did. That is the end of Kullervo’s story. The runonlaulajat sang it through to the finish because the silence after it was part of the song.