Lemminkäinen's mother restores him

At a Glance

Central figures: Lemminkäinen, the reckless young hero of Kalevala; his mother, who refuses to let death keep her son; and the blind herdsman of Tuonela who kills Lemminkäinen at the black river.
Setting: The river of Tuonela, the Finnish underworld, and the dark waters downstream where Lemminkäinen’s body is scattered; drawn from the Kalevala, runot XIV and XV.
The turn: Lemminkäinen is struck down at the river of Tuonela by a blind herdsman and hacked apart, his body thrown into the black water in pieces.
The outcome: Lemminkäinen’s mother rakes the river with a copper rake forged by Ilmarinen, recovers every fragment of her son’s body, sings the flesh together, and calls on a bee to fetch healing honey from Ukko’s halls to restore him to life.
The legacy: Lemminkäinen rises from the riverbank whole, though he admits he slept long and would have slept forever without his mother’s song and the bee’s flight.

Lemminkäinen had been warned. His mother had told him not to go to Pohjola, told him three times. She described the deaths waiting on the road - fire-pits, wolf-ditches, serpents across the path. Lemminkäinen laughed. He knew songs against fire. He knew songs against wolves. He said he would sing any serpent into rope. He went.

What his mother had not described - because she did not know it - was the blind herdsman standing at the river of Tuonela with a water-snake in his hands, waiting.

Lemminkäinen had come to Pohjola to attend a feast to which he had not been invited. Louhi had invited every man in the north country except him. He took this personally, which was how Lemminkäinen took everything. He sang his way past the fire-pits. He sang the wolves to sleep. He arrived at Louhi’s hall, demanded ale, and caused enough trouble that the master of Pohjola challenged him to duels - sword-duels, song-duels, anything to shut him up.

It did not shut him up. But it drove him out, eventually, back along the road south. And on the way south he had to cross the river of Tuonela, the black water that runs between the living world and the land of the dead.

A herdsman was waiting there. He was old. He was blind. He was Märkähattu, Wet-Hat, a cattle-herder of Pohjola, and Louhi had placed him at the ford with one instruction: kill the boy when he comes back. The herdsman raised a water-snake from the river and drove it through Lemminkäinen’s chest.

Lemminkäinen had songs against ordinary serpents. He did not know the origin-words of the water-snake. He had never learned them. His mother had told him to learn them before he left, and he had not listened.

The herdsman hacked Lemminkäinen’s body into five pieces and threw them into the rapids of Tuonela’s river. The current took them down into the black water, among the dead.

The Brush That Bled

At home, Lemminkäinen’s mother knew. She knew because of the hairbrush. Before he left, Lemminkäinen had told her: watch the brush on the shelf. If it bleeds, I am dead.

The brush bled.

She did not weep. She did not sit. She put on her shoes and walked north. She walked to Pohjola and asked Louhi where her son was. Louhi lied - said she did not know, said perhaps the horses had eaten him, perhaps the lake had swallowed him. Lemminkäinen’s mother was not fooled. She asked the sun. The sun, who sees everything, told her: your son is in the river of Tuonela, in pieces, in the black water, among the dead.

The Copper Rake

She went to Ilmarinen.

Make me a rake, she said. Copper teeth. A handle five hundred fathoms long.

Ilmarinen forged it. He did not ask what it was for. The rake’s teeth were fine enough to catch bone fragments in fast water, and the handle was long enough to reach the bottom of Tuonela’s river from the bank above.

Lemminkäinen’s mother walked to the river’s edge. The water was black. She could see nothing in it. She lowered the rake and began to drag the bottom.

The first pass brought up river-weed and mud. The second pass brought up sticks and the bones of fish. The third pass brought up a shirt - her son’s shirt, torn. She kept raking. She pulled up a sock, then a boot, then a hand, then a shinbone. She raked the river for days. Every piece of Lemminkäinen that the herdsman had hacked apart, she found. She laid the pieces on the bank in the right order: feet at the bottom, skull at the top, ribs between. Some pieces were very small.

When she had every fragment - when she could see that nothing was missing, when the shape on the bank was the shape of her son - she began to sing.

The Singing of Flesh

She sang the veins together first. Vein to vein, she sang, naming the origin of blood, the words Lemminkäinen himself had never bothered to learn. She sang the bones into their sockets. She sang the muscles over the bones and the skin over the muscles. She sang the hair back onto his scalp.

The body lay whole on the riverbank. It looked like Lemminkäinen. It was not breathing.

She called on Ukko, the old one above, the sky-god who keeps storms and silence alike. She asked for a bee.

The Bee’s Flight

A bee came - a small one, a common honey-bee. She told it what she needed: ointment from Ukko’s own hall, honey that heals what song alone cannot finish. The bee rose into the air and flew. It flew past the moon. It flew past the sun. It flew through nine skies and came to the hall of Ukko, where the old god kept his stores.

The bee filled its legs with honey. Not ordinary honey - the kind that repairs what death has broken, the kind that puts breath back into lungs and warmth back into hands. The bee flew back down through the nine skies, past the sun, past the moon, and landed on the riverbank beside the body.

Lemminkäinen’s mother took the honey from the bee’s legs. She anointed her son’s lips. She anointed his chest. She anointed the places where the herdsman’s blade had separated flesh from flesh.

Lemminkäinen opened his eyes.

He said he had slept a long time. He said he would have slept longer - forever, probably - if she had not come. He did not say thank you. That was not something Lemminkäinen said. But he sat up on the riverbank and looked at his hands, and his hands were whole, and the black river ran beside him, and his mother sat beside the river with a copper rake across her knees.

She told him not to go back to Pohjola. He did not promise. She had not expected him to.