The pike-bone kantele

At a Glance

• Central figures: Väinämöinen, the eternal sage and singer; Ilmarinen, the smith; Lemminkäinen, the reckless young hero; and Louhi, Mistress of Pohjola.
• Setting: The waters between Pohjola and Kalevala, and the shore of the heroic homeland, in the world of the Finnish Kalevala.
• The turn: A great pike rises from the depths during the voyage home from Pohjola, and Väinämöinen kills it and fashions its jawbone into a kantele.
• The outcome: Väinämöinen plays the pike-bone kantele and every living thing - fish, bird, beast, tree, spirit - draws near to listen, and even the old singer himself weeps.
• The legacy: The first kantele, the instrument at the heart of Finnish song-magic, was made not from wood but from the jaw of a fish, and it was lost to the sea before Väinämöinen carved a second from birch.

The boat was loaded with the Sampo. Väinämöinen sat at the stern, Ilmarinen braced the prow, and Lemminkäinen stood amidships, restless as always, scanning the water for trouble or company. They had stolen the great mill from Pohjola while Louhi slept, and now the dark coast behind them was growing smaller, and the sea ahead was still.

Väinämöinen had warned them: no singing until they reached home. Lemminkäinen lasted three days.

Lemminkäinen’s Song

On the third morning, with the coast of Kalevala not yet in sight, Lemminkäinen opened his mouth and sang. He sang a shepherd’s tune, rough and loud, the kind of thing you’d bellow across a summer meadow to make yourself feel brave. His voice cracked on the high notes. A crane perched on a nearby rock startled into the air, screaming.

The crane flew north toward Pohjola.

Väinämöinen said nothing. What was done was done. If Louhi woke, if Louhi sent storms, he would deal with it then. But first there was another problem. The crane’s scream had disturbed something in the water.

A pike rose alongside the boat.

It was not a normal pike. Its body was longer than the keel. Its scales were the grey-green of deep lake water, and its jaw could have held a man’s torso. It surged once, and the hull shuddered. Ilmarinen gripped the gunwale. Lemminkäinen reached for his sword.

Väinämöinen reached over the side, seized the pike behind the gills with both hands, and hauled it into the boat. It thrashed. Lemminkäinen’s sword came down across its spine. Then it was still, filling the bottom of the boat with cold blood and the smell of deep water.

The Jaw

They gutted the pike on the open sea and ate its flesh raw - red, oily, firm. There was enough to feed ten men. Väinämöinen ate slowly and set the bones aside. He turned the great jawbone over in his hands. The curve of it. The ridges where the teeth had been. He scraped it clean with his knife and held it up to the light.

“A kantele,” he said.

Ilmarinen looked at the jawbone. A smith sees structure in everything, and he could see it - the arch, the tension, the way the bone wanted to hold strings.

Väinämöinen carved pegs from the pike’s own smaller bones. For strings, he used hairs from the mane of Hiisi’s gelding - he had carried those hairs since an older adventure, wound around his wrist. Five strings. He stretched them across the jawbone, tuned each one with a turn of the bone pegs, and sat back.

The kantele lay across his knees like something that had always existed and was only now being found.

The Playing

He drew his fingers across the strings.

The first sound was thin, almost nothing - a vibration more felt than heard. Then his fingers found the instrument’s voice and the voice found the air and the air carried it out over the water in every direction.

He played. The fish came up from the deep. Pike and perch and bream and salmon, their pale bellies turning toward the surface, their mouths open. They pressed against the hull of the boat so thickly the water thickened around it.

He played. The birds came down from the sky. Eagles folded their wings and landed on the mast. Swans circled lower and lower. Small birds - wagtails, finches, wrens - landed on Väinämöinen’s shoulders and along the gunwale, and none of them were afraid.

He played. On the distant shore, the trees of the forest leaned toward the water. Birches bent at the waist. Pines swayed without wind. The forest spirits, the haltija of grove and stream and stone, came to the waterline and stood listening with their strange still faces.

He played. Ilmarinen wept. The smith who had forged the Sampo, who had hammered sky-lids and ground-plates and never flinched at the heat, sat in the prow of the boat with tears running into his beard. Lemminkäinen wept. The man who feared nothing, who had walked into Tuonela and walked back out, pressed his face against his knees and his shoulders shook.

Väinämöinen wept. His own tears rolled from his cheeks and fell - not onto the deck of the boat, but over the side, into the sea. They sank. They did not dissolve. They fell through the water like stones, down through the layers of cold and dark, and on the seabed they became pearls - blue, small, hard, beautiful, and no one could retrieve them.

He played until his hands ached and the strings hummed with silence.

Louhi’s Storm

The music had carried north. Louhi was already awake - the crane had seen to that. Now she raised a storm. Wind hit the boat broadside. Waves came over the gunwale. The Sampo shifted in the hold and Ilmarinen threw his weight against it. Lemminkäinen bailed water with his hands.

The kantele slid from Väinämöinen’s lap. He grabbed for it, but the boat pitched and the instrument went over the side. It struck the water and was gone - swallowed instantly, pulled down into the same depths where his tears had fallen.

He could not sing it back. The water had taken it, and the sea keeps what the sea takes.

They fought the storm for hours. The Sampo broke apart in Louhi’s final assault - she sent a great eagle of Pohjola, and it ripped the mill from the hold - but fragments of the Sampo washed ashore on Kalevala’s coast, and those fragments were enough to seed the land with grain and salt and fortune.

The kantele did not wash ashore. It stayed on the seabed, among the pearls.

The Birch Kantele

Later, on dry land, Väinämöinen walked into the forest and found a birch tree weeping sap in the spring sun. He asked the birch for its wood. The birch gave it. He carved a new kantele - wooden this time, lighter, warmer in tone - and strung it with new strings.

He played again, and again the world listened. But those who had heard the pike-bone kantele said the sound was different. The birch kantele sang of the living forest, of sap and leaf and wind. The pike-bone kantele had sung of something older - the cold deep water, the bones of things, the places beneath the surface where light does not reach. That instrument was gone. Väinämöinen played the birch kantele for the rest of his long life, and it was enough. But the first kantele lay on the seabed in the dark, and no one ever played it again.