Väinämöinen's departure
At a Glance
- Central figures: Väinämöinen, the eternal sage and singer, born old from his mother Ilmatar; Marjatta, a young virgin who bears a son; the infant king, baptized ruler of Karjala.
- Setting: Kalevala, the heroic homeland of the Finnish rune-singing tradition, and the shores where Väinämöinen’s copper boat waits; the final runo of the Kalevala.
- The turn: Marjatta’s son is judged worthy to be king of Karjala, and Väinämöinen - who argued the child should be destroyed - is overruled by a voice that shames him for his judgment.
- The outcome: Väinämöinen sails alone in his copper boat to the place between earth and sky, leaving behind his kantele and his songs as a gift to the Finnish people.
- The legacy: The kantele and the songs of the Kalevala remain. Väinämöinen promises he will be needed again and will return when the people call for a new Sampo, new songs, new light.
The child had no father anyone could name. Marjatta had swallowed a lingonberry on a hillside, and from that berry she grew heavy, and from that heaviness she bore a son in a stable because no one in the village would give her a room. The boy was two weeks old when they brought him before Väinämöinen to be judged.
Väinämöinen looked at the child. He had lived longer than anyone. He had been born old, had floated on dark waters before there was land, had sung forests into existence and forged the first kantele from the jawbone of a great pike. He had stolen the Sampo from Pohjola, fought Louhi on black water, lost the Sampo to the waves and recovered only fragments. He had done everything that could be done by singing. Now they brought him a baby born from a berry and asked him what should be done with it.
The Judgment
Väinämöinen said the boy should be taken to the marsh and struck on the head with a club. A child with no proper father, born from a lingonberry - what kind of king could come from that? Better to end the matter cleanly.
The boy was two weeks old. He opened his mouth and spoke.
He said it was a poor judgment from a man who had done worse. Had Väinämöinen not given Aino away to drown? Had he not let Ilmarinen’s wife die in the struggle over the Sampo? Had he not made bargains with Louhi that cost other people their lives? The child spoke clearly, with a voice that did not belong to an infant, and he laid out Väinämöinen’s failures one by one.
Väinämöinen did not answer.
The old man Virokannas came forward and baptized the boy. He poured water on the child’s head and named him king of Karjala, ruler of the land and its people. The baptism held. The words were spoken. The boy was king.
The Copper Boat
Väinämöinen walked to the shore. He did not argue. He did not sing the child into a swamp or turn the baptism back with rune-songs. He could have. There was no singer alive or dead who could match him, and the old songs still lived in his throat like coiled rope. But he did not sing.
He had built a copper boat long ago, or perhaps it had always been there, waiting at the waterline where the pines came down to the sand. It sat low in the shallows, its hull the color of an old kettle. He pushed it out into the water and the keel scraped over stones and then floated free.
Before he stepped in, he set down the kantele. Not the first one - that was lost, the pike-bone kantele, broken on the rocks when the Sampo shattered. This was the second, the birchwood kantele he had carved and strung himself, the one that made the animals of the forest sit still and the fish rise to the surface and the trees lean in to listen. He set it on the shore stones where someone would find it.
He left the songs too. Not in any box or binding, but loose in the air, in the mouths of the runonlaulajat who had heard him sing. The words would pass from singer to singer, hand clasped to hand on winter nights, rocking back and forth on birchwood benches, and nothing would be lost that the singers remembered.
Between Earth and Sky
Väinämöinen sailed north and west, or perhaps he sailed in a direction that does not have a name. The copper boat moved without wind. The water was calm and then it was not water but something thinner - air, or the space between air and the upper sky. The boat rose. The shore fell away behind him: the pines, the smoke from the village, the dark lake, the birch forests of Karjala where he had lived since before the land was shaped.
He did not look back. Or if he looked, the Kalevala does not say so.
The sky opened above him like a door in a ceiling. The boat passed through. Väinämöinen sat in the copper hull with his hands on his knees and his white beard on his chest, and he rose into the space between the dome of the sky and the roof of the heavens, where no one goes and no one returns from, and the water closed beneath him like a mouth.
What He Left Behind
The shore was empty. The kantele sat on the stones. Waves lapped at its frame. Someone picked it up - the songs do not say who - and carried it inland.
The boy grew. Karjala had a king. The Sampo was still broken, its fragments scattered on the sea floor and in the sand of the coastline, but the land gave enough. Grain grew. Fish were caught. The long winters came and went.
Väinämöinen had said one thing before he pushed the boat out. He said there would come a time when the people needed him again - when they needed a new Sampo forged, new songs sung, new light brought back from wherever light goes when it is taken. He said he would come back then. He did not say when.
The singers kept the songs. They sat knee to knee in the dark houses of Karjala and Finnish land, in the smoke and the firelight, and they sang the runot back and forth - Väinämöinen’s birth on the waters, Ilmarinen’s forge, Lemminkäinen’s death and resurrection, Kullervo’s grief, the theft of the Sampo, the battle on the black sea, and at the end, always, the copper boat rising into the sky.
They are still singing. The kantele is still played. Väinämöinen has not come back. The space between earth and sky is quiet, and the boat has not been seen, and the promise stands.