Vainamoinen and the Forging of the Sampo

Vainamoinen, the ancient and powerful singer of Kalevala, whose songs can shape the physical world itself, is challenged to a contest of knowledge and singing by the brash young Joukahainen, who boasts of his own wisdom. Vainamoinen easily defeats him in the contest, and Joukahainen, humiliated and refusing to accept the loss gracefully, shoots Vainamoinen's horse out from under him as he rides home, throwing him into the sea, where he drifts for days before finally washing ashore in Pohjola, the dark and hostile northern land ruled by the powerful witch Louhi.

Louhi takes Vainamoinen in and, in exchange for guiding him safely home, extracts a promise: he, or someone on his behalf, will forge the Sampo, a device of uncertain but immense power said to grind out grain, salt, and gold without ever emptying, securing Pohjola's prosperity. Vainamoinen, no smith himself, returns home and persuades the master smith Ilmarinen to travel to Pohjola in his place, promising him Louhi's daughter in marriage as further incentive for the difficult journey and even more difficult task ahead.

The Kalevala as it survives today is not an ancient text transmitted whole but a compilation assembled by the Finnish physician and folklorist Elias Lonnrot in the nineteenth century from oral poems he collected on repeated journeys through rural Karelia, a border region where the old singing tradition survived longest; W. F. Kirby's 1907 English translation, made directly from Lonnrot's Finnish rather than through an intermediate German version, remains one of the standard English renderings of the epic.

Ilmarinen forges the Sampo in Pohjola's smithy after several failed attempts produce only useless or dangerous objects, and Louhi has it fixed inside a mountain vault, guarded closely as the foundation of her land's newfound wealth. Years pass, and after the death of Ilmarinen's wife, the three great heroes of Kalevala, Vainamoinen, Ilmarinen, and the reckless warrior Lemminkainen, resolve that the Sampo rightly belongs to their own impoverished land and sail north to take it back by whatever means necessary.

Using his kantele, a harp whose music can enchant all who hear it, Vainamoinen lulls Pohjola's household to sleep, and the heroes free the Sampo from its mountain vault and load it aboard their ship. Louhi wakes, discovers the theft, and pursues them in the form of a monstrous eagle or bird of prey, catching the fleeing heroes at sea. In the desperate battle that follows, the Sampo is torn loose and shattered, its pieces scattering into the water; most of it sinks forever beyond recovery, though enough fragments wash up on Kalevala's own shores afterward to bring the land a measure of ongoing, if much diminished, prosperity, a bittersweet outcome the epic treats as a genuine victory nonetheless, since Pohjola's monopoly on the great treasure is broken even though nobody now possesses it whole.