Aino

She went into the greenwood for bath-whisks, three of them: one for her father, one for her mother, one for her young ruddy brother. Birch branches for the sauna, cut in early summer while the leaves are still soft, dried through the winter and steeped in hot water until they smell green again. It is the most ordinary errand anyone performs in the whole epic. It is also the last ordinary thing she ever does.

On the way home, pushing through alder scrub with the bundles under her arm, she met an old man on the heath. He wanted the beads at her neck and the cross at her breast worn for him and nobody else, and her hair plaited and bound with silk for him. She told him she cared nothing for sea-borne cloth and did not value wheaten bread, that she would go in homespun and fill herself with crusts in her father’s house. Then she took the crosslet off her breast, pulled the rings from her fingers, tore the blue bands from her temples, and threw the whole glittering handful into the bushes. Silver going into undergrowth makes a very small sound.

She lied to almost everyone when she got home. Her father, carving a hatchet handle at the window, was told she had dropped her buckle; her brother, shaping sledge runners at the gate, that she had lost her rings; her sister, weaving a golden girdle, that the gold had fallen from her brow. Only her mother, skimming milk on the storehouse threshold, got the truth, and her mother’s answer was a diet and a wardrobe: butter for a year to round her out, pork the second year, cream cakes the third, then the mountain storehouse and the painted chest with the lid that clangs, six golden girdles and seven blue robes woven by the Moon’s own daughter and the Sun’s own. She had begged that gold from Kuutar and that silver from Päivätär when she was a girl herself, worn it three days, and locked it away for the rest of her life.

Aino went to the storehouse. She put on the finest of everything, gold at her temples, silver in her hair, sky-blue bands across her brow and scarlet braiding on her head, and then she walked out past the fields and the marshes and the heathlands into the dark forest and kept going. Better, she said, to be the powan’s sister and a companion of the fishes than to be an old man’s staff and mend his stockings. She wandered three days.

At dawn on the third she came out onto a headland and saw three maidens bathing in the water below. She made a fourth. Her shift went onto the willows, her dress onto the aspens, her stockings onto the open ground, her shoes onto the boulders, her beads scattered across the sand and her rings across the shingle. Out in the waves stood a rock, brightly coloured and shining gold, and she swam for it as a refuge. She climbed it. It sank under her, all the way to the bottom, and as she went down she made a speech: let her father never cast a net in this water, let her mother never fetch water here for baking, let her brother never water his horse at this margin. The lake itself was the blood out of her veins. Every fish in it was her flesh, the bushes along the bank were her ribs, and the grass at the waterline was her wet and tangled hair.

Somebody had to carry the news. The bear was asked and did not go, having strayed in among the cattle. The wolf did not go either, being busy among the sheep, and the fox was among the geese. It fell to the hare, who promised not to forget the message and ran on his crooked legs to the bathhouse and crouched on the threshold, where a room full of women holding birch whisks offered to boil him for the master’s supper or roast him for the mistress’s breakfast. He told them the tin-adorned one was gone, sunk with her silver buckle and her belt of copper, down to be the powan’s sister. The animals in this passage are funny, and then very abruptly they are not. It is the only true beast fable anywhere in the Kalevala.

Her mother wept, and the poem follows the tears all the way down: cheeks to breast, breast to hem, hem to the scarlet stockings, stockings to the gold-embroidered shoes, shoes to the ground, where they soaked in and swelled into three rivers. Out of each river came waterfalls and rocks and golden hills and birches, and in the crown of every birch three golden cuckoos. One cried Sweetheart for three months to the drowned girl. One cried Lover for six months to the suitor. One cried Gladness for a lifetime to the mother, who said that hearing a cuckoo shortens her life by an ell.

Väinämöinen went looking for her with fishing tackle. A sleeper named Untamo told him where Ahto keeps his country and Vellamo’s maidens live: past the cloud-covered headland, past the ever-misty island, down on the black ooze. He fished there with a copper rod that trembled and a silver line that whistled, and one early morning he pulled up something he could not name. Smoother than a powan, yellower than a salmon-trout, greyer than a pike, too finless to be a female fish and too scaleless to be a male, without a maiden’s hair and without a water-nymph’s belt. He drew the silver-hafted knife from his waistband to cut it up for breakfast, and it went over the side. It surfaced on the fifth wave, and the sixth, and the ninth, and told him it had come to sit at his side and bake his bread, that it was no salmon but Joukahainen’s sister, and that he had not had the wit to hold Vellamo’s water-maiden, the darling child of Ahto. He asked her to come back. She dived into a liver-coloured crevice and never came near him again. He wove a net of silk and dragged it through every reach and bay and river in the world, and caught every fish there is except the one.

No folk singer ever sang a girl called Aino. Elias Lönnrot made the name for the second Kalevala of 1849 by putting a capital letter on a word that had been sitting in the old poems as an adjective, aino, the poetic form of ainoa, meaning only or sole, as in aino tyttö, the only girl. Where the collected songs give Joukahainen’s sister a name at all it is Anni or Annikki. The story is stitched as well as named: a poem from White Sea Karelia about a maiden who hangs herself, spliced to the entirely separate song about the fishing of Vellamo’s maiden, packed out with the lyric laments that Karelian and Ingrian women sang about their own marriages. In the folk version she hangs. The water is Lönnrot’s idea. Both the Kalevala Society and the Finnish Literature Society say this outright, and it makes her a nineteenth-century literary character assembled from genuinely ancient parts rather than a goddess or a ghost.

What she can do is refuse, and the poem is careful about where that works. On land she has no standing at all. The bargain that disposes of her is struck between two men in a swamp, one of them sinking, and her own mother sides with the buyer. She cannot sing, cannot charm, cannot bind or loose anything, and every ornament she owns was given to her. Only in the water does the refusal hold, and there it holds absolutely: she cannot be married, cannot be caught, cannot be argued with, and the greatest sage in the north spends the rest of the episode trawling for her and telling open water that his judgment has failed.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted her three times over in 1891, the proposal on the left panel, the drowning on the right, the fish rising beside the boat in the centre, set in a wooden frame he built himself with lines of the Kalevala cut into it. The triptych hangs in the Ateneum in Helsinki and is usually treated as the opening move of Finnish National Romanticism. The word Lönnrot took her name from means only. It is now one of the commonest girls’ names in Finland.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Aino in the Kalevala?

Aino is the young sister of Joukahainen in the Finnish national epic. Her brother loses a contest of magical singing to the ancient sage Väinämöinen and, sinking into a swamp, buys his life by promising her in marriage. She refuses the match, walks to the sea and drowns, and later appears to Väinämöinen as a fish.

Why did Aino drown herself?

She drowned rather than marry Väinämöinen, who was old enough that she described the marriage as becoming a staff for a feeble man to lean on. Her mother urged her to accept and to dress in the family gold and silver for the wedding. Aino put the finery on, walked away from the house for three days, and swam out to a coloured rock in the water that sank beneath her.

Did Aino exist in Finnish folk poetry before the Kalevala?

No. Elias Lönnrot created her for the second edition of the Kalevala in 1849 by capitalising the word aino, a poetic form of ainoa meaning only, which the folk poems used as an adjective in phrases like the only girl and the only sister. Where the collected songs name Joukahainen’s sister at all, they call her Anni or Annikki.

What happens to Aino after she drowns?

She becomes a fish. Väinämöinen catches something on his line near Ahto’s misty island that he cannot identify, and as he draws his knife to cut it up it leaps into the water, rises on the waves and tells him it is no salmon but the girl he was promised, mocking him for not having the wit to hold her. He drags a silk net through every water in the world afterwards and never finds her again.

What does the name Aino mean?

Aino means the only one. It is a poetic form of the Finnish word ainoa, sole or unique, and in the original oral poems it was a description rather than a name. Lönnrot’s decision to capitalise it turned an adjective into the first Finnish given name to come out of the Kalevala, and it remains in common use.

Related Entries

Väinämöinen, Vellamo, Ahto, Ilmarinen, Louhi, Antero Vipunen, Näkki, Iku-Turso, Sedna, Rusalka, Undine, Ceasg, Melusine, Daphne