Ilmarinen

The interview took place in a cold hall at the top of the world, and the candidate’s references were unusual. Louhi of Pohjola wanted a mill that would grind wealth out of nothing, and the man who had arrived on a stormwind stood in her doorway with soot worked into the creases of his knuckles and explained why he was the right smith for the job. He had already forged the arch of heaven. He had fitted the air with its concave lid, before the earth had a beginning. The old songs report this without blinking. There is no smith cleverer, they sing, no craftsman more precise, than Ilmarinen, who has forged heaven and hammered the vault of the sky, and left it so clean that you cannot feel the trace of the hammer on it, or find the marks of the tongs.

The strangest thing about that boast is that no song ever shows him doing it. The making of the sky is only ever mentioned afterwards, in passing, as a line on a long résumé. What the songs show instead is a working man in a hot room. He builds his forge on a rainbow-coloured rock in a foreign country, lays the bellows on the second day and the furnace on the third, and sets hirelings pumping air for three short midsummer nights until the stones begin to blossom under the workmen’s feet. He is being asked to make the Sampo out of a swan’s feather, a single grain of barley, a scrap of wool and some milk, which is another way of saying it cannot be done. He does it anyway, but the fire fights him first. Out of the coals rises a golden crossbow that demands a hero a day and two on feast days. He breaks it and throws it back. Then a boat that goes looking for wars, and a heifer that runs off wasting her milk in the grass, and a plough that furrows the good barley. He breaks them all and feeds them to the flames. At last he dismisses the hirelings and lets the four winds work the bellows, and on the third night the Sampo comes up out of the furnace with its lid of many colours, grinding one measure at daybreak to eat, one for the market, one for the store-house.

Louhi carried it into a hill of copper, put nine locks on it and grew three roots under it, nine fathoms deep. Then he asked for the girl he had been promised, and she said no, and talked instead about the cuckoo she would miss. He went home with nothing.

He came back, of course. The second time Louhi set him the sort of tasks that had already killed a great many suitors, and each one he answered by making something. Told to plough a field boiling with vipers, he forged a golden ploughshare, a silver beam, copper handles, and boots, gloves and mail of iron, and turned the snakes harmlessly under the furrow. Told to bridle the bear of Tuonela, the land of the dead, he hammered a bit and straps of steel and copper on a rock beneath a triple current, then asked the fog-maiden to lay a mist over the death-country so the beast would not hear him coming. Told to take the great pike of the river of the dead without hook, net or boat, he forged an eagle with iron talons and a beak of steel and copper, sat between its wing bones, and sent it out over the black water. The bird caught the monster after three passes, tore it up in a pine top and ate everything but the head. Ilmarinen brought the head back and Louhi looked at it and complained about the state of it. That is the shape of his whole career in one scene: he does the impossible thing, and someone else is disappointed with the result.

Nobody says what he looked like. The songs are not interested in his face, only in what his hands are doing, and one Viena Karelian song about the origin of iron shows him improvising a workshop out of his own body, using his shirt for a smithy and his fur coat for bellows, his elbow for a hammer and his knee for an anvil, turning out belt hooks and needle points and sword blades. In that same song he sets his forge down in the tracks the wolf and the bear left in the swamp, which is exactly where the people who sang it dug their bog iron. He is called the craftsman of eternal age. He is not called handsome, or terrible, or tall.

His name is older than his hammer. Ilma means air, and weather, and by extension the whole turning sky, and the oldest written mention of him in Finnish is not a story at all. In 1551 the reformer Mikael Agricola printed a list of the gods his countrymen still remembered, and among the gods of Häme he set Ilmarinen down as the one who made calm weather and wind, and carried travellers on their way. The Sámi had a weather-ruler called Ilmaris. The Udmurts, far to the east, called their sky god Inmar. Charms were sung to Ilmarinen for fair winds and good weather long after the churches went up. Uno Harva, who went looking for the sky father behind the smith, concluded honestly that the evidence will not stretch that far: Ilmarinen is not the rain-and-thunder god, whatever his name once meant.

It is worth being plain about where the rest comes from. The Kalevala is not an ancient book. Elias Lönnrot, a country doctor, made eleven collecting trips between 1828 and 1844, wrote down the songs of Karelian and Finnish singers, and assembled them into an epic, a first version in 1835 and the long one in 1849 that Finland took as its national poem. The songs behind it are genuinely old. The Ilmarinen in them is a smaller and stranger figure than the one in the book. He barely speaks. Kaarle Krohn, sifting the folk poems against Lönnrot’s text, found that of the seven incantations the Kalevala gives Ilmarinen, only two have any precedent in oral song. In the singers’ mouths he is a quiet technician, a man so far inside his work that he can lose track of his own courtship, and the one utterance regularly attributed to him is a warning to other men not to make a woman out of gold.

He had reason to warn them. In the Kalevala his wife is killed by a herdsman’s revenge, and the widowed smith gathers gold from the sea and silver from the mountains, burns thirty sledge-loads of birch to ash, and stands at the furnace for three days trying to hammer out a replacement. A lamb comes out of the fire first, gold-haired and threaded with silver, and he throws it back. Then a colt with copper hooves, and he throws that back too. On the third day a woman rises out of the flames. He forges her feet and they will not walk, her arms and they cannot hold him, her ears and they do not hear, her mouth and it says nothing, her eyes and they do not see. He washes her, lays her on his bed under three bearskins and seven wool blankets, and wakes in the night with one side of his body warm and the other side turning to ice. In the older songs the golden maiden is not grief at all but humiliation. The smith is taunted for living alone, loses a courtship race, comes home in a foul mood and makes himself a wife out of metal, and what she is missing is listed with brutal economy: a tongue in her mouth, a mind in her head, eyes inside her head.

Everything he can do comes out of the forge, and it is a great deal. He can shape iron into anything the story requires, from armour that turns venom to chains that will hold the beasts of the dead, from a flying eagle to a mill that makes a country rich, and the sky over Finland is supposed to be his work. He is tireless and unshakeable, and when a thing simply has to be built, the other heroes send for him. His limits are the limits of manufacture. Väinämöinen wins by knowing; Ilmarinen wins by making; and the songs are quietly certain that knowing is the greater gift. When Louhi finally steals the sun and the moon and hides them in her copper mountain, and the cattle starve and people begin to die in the dark, Ilmarinen goes back to the anvil and forges a moon of gold and a sun of silver. He hangs the moon in a pine and the sun in an elm, sweat dripping from his forehead and off his fingers with the labour of it. They do not shine. Silver will not gleam as sunshine, Väinämöinen tells him, and gold does not give birth to moonlight. What actually brings the real lights back is a bluff: Louhi comes to spy on the smithy as a black eagle, asks what he is hammering, and he tells her he is forging a collar for her neck. She unlocks the mountain that same day.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ilmarinen in Finnish mythology?

Ilmarinen is the eternal smith of Finnish and Karelian tradition and one of the three central heroes of the Kalevala. The songs credit him with forging the vault of the sky and the Sampo, a mill that grinds out grain, salt and money without end. His name comes from ilma, the Finnish word for air and weather, and the oldest written record of him, Mikael Agricola’s list of pagan gods from 1551, describes him as a god of weather and a protector of travellers.

What is the Sampo that Ilmarinen forged?

The Sampo is a mill with a many-coloured lid that Ilmarinen forged for Louhi, the mistress of Pohjola, as the price of her daughter’s hand. It grinds one measure of flour, salt and money at daybreak: one to eat, one to sell and one to store. Louhi locked it inside a copper mountain behind nine locks, and it is later stolen and broken, which is why the songs say the sea is rich and the land is poor.

Why did Ilmarinen make a wife of gold, and what went wrong?

In the Kalevala, Ilmarinen forges a woman out of gold and silver after his wife is killed. The figure he lifts from the fire is beautiful and useless: her feet will not walk, her mouth will not speak, her eyes do not see, and the side of the bed she lies against turns to ice. In the older folk songs the golden maiden is made not out of grief but out of wounded pride, by a smith who has lost a courtship contest and been mocked for living without a wife.

How did Ilmarinen win the Maiden of Pohjola?

He completed three deadly tasks set by her mother Louhi, and he completed each one by making a tool for it. He ploughed a field of vipers wearing iron armour and using a golden ploughshare, bridled the bear of the death-land with a magic bridle of steel and copper, and caught the giant pike of Tuonela’s river with an iron eagle he forged and rode. The maiden then agreed to the marriage.

Is the Kalevala an ancient text?

No. The Kalevala was assembled by Elias Lönnrot, who collected oral runo-songs in Karelia and eastern Finland on eleven trips between 1828 and 1844 and published his epic in 1835 and again, much expanded, in 1849. The songs themselves are old and genuinely traditional, but the epic’s shape is Lönnrot’s, and its Ilmarinen is more talkative than the quiet, almost speechless craftsman of the folk poems.

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