Joukahainen

Two sledges met head-on at dusk on the road across Väinölä, and neither driver would give way. The shafts wedged, the collars jammed, the runners struck and locked, and the horses stood shuddering in the traces with steam lifting off their backs while sweat ran down onto the wood. One of the drivers was an old man out for a quiet ride through his own country. The other had been whipping his horse north for three days without stopping, and he had come a long way to pick this fight.

Word had reached him at a feast. Somewhere south there lived a better singer than he was, better than the man who had taught him, and the news sat in him like a splinter. His father told him not to go. His mother told him not to go, and warned him plainly what would happen: the old man would sing him down into a snowdrift, and his hands and feet would stiffen until he could not move them. He heard both of them out and answered that a father’s counsel is good, a mother’s is better, and one’s own opinion is best of all. Then he fetched his gelding, hitched the golden sledge, and went anyway.

What Joukahainen actually knew, when he was made to say it, was a boy’s inventory of a working world. Every roof has a smoke-hole and every fire has its hearthstone. The seal lives well and eats salmon. Pike spawn in the hard frost, and the perch swims sluggish and hump-backed into deep water in autumn. In the north they plough with reindeer, in the south with mares, in furthest Lapland with elk. He could name the tall firs on the rocks of Horna and count three great waterfalls in the world, Hälläpyörä in Häme and Kaatrakoski in Karelia and, above both of them, Imatra roaring down the Vuoksi. It was not nothing. It was the knowledge of somebody who had been paying attention for about twenty years.

Väinämöinen called it children’s talk and asked for something older. So the boy reached for something older and claimed it. He said he had ploughed the ocean and hollowed out its depths and dug the caves for the fish; that he had stood sixth or seventh among the heroes when the earth was made, fixed the pillars of the sky, set the moon on its road and scattered the stars. It was a magnificent thing to say and it was not his to say. Väinämöinen told him so in four words, and then stopped being patient.

The song that followed did not go after Joukahainen at all, not at first. It went after his belongings. His runners turned to saplings and his collar to willow, his gilded sledge drifted off among the lake reeds, the beaded whip became a reed on the water and the white-blazed horse became a stone beside the torrent. His gold-hilted sword went up as a flash of lightning. His inlaid crossbow bent into a rainbow over the water and his feathered arrows went up after it as hawks. His dog set into the earth as a stone with its muzzle still lifted. Then his cap became a cloud, his gloves became water lilies, his blue coat floated off as a fleece of cloud and the fine belt at his waist was scattered across the sky as stars, and only when he had been stripped of every possession he had brought did the ground begin to take him. Waist, hips, armpits. He tried to lift one foot and could not, tried the other and found it shod with stone.

He bid for his life from the mud, and every offer was a duplicate. Two crossbows, one quick and one accurate. Two boats, one light and one for cargo. Two stallions, one fast and one strong. A golden helmet and a hat full of silver his father had taken in war. All his standing corn and every stack in his yard. Väinämöinen already had bows on every peg, boats in every creek, horses in every stall and fields in all directions, and each refusal sank the boy deeper, until the mud was in his beard and the moss was in his mouth and his teeth were among the tree roots. Then he offered his sister. That one the old man took, sitting down on the stone of song to unpick the spell an hour at a time, three times over, while Joukahainen dragged his chin out of the swamp.

He drove home so badly he smashed the shafts against his own doorpost. His mother clapped her hands when she heard the news, because she had been hoping for exactly this match for years. His sister wept on the threshold for three days and then walked into the sea.

The revenge took longer and was better made. He built a crossbow of iron backed with copper, inlaid with gold and worked with silver, with a horse standing at its back, a foal running on the stock, a sleeping woman on the curve and a hare crouched at the catch. He strung it with sinew from the elk of Hiisi and hemp cord from Lempo. He cut shafts of oak and heads of pine, feathered them from swallows and sparrows, and steeped the points in the black blood of adders. Then he waited at a window, on a stair, by a path, out on a headland where the land runs into the water, until one morning something dark showed on the sea that was not a cloud and was not the dawn. His mother caught him with the bow already bent and told him to put it down, because Väinämöinen was her own sister’s son and the world would lose its songs. He thought about it. He shot anyway. The first arrow went high into the clouds, the second went so deep into the ground that the sand hills split, and the third took the blue elk under the old man in the left side below the shoulder and put him in the water.

Powers came easily to him and never quite came far enough. He could sing, genuinely sing, and he threatened to turn a coward into a snouted swine and pitch him grunting into a byre, which is not an idle boast in a tradition where that is a thing singers do. He could make a weapon of real beauty and shoot it accurately at a moving target across open sea. What he could not do was hold his tongue, hold his temper, or produce one line of the deep song, the account of how things came to be, which is the only currency that counted in the contest he had chosen. His epithet in the poems is simply nuori, young, against Väinämöinen’s vanha, old, and in this world that settles it before anyone opens their mouth. He lost because he was younger, and because he tried to borrow an origin that belonged to someone else.

The Joukahainen of the sledge and the swamp comes from the Kalevala, which Elias Lönnrot assembled and published in 1849 out of oral poems collected in Karelia and eastern Finland, so the tidy sequence of contest, pledge, drowning and ambush is partly his editing. The folk poems underneath are older and much less orderly. There the name itself will not stay still, running through Joukamoinen, Joukavainen, Joukkahas, Jompainen and Joutavoinen, and neither will his family: some songs make him Väinämöinen’s brother, White Karelian ones make him his aunt’s son, and in Ladoga Karelia he and Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen are all born of the same maiden. His sister’s name is one of the parts Lönnrot shaped most heavily. What he is has never been agreed either. Christian Erici Lenqvist called him a god in 1782 and Christfried Ganander called him a giant in 1789; Emil Nestor Setälä read the name through Sámi words for snowfall and freezing and made him the haltija of ice and snow; Kaarle Krohn thought him a human hero and wondered about Estonian jõud, power; Risto Pulkkinen, following a link between the name and joukainen, swan, called him the shaman of a swan clan. Anna-Leena Siikala set the whole duel of knowledge beside Odin and Vafþrúðnir, which is the right shelf for it.

Whatever he was, the one possession he had that Väinämöinen actually wanted was a person, and nobody asked her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Joukahainen in the Kalevala?

Joukahainen is a young singer from the north who challenges the old sage Väinämöinen to a contest of songs and knowledge in the Finnish national epic. He loses, is sung waist-deep and then chin-deep into a swamp, and buys his freedom by promising his sister Aino to Väinämöinen as a wife. Later he ambushes Väinämöinen with a crossbow.

Why did Joukahainen give his sister to Väinämöinen?

He was drowning. Väinämöinen’s song had sunk him into a mire up to his chin, and he had already offered two crossbows, two boats, two stallions, a golden helmet, a hat of silver and all his corn, and been refused each time because Väinämöinen already owned better. His sister was the only thing left that the old man did not have.

Did Joukahainen kill Väinämöinen?

No. Joukahainen waited on a headland with a poisoned, triple-feathered arrow and shot three times as Väinämöinen rode across the sea. The first shot went high, the second buried itself in the ground, and the third killed the horse under him, dropping Väinämöinen into the water, where a storm carried him off toward Pohjola. His own mother told him the deed was evil.

Is Joukahainen a god, a giant or a human?

The sources have never settled it. Christian Erici Lenqvist called him a god in 1782 and Christfried Ganander called him a giant in 1789, while Emil Nestor Setälä read him as a spirit of ice and snow, Kaarle Krohn as a human hero, and Risto Pulkkinen as the shaman of a swan clan. In the Kalevala itself he behaves like a mortal young man with a mother, a father and a sister.

Related Entries

Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Louhi, Antero Vipunen, Hiisi, Lempo, Ukko, Ahto, Vellamo, Iku-Turso, Otso