Lemminkäinen

Also Known As: also Lemminki and Lemmitty; called Kaukomieli and Ahti Saarelainen in the Kalevala; Estonian Lembitu, Lemming, Lemmingäine; the name carries lempi, the Finnish word for erotic love
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Finnish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He fights with charms and songs as readily as with a blade, and he is the one Finnish hero who dies outright and is put back together again.
Role in Mythos: He is the young, reckless third of the Kalevala’s hero trio, the suitor who goes north to Pohjola for a wife and comes home in pieces.
Relation to Humans: He is not prayed to and he grants nothing, which makes him the most human figure in the whole cycle. What the songs offer instead is a warning about the man who will not be told, and the mother who goes into the land of the dead after him anyway.

The hairbrush began to bleed.

Kyllikki saw it first, on a winter morning in an empty house, red beading along the golden bristles and creeping down into the wood. She had been left behind, which by then was the shape of her marriage, and she knew what the sign meant before she would let herself say it. Then his mother came and looked, and said it out loud.

Somewhere far to the north, Lemminkäinen was dead.

The songs call him lieto, a word that holds recklessness and wantonness in the same breath, and they hand him almost nothing else. He is young. He is handsome. He is the kind of man who turns up at a feast he was not invited to, drinks what he is given even when there are snakes coiled in the tankard, and kills the host who poured it. His name has lempi inside it, the word for erotic love, and the old singers heard fire in it as well. Everything he does runs off that one syllable.

He had taken Kyllikki from the island of Saari, lifted her into a sleigh and driven her home. They swore matching oaths: she would keep away from the village dances, he would keep away from war. She broke hers, or he decided she had, and he was on the road north within a day. Pohjola is the far country in these poems, cold and rich and run by Louhi, who had daughters and no intention of parting with one cheaply. She set him three tasks.

The first was the elk of Hiisi. He climbed a mountain of loose stone in the grey light, prayed to Mielikki for the silver keys that open the forest, and sang until three glens were friendly to him. When the elk came he dropped a noose over its antlers and stood a moment stroking the hot neck of an animal nobody else had ever got a rope on. The second was Hiisi’s stallion, which breathed fire out of its mouth and eyes and nostrils. He asked Ukko to break the sky open, and the hail came down in stones smaller than the heads of horses and larger than the heads of men, and the horse put its silver head into his bridle like a farm pony.

The third was a swan on the river of Tuonela, and he was to kill it with one arrow.

A blind herdsman was waiting on the bank. He was old and crippled and despised, and Lemminkäinen had once done him a kindness, which turned out to be the wrong thing to have done. He sent a water snake out of the death river the way an arrow leaves a crossbow, straight through the hero’s heart. Lemminkäinen went down knowing exactly what had killed him and exactly why. He said so as he fell: that he should have listened to his mother, that three of her words would have been enough, that he had never learned the sting of serpents. Then the herdsman rolled him into the black water. Downstream, in the cataracts, Tuoni’s son took an axe to him and struck sparks off the stone floor and chopped him into five unequal pieces.

His mother went looking. She asked the trees, and the trees said they were being felled and burned and had troubles enough. She asked the roads, and the roads said they were trodden by dogs and deer and armies and had troubles enough. She asked the Moon, who was busy. The Sun told her the truth: her son had gone under at the whirlpool and was lying in Manala.

So she went to Ilmarinen’s forge and ordered a rake with copper teeth a hundred fathoms long on a handle of five hundred. She did not ask for a small one. She waded into the river of the dead up to her belt and dragged the bottom, and brought up his tunic, and then his shoes and stockings, and on the third pass the body, tangled in the copper teeth. Half the head was gone. A hand, a forearm, other pieces. A raven told her to throw the rest back and let it become a seal. She kept raking.

What she did on the bank is one of the strangest passages in the epic. She laid flesh against flesh, set the bones in their places, counted the threads of the small veins and knitted the ends together, and called down Suonetar, the slender spinner of the body’s vessels, to come with her copper wheel and mend what was torn. The body was whole and it was warm and it would not speak. Three times she sent a bee out for honey: into Tapio’s meadows first, then across seven seas to an island where the balm was cooked in cups smaller than a thimble, and at last up past the Moon and the Great Bear to Ukko’s own storerooms, where the medicine stands in silver cauldrons. That was the one that worked. Lemminkäinen woke, stretched, and told her he could happily have slept longer, that the sleep in Tuonela had been sweet.

His powers are the ordinary Finnish ones taken to an extreme: a voice that can sing an enemy into a swamp, charms for the forest and the road, and enough nerve to use both against people far older and better trained. His limit is the exact place where that nerve outruns the knowledge. Finnish magic works by origins. To master a thing you must know where it came from and be able to recite it, and the first thing his mother does once he can hear her again is deliver the origin of the serpent: spat out by Syöjätär onto the waves, warmed by the sun, rocked by the wind, carried ashore. He had gone to the river of the dead without it. He never listened.

The man who does all of this in one unbroken life is younger than he looks. Elias Lönnrot published the first Kalevala in 1835 and the expanded one in 1849, and to build a coherent epic out of thousands of separate songs he welded several different heroes into single characters. Lemminkäinen absorbed at least two others. Kaukomieli, or Kaukamoinen, was a swaggering Viking-age brawler with his own beer-hall killing and his own flight from justice. Ahti Saarelainen, the Islander, was a sea raider with a wife and a broken oath and a war companion named Tiera. Kaarle Krohn was pulling the three apart again by 1906. The oldest layer under all of it, the one that goes to the other world and is dragged back by kin, is a shaman’s song, and the singers of White Karelia and Ilomantsi and Kerimäki kept it alive under its own name, Lemminkäisen surma, the Death of Lemminkäinen.

Which is worth knowing, because in the versions some of the finest Karelian singers preferred, the rake comes up empty of everything that matters. The mother works and prays and the pieces stay pieces. The son speaks to her once from the water, only to tell her that he will not be a man again, that what has rotted does not come back, and that she should stop.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Lemminkäinen?

Lemminkäinen is the young, reckless hero of Finnish mythology and one of the three central figures of the Kalevala, alongside Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen. He is a singer-magician and fighter known for chasing women, ignoring advice, and taking on impossible tasks. He is best known for being killed at the river of the dead and brought back to life by his mother.

How did Lemminkäinen die?

Lemminkäinen was killed while attempting the third of three tasks Louhi set him in exchange for her daughter: shooting the swan that swims on the river of Tuonela. A blind herdsman waiting on the bank sent a water snake through his heart, then threw his body into the river, where Tuoni’s son chopped it into five pieces with an axe.

How was Lemminkäinen brought back to life?

His mother recovered him. After the Sun told her where he had drowned, she had Ilmarinen forge a copper rake with teeth a hundred fathoms long, waded into the river of the dead, and dragged up the pieces of his body. She sewed him back together with the help of Suonetar, goddess of the body’s veins, and sent a bee to Ukko’s storerooms for the honey that restored his speech and senses.

Is Lemminkäinen the same person as Ahti Saarelainen and Kaukomieli?

In the Kalevala they are one character, but in the older folk poetry they were not. Elias Lönnrot merged several separate song-heroes into single figures when he assembled the epic, and Lemminkäinen absorbed Kaukomieli, a Viking-age brawler, and Ahti Saarelainen, a seafaring raider from the island of Saari. The name Ahti also belongs to a Finnish water deity, which is a separate matter again.

Does Lemminkäinen’s mother always save him?

No. In versions of the song recorded from some of the finest Karelian singers, the resurrection fails. The mother rakes the river and works over the body, but her son tells her from the water that he will not become a man again, and the poem ends there.