Väinämöinen

A hero who does not fight

The central figure of Finnish oral poetry is an old man who wins by singing.

That is not a quirk of one story. It is the structure of the whole tradition. In the Kalevala-metre corpus the operative power is knowledge, specifically knowledge of origins: to control a thing you recite where it came from. A singer who knows the birth of iron can stop a wound; one who knows the birth of fire can treat a burn. The corpus is full of these origin-charms, recorded from working practitioners.

Väinämöinen is that practitioner in heroic form — the tietäjä, the one who knows. When he meets an opponent he does not draw; he sings the opponent into a bog. When he needs a boat he sings it, and when the song lacks three words he has to go and find them, which is a plot.

Set that beside the other traditions here. The Slavic hero defeats Koschei by finding the needle. The Maya twins survive by enduring. The Finnish hero wins by knowing more than the other person, and the poems treat that as the highest form of power there is.

The singing contest

The best-known single episode is a duel, and it is a duel of competence.

A young man — Joukahainen — challenges the old singer on the road, boasting of what he knows. He recites what he has: things he has seen, facts about the world. Väinämöinen answers with what he knows: how those things came to be. The young man's knowledge is inventory; the old man's is origin, and origin wins.

Joukahainen loses and is sung into a bog, sinking as he argues, and buys his way out by promising his sister. What follows is not triumphant — the promise leads to her death and to a long sequence of consequences — which is characteristic. The poems are not sentimental about their hero.

We have given the contest its own page, because the thing it is really about — two kinds of knowing — explains more about this tradition than any biography of either man.

What the songs have that the epic drops

Read the SKVR texts after the Kalevala and the differences are not small.

He is inconsistent. In different regions and different singers' versions he is a creator, a sage, a suitor, a maker, a ritual specialist, occasionally a figure of comedy. Singers did not maintain one characterisation across episodes because there was no single work to be consistent within.

He is not always central. Some episodes attach to other names in some variants.

And his status is unresolved. Material that looks cosmogonic — the shaping of the world, the sowing of the lakes — sits next to material about a man courting a woman who does not want him. Agricola in 1551 listed a name read as his among beings he was condemning as gods, which tells us a sixteenth-century bishop encountered him in a religious register.

Lönnrot resolved all of this: one birth, one arc, one departure at the end, after which he leaves and his kantele stays behind. That is a satisfying literary close, and nothing in the oral record requires it.

The kantele

The instrument is the attribute, as the mortar is Baba Yaga's and the hand on the tail is the ahuitzotl's.

In the famous version he makes it from the jawbone of a giant pike, strings it with hair and plays it until every living thing comes to listen and weeps — including himself, his tears running into the water, where they become pearls.

Later he makes a second one, of birch, strung with a girl's hair.

Two details are worth keeping. The first instrument is made from a dead animal's bone, which places it in the same world as the charms. The second is that the instrument stays behind when he goes: the power is transferable, and the point of the story is that the singing continues without the singer.

What we illustrate

A kantele on a bench, a boat on open water, and a bog.

Not his face. The poems describe him with formulae rather than features, nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting supplied a white-bearded portrait that everyone now pictures, and reproducing that would be illustrating Gallen-Kallela rather than the sources.

Sources

SKVR (1908–1948) for the songs and their variation; the Kalevala (1849) for the epic and for what it unified; Haavio (1967) for the distinction between them; Agricola (1551) for the earliest written trace of these beings.

• Finnish Literature Society, Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (SKVR) (1908). 33 volumes, 1908–1948
• Elias Lönnrot, Kalevala (1849). Expanded edition; first edition 1835
• Martti Haavio, Suomalainen mytologia (1967). WSOY
• Mikael Agricola, Verse preface to the Psalter (Dauidin Psaltari) (1551)