The Fire From The Sky

Louhi stole the sun and the moon.

That is the situation going in. She heard Väinämöinen playing the kantele and came south as a bird to listen, and while she was down there she took the sun out of a birch and the moon out of a fir, carried them north, and locked them inside the hill behind nine locks. Then on her way out she took the fire off every hearth in Kalevala.

So: no sun, no moon, no fire. The crops fail. Nobody can see. Nobody can cook. It is not a dramatic disaster so much as a domestic one, which somehow makes it worse.

Ukko, up above, is a thunder god and the highest one there is, and even he found this odd. He went out to look and could not find the sun where he had left it. He walked the edge of a cloud looking for the moon and it was not there either.

So he did what gods do when the equipment goes missing. He struck a new fire.

He drew his sword, took the fire out of the blade with his fingernail, and struck once on the rim of a cloud above the ninth heaven, and a spark came off it.

Then he did something careful, which is worth noticing, because it is the only careful moment in the entire rune. He did not simply drop it. He put the spark in a golden box with a silver lid and gave it to a maiden of the air, and told her to rock it in a cradle on a silver cord so that it might grow slowly into a new moon, and then into a new sun.

She did exactly as she was told. She sat on the long edge of a cloud with the cradle and rocked the fire like a child. Other maidens came to help her. It was going well.

Then it got away from her.

That is the whole of it. There is no villain in this part. She turned her hand and the fire went through it, and over the edge, and down.

It fell through nine skies and six starry vaults. It went past Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen, who both watched it go and immediately decided to follow it, a decision they will come to regret at length.

And on the way down it did what fire does, which is not one enormous thing but a long series of small terrible ones.

It went through a house in Pohjola. In at the smoke hole, down between the rafters, into a cradle where a baby was sleeping. It burned the child's chest, burned the mother's hand as she reached for it, and went out through the floor.

It crossed a swamp and burned the swamp. It went into a spruce grove and burned a mile of it, and left a fire running loose in the trees behind it.

It went north and burned the fields of Pohjola. Then it turned and came back and burned half of Savo, and went on and took the edges of Karelia with it.

Then it hit Lake Alue, and the lake boiled, and threw itself up over its own shores three times in a single summer night. The fish underneath held a meeting about it. A whitefish said something ought to be done. A salmon agreed and did nothing. In the end the whitefish swallowed the fire.

The lake settled.

Then the whitefish stopped being able to swim properly, and a salmon ate the whitefish, and the salmon got sick, and a grey pike ate the salmon, and the pike got sick, and the pike went and lay on the bottom in the dark with a fire inside it. Which is where Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen have to go and get it out.

They will need a net. They will fail at this several times. Eventually everyone in Kalevala will be involved.

The whole business starts with a god being organized about it, and a woman doing her job properly, and one hand turning very slightly at the wrong moment above the ninth heaven.