The First Kantele

Väinämöinen was sailing home from the North with the Sampo aboard, which is a different problem and a longer story. What matters here is that the boat stopped.

It did not run aground. There was no reef, no rock, no sandbar. The boat had simply gone up onto something in open water and would not come off, and the crew poled at it and heaved at it and got nowhere at all.

So Väinämöinen told Lemminkäinen to get in the water and find out what they were standing on.

Lemminkäinen went over the side, felt around, and reported that they were sitting on the shoulders of a fish. A pike. A pike the size of a shoal.

Killing it took three attempts. Lemminkäinen swung at it, missed, went into the water himself and had to be lifted out by the hair. Ilmarinen swung and got the head off, and the boat came loose, and the animal was so large it had to be brought aboard in pieces.

They cooked it. Everyone ate. It was a good meal, and afterward there was a heap of bone left on the rocks, which is the ordinary way of things.

Väinämöinen looked at the heap for a while.

He asked, out loud, what could be made from the jaw of a pike. Somebody said nothing. He said that nothing comes of nothing if nobody makes anything of it.

So he took the jawbone and made a body out of it, and took the teeth and made the pegs. Then he needed strings, and for those he went to the worst supplier available, which is Hiisi, whose stallion was standing in a field with a long tail and a very bad reputation. He took five hairs. Six, depending on who is telling it.

And then he had an instrument, and nobody could play it.

This is the part of the story people forget. The kantele went round all of Kalevala and it would not sound. Young men tried it. Old men tried it. It made a noise like a fence in a gale. They handed it to a boy, and the boy said, in the poem's own words, that it would never sound in the hands of the young or the old, that the joy of it was not in them. They passed it back and forth across the water and it sulked in every lap it was set in.

Eventually somebody said the obvious thing, which was to give it to the man who made it.

Väinämöinen sat down. He put the pike's jaw across his knees, set it straight, tightened the strings, and began.

And everything came.

Not an audience. Everything. Squirrels came down through the branches. Stoats came and sat along the fence rails. The elk bounded up out of the heath and the lynx sat down in the open to listen. The wolf came out of the swamp. The bear came out of the pines and stood with its paws up on a fence.

The eagle left its eaglets in the nest and came. Hawks came, and swans, and ducks. The fish came up: pike, salmon, whitefish, hanging at the surface with their heads out of the water. The lake itself is described as heaving.

The mistresses of the air came down and sat on the arch of the sky until their shoulders ached and their belts cut into them, because they had forgotten they had bodies at all.

The old woman of the water leaned on a rock with her breast half out of the lake and listened until she fell asleep on the stone.

And every creature that came, and every person, began to cry. Not from grief. There is no bad news anywhere in this scene. They cried because it was too much for them, and the drops ran down their faces and off their chins and onto the ground and into the water, and the water carried them, and they turned into pearls.

Then Väinämöinen cried too. His tears went into the lake and had to be fetched back up by a blue duck, and they came up as blue pearls, and he gave them away.

He asked at the end whether anyone present had ever heard anything like it. Nobody had.

The first instrument in the world was made from the mouth of a fish that got in the way and the tail of a horse belonging to a demon, and it was played by an old man who was frequently insufferable, and it sat the entire forest down in one place and made it weep.