The Maiden on the Rainbow

On the road home from the North, Väinämöinen was told to keep his eyes down and not lift them until his horse had rested. This is the sort of instruction that guarantees the opposite.

He looked up.

There was a rainbow in the sky, and on the arc of it a girl was sitting and weaving. Gold cloth on a golden loom, a silver shuttle going back and forth, a comb of gold, and the whole thing making a noise like weather.

She is the daughter of Louhi. She is the most beautiful thing in the North, and she is famous for it. Suitors come from everywhere. She has said yes to precisely none of them. She would rather sit up there and work.

Väinämöinen stopped his horse.

"Come down," he said, "and sit in my sledge."

Note what he does not do. He does not ask her name. He does not ask what she is making, or how long it took her to learn to make it, or whether she has any interest in a seat in a stranger's sledge. He has seen the gold and he has seen the girl and he has made an offer.

She asked what he wanted her for. He said: to bake his bread, brew his beer, sing on his benches, and be the pride of his household.

She let that sit for a moment. Then she told him about a bird.

Yesterday, she said, I was out at sunset and a thrush was singing in the birches, and I asked it which is happier, a girl at home or a wife in a husband's house. And the thrush said a girl at home is a summer day. A wife is a dog on a chain. There is no warmth in a husband's house.

Then, being polite about it, she said: if you want me, split a hair with a blunt knife.

He split the hair.

Tie an egg in a knot with the knot not showing.

He tied the egg.

Peel a stone. Cut a fence post out of ice without raising a single splinter.

He did those too.

So she went to the last one, which is not a trick but a real piece of work. Build me a boat from the broken pieces of my spindle and the splinters of my shuttle, and put it in the water without touching it with knee or hand or foot or arm.

He said yes to that as well, because by then he had got into the habit of saying yes.

He found the right tree and started cutting. Two days went well. On the third the axe turned in his hand, and it did not turn by accident. Hiisi guided the blade and Lempo aimed it, and the edge went into his knee, deep and to the bone, and the blood came out of it the way a river comes out of a hill.

He tried to sing it shut.

This is the point of the whole story, so it is worth being plain about it. He could not remember the words. He knew a thousand origins and he could not produce the origin of iron, and without the origin of a thing you cannot give it orders. So the greatest singer alive stood bleeding in the woods with a full mouth and nothing in it.

He bound the leg with what he had, got into the sledge and went looking for somebody who knew.

Two houses turned him away. The third had an old man at the window who looked at the knee and said he had stopped worse floods than that with three words, and told him to sit down.

And then the old man told him where iron comes from, at length, from the very beginning, and the bleeding stopped.

The girl on the rainbow is still up there when the scene ends. She keeps weaving. She is admired for a long time before anybody thinks to ask what she is making, and nobody in the poem ever does.