The Forging of the Sampo

Väinämöinen got home and immediately started talking about the girl on the rainbow, which is how Ilmarinen ended up in the North.

Ilmarinen is the smith. He made the sky. He hammered out the vault of heaven at the beginning of things, and the compliment everyone pays the work is that you cannot find the mark of the hammer anywhere on it, which is the highest praise available in this poem.

He also did not want to go to Pohjola, and said so plainly. Men who go north do not come back.

So Väinämöinen, who has never once solved a problem without singing at it, described a fir tree with the moon in its branches and a whole constellation in its crown. Ilmarinen, being a craftsman, could not leave an interesting object alone. He climbed the tree to fetch them down.

Väinämöinen sang a wind.

The wind picked the smith out of the branches and carried him north and set him down in the yard at Pohjola, without his consent and without his tools.

Louhi met him at the door and was delighted. She fed him. She showed him her daughter, who was at that time the most beautiful thing north of anywhere. And she named her price, which was the same price as always.

Forge me a Sampo. Make it from the tip of a swan's quill, the milk of a barren cow, one grain of barley and the wool of a single summer ewe. Do that and the girl is yours.

Ilmarinen said he would try.

There was no forge in Pohjola, so he built one. There was no bellows, no anvil, no hammer and no tongs, so he made those too, from nothing, in a place that had never had a smithy in it. Then he hired the winds to work the bellows, and they blew for three days and three nights until the stones in the ground caught fire and the sand boiled.

On the first day he looked into the furnace and something came out of it. A crossbow: gold arc, silver tips, copper shaft. Flawless. It also had a temper, and it wanted a head a day and two on holidays. He broke it and put it back in the fire.

Second day, a boat came out. Red sides, gilded ribs. Flawless, and it wanted to go to war for no reason at all. Broken. Back in the fire.

Third day, a heifer with golden horns and the sun and stars on her forehead, who would not stand for milking and slept in the swamp on purpose. Broken. Back in the fire.

Fourth day, a plow with a golden blade, a copper beam and a silver handle, which went straight through other people's fields and tore up other people's crops. Broken. Back in the fire.

Every one of those was a masterpiece and every one of them was wrong.

So Ilmarinen fired the winds and hired better ones. The servants of the wind came and worked the bellows properly, and on the third day of that he looked down into the furnace and saw something growing at the bottom of it.

He took it out with the tongs and hammered it into shape.

A mill. It ground grain from one side, salt from another, and money from the third. It ground one binful at dawn to eat, a second to sell, and a third to keep. And over the top of it, turning, a lid of many colors.

They took it into the stone hill at Pohjola and locked it behind nine locks, and they set roots on it: one root nine fathoms into the earth, one into the water, one into the home mountain. And Pohjola, which had been the cold poor end of the world, was rich from that morning onward.

Ilmarinen then asked for the girl.

She said no. She said she was not ready, that if she left there would be nobody to sing in the yard and nobody to bring in the berries. He was given a boat, a following wind and three days home.

He arrived. Väinämöinen asked how it had gone. He said: I forged the Sampo. It grinds. She stayed.

Nobody in the poem ever says what a Sampo actually is. Not the smith who made it, not the woman who commissioned it, not the man who described it before it existed. It is the most valuable object in Finnish literature, and the closest anyone gets to defining it is a list of what comes out of the bottom.