Ilmarinen

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He is born already holding the tools. In the runo-song and in the Kalevala that Elias Lonnrot assembled from it, the smith Ilmarinen comes into the world in the night and is found at morning with the hammer in one hand and the tongs in the other, looking for the place to set his forge. Before him there was no iron worked among men; he is the one who first finds the ore, first raises the bellows, first brings the metal to the white heat at which it can be made to obey. The other great figure of the song masters the sung word; this one masters the fire and the anvil. What he makes is not a charm or a verse but a thing — a thing that holds its shape, that can be carried, lost, and broken. The supreme thing he makes is a mill, and the breaking of that mill is the central catastrophe of the whole tradition.

The air-god behind the smith

The name comes from ilma, the Finnish word for air, and the word that lies behind it is older and larger than the smith who now carries it. Cognates of ilma run through nearly all the Finno-Ugric languages, and the philological reconstruction reads Ilmari as something like a “sky-being,” the suffix that builds the name being the one that forms words for a person associated with a root — so that the root sense is not “smith” at all but “the one of the air, the one of the sky.” The diminutive -nen gives the familiar Ilmarinen, a form that also happens to fall into two trochaic feet and so sits easily in the meter of the runo-song. Among the wider Uralic peoples the same name survives still attached to the sky: the Udmurt high god is Inmar, the heaven, and scholars set him beside Ilmarinen as evidence that behind the Finnish smith stands a deity of the firmament that the Uralic peoples carried before they parted.

The founding written witness keeps this older layer visible. In 1551 Mikael Agricola — the reformer who gave Finnish its first printed books — placed at the front of his translation of the Psalter a verse list of the gods his countrymen had worshiped before the church, twelve assigned to Hame (Tavastia) and twelve to Karelia, the whole framed by Agricola as the devil-driven idolatry the gospel had come to end. The list is hostile, and it is the oldest written record of the pre-Christian Finnic gods there is. In it Ilmarinen appears among the gods of Hame, and what is said of him is not smithcraft but weather and travel. The couplet runs, in the Finnish of the period, Ilmarinen Rauhan ja ilman tei / ja Matkmiehet edheswei — Ilmarinen made the calm and the air, and carried travelers forward. This is the air-god, the giver of fair weather and the prosperer of the journey, the power one would invoke to cross water safely; there is no forge in Agricola’s line at all. The smith is not yet in view in 1551, or at least Agricola did not record him.

How the sky-god of fair weather became the iron-master of the song is one of the genuinely contested questions of the field, and it should be marked as contested rather than smoothed over. The reconstruction that most scholars favor runs in two movements. First, the inherited sky-god lost his height: as the Finnic peoples came into contact in the first millennium BCE with the thunder-and-sky deities of their Baltic and Germanic neighbors, a new sovereign of the sky, Ukko the old man of the weather, rose to the foremost place, and the older Ilmari was displaced from the summit. Second, the displaced god was drawn down and reattached to a craft — the iron-working that reached the Finnic world in the same centuries, the Iron Age that in Finland runs from roughly 500 BCE onward — so that the one who had made the air came to be remembered as the one who had hammered out the firmament, and from there as the smith who could hammer out anything. The chain is plausible and widely held; it is also a reconstruction, built backward from a late and Christianized record, and the honest statement is that we do not have the steps documented, only the two ends of the process and a probable line between them.

The smith of the gods

In the song as Lonnrot fixed it, Ilmarinen is seppo Ilmarinen, Ilmarinen the smith — not a smith among smiths but the eternal one, the forger of the gods, takoja iänikuinen, the artificer at the beginning of things. He is the patron of all who work metal, the discoverer of iron and the inventor of the forge. Two works set him above every other craftsman, and both are works of cosmic scale.

The first is the sky itself. Before the world had its roof, Ilmarinen hammered out the dome of the air — taivaankansi, the lid of heaven, the vault over the earth. The marvel of the work, the detail the song dwells on, is its finish: he forged the sky-dome so cleanly that no mark of the hammer remains in it, no trace of the tongs, no seam where the metal was joined. The vault overhead is a single beaten sheet with no sign of how it was made. This is the older sky-god still legible inside the smith — the one who once was the air now stands as the one who forged the air’s covering — and it is the proof of his craft that the tradition offers before any other: a man who could make the sky without leaving a fingerprint on it can make anything.

His supreme work, though, is not the sky but a machine. The Mistress of the Northland — Louhi, who rules the cold far country of Pohjola at the edge of the inhabited world — sets as the price of her daughter the forging of the Sampo, and it is Ilmarinen, brought north for the purpose, who alone can make it. The Sampo is the wonder at the center of the whole tradition: a mill, in the plainest reading, that grinds without end and without exhaustion. The song describes its work in the parallel lines the runo-meter loves — on one side it grinds meal, on a second salt, on a third money, one measure to eat, one to sell, one to lay up in store — so that whoever owns it can never know want. It is crowned with a kirjokansi, an ornamented lid of many colors, and that colored lid is the part the later cosmological readers seize on, taking the whole engine for a model of the turning heavens.

The forging is itself an ordeal. Ilmarinen raises a furnace and works it for three days, casting into the fire not ore but a sequence of impossible materials — a swan’s feather, the milk of a cow, a single grain of barley, the wool of a summer ewe — and watching what rises from the flame. False things come first: a crossbow, a boat, a heifer, a plow, each beautiful and each flawed, each with a cruel temper that makes it useless, and each thrown back into the fire. Only when he calls the winds themselves to work the bellows, the four winds fanning the forge to a heat no human lung could raise, does the true thing finally form, and the Sampo rises from the fire with its colored lid turning. The detail that the smith must summon the winds is worth marking: the air-god is not wholly gone from the smith even here, for it is the winds, the ilma of his own old name, that bring his greatest work to birth.

The master of metal and the master of the word

Ilmarinen is almost never sung alone. He stands beside the other great figure of the tradition, and the two are deliberately set apart, a pairing that should not be collapsed into one heroic type. Vainamoinen is the primal singer, the ancient sage whose mastery is the sung word — the loitsu, the incantation, the song that orders water and wood and the bodies of the dead, the craft of the tietaja, the knower, who works by knowing the origin of a thing and naming it. Ilmarinen’s mastery is the opposite pole of the same world: not the word but the metal, not the song but the fire and the anvil, not the knowledge that commands a thing by naming it but the labor that forces a thing into being against the resistance of the material. The one shapes the world by saying; the other shapes it by striking.

The song keeps them allied and keeps them distinct. They are brothers-in-craft and sometimes rivals — for the Northland bride, above all, whom Ilmarinen wins by his forging while Vainamoinen, the elder, is refused; and they are partners in the great expedition north to take the Sampo back. But the division of labor never blurs. When the heroes need the Northland sung to sleep, it is Vainamoinen who plays the kantele, the box-zither of the tradition, and lays the household under his spell. When the lights of heaven are stolen and locked away and tools are needed to free them, it is Ilmarinen who returns to the forge. Word and metal are the two powers by which this world is made and held, and the tradition gives one to each man and lets neither stand in for the other. To read Ilmarinen as simply a second Vainamoinen, or to flatten the pair into a single culture-hero, is to lose the structure the song was built on.

The carrying-off and the breaking

The Sampo does not stay where it is forged, and its story is not finished when it is finished. Louhi takes the mill into Pohjola and shuts it inside a copper-bound hill behind nine locks, its roots growing nine fathoms deep into the rock, and while it grinds for the North the heroes’ own country goes without. So Vainamoinen, Ilmarinen, and the reckless third companion sail north to take it. Vainamoinen sings the household of Pohjola into sleep, and while Louhi and her people lie spellbound the smith who made the Sampo helps wrench it from its rooted hill, and they carry it to the ship.

They do not get clear. Louhi wakes, finds the hill empty, and gives chase across the sea — raising storm and fog, loosing a sea-monster, and at last taking the shape of a monstrous bird, mounting her warriors on her wings and falling on the fleeing ship in open water. In the battle the Sampo is seized and lost over the side, and the great mill shatters on the waves. The largest pieces sink to the sea-floor — and these, the song says, are the wealth and the luck of the waters, the reason the sea will always be richer than the land. The smaller shards wash to the shore of the heroes’ country, and from those splinters scattered on the soil comes the grain and the slow prosperity of the home fields. The mill of endless plenty is never recovered whole. It is broken in the taking, and its breaking is the founding of the world’s two abundances, the great share kept by the sea and the lesser share that drifted home to be planted. What Ilmarinen forged out of a feather and a grain and the four winds ends as fragments on a beach, and the fragments are the harvest.

Source-distance: the epic, the idol-list, and the long reconstruction

Almost everything narrated above rests on a record that must be read with its distances kept in view, because the layers are not equally old and not equally direct.

The narrative of the forging and the breaking comes from the Kalevala, and the Kalevala is not an ancient pan-Finnic scripture. It is Lonnrot’s nineteenth-century selection and arrangement of living oral song — a first version, the Old Kalevala, in 1835, and the far larger New Kalevala of 1849, the version read today — assembled from genuinely old runo-poetry that Lonnrot and others collected, much of it from the Orthodox Karelian villages east of the present Finnish border. The song was real and old; the epic is a literary synthesis built from it. How much is the singers’ and how much is Lonnrot’s is the load-bearing question of the discipline. The folklorist Vaino Kaukonen’s much-cited tally put roughly a third of the Kalevala’s lines as oral poetry kept essentially unchanged, half as verses Lonnrot retained with minor alteration, and the remainder — about a sixth — as his own composition, whether stitched together from variants or written outright to carry the plot. Domenico Comparetti argued already in The Traditional Poetry of the Finns (English translation 1898) that the epic was a construction rather than a recovered whole, and the point has held. So the connected story of Ilmarinen — the sequence of false forgings, the winds at the bellows, the chase and the shattering — is genuine oral material that Lonnrot selected and ordered into a single line. The reader should resist treating that line as a fixed ancient mythology; it is the shape one editor gave to a tradition that, in the mouths of its singers, had many shapes and no single canon.

The older sky-god rests on a different and even more cautious footing: the single hostile couplet in Agricola’s idol-list of 1551, which gives us Ilmari the maker of weather and the prosperer of the traveler and not one word of the forge. Between that couplet and the smith of the Karelian song lies three centuries with almost no documentation, which is why the descent from air-god to smith can only be reconstructed and not traced. And the deepest layer — the proto-Uralic sky deity behind both, the kinship with the Udmurt Inmar — is comparative reconstruction, the most distant and the most contested of all. A claim about Ilmarinen is only as firm as the layer it rests on, and those layers run from a beaten couplet of folk poetry, through a Reformation bishop’s catalog of idols, back to a name shared across peoples that split before history.

Reception and afterlife

Through Agricola the air-god survived as a memory; through the Karelian rune-singers and through Lonnrot the smith was fixed; and through the modern study of both the figure was finally read as what it most likely is — a deity of the sky drawn down over centuries into a culture-hero of the forge. That reading is the achievement of the comparative folklore that grew up around the Kalevala: the historic-geographic method of Julius and Kaarle Krohn, which traced individual songs across their variants, and the later mythological studies, among them Juha Pentikainen’s Kalevala Mythology, which set the smith within the whole sacred world the song preserves.

The figure also passed into the visual and national life of a country that took the Kalevala as its founding text. When Finland, still inside the Russian Empire, built a literature and an identity around Lonnrot’s epic, the forging of the Sampo became one of its central images: Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted Sammon taonta, the smith at his anvil raising the mill from the fire, and The Defense of the Sampo, the heroes’ ship and Louhi’s vast bird-shape locked over the lost treasure, and these canvases became the visual shorthand of Finnishness itself.

The Forging of the Sampo (Sammon taonta), 1893, Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Akseli Gallen-Kallela, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

In the twentieth century the smith took on yet another life. The folklorist Pekka Hakamies has tracked how Ilmarinen, the maker who could forge a machine that ground out plenty without end, became in industrializing Finland a patron of the engineer and the techno-utopian imagination — his name attached to factories, to a great pension institution, to the modern dream of an engine of abundance, the Sampo reborn as the machine that would grind out the wealth of a nation. The reception is worth noting precisely as reception and not as anything the rune-singers intended: the national-romantic and then the industrial uses of the smith are the afterlife of the figure, layered on top of the song, and they should not be read back into it.

The Defense of the Sampo, 1896, Turku Art Museum. Akseli Gallen-Kallela, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

What remains, under all the layers, is a singular conception. The other powers of this world greet the sun, break the thunder over the harvest, own the game of the forest, or shape the world by singing it. Ilmarinen is the one who builds — who finds the ore and raises the fire and beats the resistant metal into the form he wants, and who made the two greatest built things of the cosmos, the unmarked dome of the sky and the mill that ground out the world’s plenty until the day it broke on the sea. The runo-singers of the Karelians, who carried his song longest, kept him exactly there: not the master of the word but the master of the metal, the smith standing beside the singer at the making of the world.

→ Related: Vainamoinen · Ukko · Tapio · Beaivi · Pohjola · The Karelians · The Sami · The Mari · Ukonsaari · Astuvansalmi · Taatsi · Varikallio