Kalevala shortly #12 - Lemminkäinen goes to war

• This is part of my "Kalevala series" in which I tell the epic folklore poetry of Finns as a series of short stories, one rune at a time.

• Don't know what Kalevala is? Check my introduction post of it: Kaleva: An epic folklore of Finns - A source of inspiration for Tolkien's mythology

• Want to start from the beginning? Go to Part 1: The birth of Väinämöinen

• Previous part: Lemminkäinen's quest for a wife

---

Lemminkäinen lived his life with his beautiful wife, Kyllikki, on his side.

But their peaceful living was disrupted when one night Lemminkäinen didn't come back home for the night from his fishing trip; Kyllikki thought he had already broken their wedding vowel, and went back to her home village for the frolics with other maidens.

When Lemminkäinen heard she had gone to the village and broken their vowel, he got mad and broke his side of the vowel of not going to war:

"O' mother prepare my armor, wash my shirt, clean it with hurry;
I'm about to go to a war, go to the cabins of the North,
distant fields of the Laplanders."

Kyllikki tried to warn him for her dream in which she saw destruction and despair.

Lemminkäinen dismissed her warning.

Her mother tried to stop him from going to war:
she pleaded to their drinks in their barrels which he could drink all day,
to their becoming harvest worth gold and silver,
and to his beautiful wife.

But Lemminkäinen wanted to drink the nectar of war rather than beer from their barrels,
would rather earn a penny from fighting than be content on his own harvest,
and for a wife he wouldn't care a frolics stroller, instead, he wanted to find a new maiden among the famous beautiful virgins in the North.

The mother still feared for his son getting into the merciless grip of North, to its witches and their conjures, leading to his destruction. But Lemminkäinen wasn't helpless in his abilities:

"Already I was conjured by witches, swored to me by devious vipers. "

"Three Laplanders threatened onto me, encircled me onto a rock,
wished to push me into a swamp, sink my head, drown into the sludge."

"But such son of a bitch I was: Did not rush, carefully dialected,
by myself conjured upon them; sang the witches with their arrows,
enchanted the wizards' power, hexed the sa'ages with their steel,
into a rapid of the Underworld; where they shall lye, sleep on their death,
until hey grows through their bodies."

He put on his iron shirt and steel belt with the fiery sword - forged in an altar of gods in a shade of holy grove - in sheath by his side, and prepared his stallion to began his campaign to the North.

Upon arriving to the North he peeked into the highest of cabin, full of great singers, witches and conjurers, including Louhi, the Mistress of the North, who asked upon Lemminkäinen:

"What is a man of your quality, where do you come disturbing my house;
you went past the hound, the barker, without its notice, without noise."

Lemminkäinen wasn't born to be slain by a puny dog, he was raised as a sage for every road, singer with a craft for every language, conjurer for every spell.

He lifted his word with his fur's lapels on fire, with a glow in his eyes:

He sang all the conjurers, the masters of singing, all the men from young to old: which one onto a root of furnace, which one into a damp swamp, into a fishless dead lake, uncultivated dry land, into a rapids fierce roaring, to its bottom as a rock.

But one man he spared, because of Lemminkäinen's despise on him who he didn't even dare to touch: a farmer who had gone into his sister and ruined onto animals. He fleed to the back of the Underworld river where he waited for absentminded Lemminkäinen to leave.

---

---

• Part 13: The hunt for the Moose of Hiisi

---

Pics: 1, 2