The drowning maiden
Outside the Fellman manor, nowadays housing the historical museum in Lahti, lies the fountain Aino by Emil Wikström, displaying a tragic scene of a young woman being driven to the water. The work was completed in 1912 and was moved to this location from Helsinki in 1949.
In the Finnish epic Kalevala, Aino was the beautiful sister of the young Joukahainen, who competing in knowledge lost a singing battle to the old sage Väinämöinen. Väinämöinen sang Joukahainen into the swamp and in order to save himself from drowning, Joukahainen promised his sister to be married to old Väinämöinen.
Väinämöinen was a great man, famous and wealthy, and Aino's mother was happy about the arrangement. Aino however despaired; she would not be married - better to be friend of the fish than a caretaker for an old man.
In the statue Aino is on top of the rock with the water-maidens tempting her and helping a male servant from Ahtola push the rock to the sea. Ahti and Vellamo are the master and mistress of water, and their house or underwater kingdom is Ahtola.
Aino runs away and wanders for days till she reaches the seashore. She spends the night there weeping, and in the morning she finds there are three water-maidens bathing by an iridescent rock in the water. Aino lays off her clothes and jewellery and swims across to join them on the rock. As soon as she mades it and sits on the rock, it loosens and falls to the bottom of the ocean taking poor Aino with it.
As she falls, she chants to her family; forbidding her father to not fish from this large ocean, her mother not to take water to her bread dough, her sister not to wash her eyes from a pier here , and her brother not to water his war-horses from shore of the ocean. She claims water of the sea as her blood, The flesh of the fish her flesh, twigs on the shore the ribs of her wretched self and sea-grass frayed from her hair.
The story is also depicted in this triptych, Aino Myth by Akseli Gallen-Kallela from 1891, located in Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki.
And that was the end of the beautiful maiden - though she will return later.
After hearing the news, In his sorrow Väinämäinen goes to search the areas of the water-maidens, where he angles up a strange fish(salmon). As he is about to cut the fish for dinner, it leaps out of the boat and transforms into Aino in her human form. She mocks the old sage for not recognizing her and then disappears back into the sea never to be seen again.
Here is a video of the fountain with a couple of ducks to lighten things up.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/
Here is link to english translation of Kalevala by John Martin Crawford from 1888. This story is told in runes 3-5 which I've tried to summarise with help of this and the finnish text:
http://runeberg.org/kalevala/
I took these pictures last Friday when I took a walk to the beach and passing the museum on my way. What a beautiful day.
for friends of melodic death metal, here is the song Drowned Maid where i snatched the title, by Amorphis from their 1994 album Tales From The Thousand Lakes inspired by this story( there are few actually.)