A Mill in the Kalevala, a Pillar in the Songs

On the third night the four winds are working the bellows, and the Sampo rises out of Ilmarinen's furnace with its lid in many colors. In John Martin Crawford's 1888 English Kalevala, it grinds flour on one side, salt on another and money on a third. The poem says almost nothing else about it. It gives no size and no shape, and it never explains how the thing works. The translation did not lose these details. By the time Elias Lönnrot collected the songs, the singers themselves no longer agreed on what the Sampo was.

How the smith got to the furnace

The Kalevala's version starts with a debt. Väinämöinen comes home from Pohjola, the dark Northland, by sledge. He has been stranded there. To save his life, he promised its mistress Louhi a Sampo, but he cannot forge one. Crawford's text says plainly what he offered instead: Ilmarinen, the smith, "as ransom."

Ilmarinen refuses to go. Pohjola, he says, is a place "Where the people eat each other." But Väinämöinen has prepared for this. On the ride home, on the Osmo fields, he sang a pine tree up until its golden top touched the sky, with the Moon and the Great Bear in its branches. Now he only describes it. Ilmarinen will not believe it until he sees it, so Väinämöinen takes him there and asks him to climb up and bring the Moon and the Bear down. The smith climbs. The tree itself calls him senseless. Then Väinämöinen sings up a storm-wind, which builds a boat out of air and carries Ilmarinen north. He lands so quietly that Louhi's watch-dogs never pick up his scent.

Louhi has her terms ready. She wants a Sampo made from the tips of white-swan feathers, the milk of greatest virtue, a single grain of barley and the finest wool of lambs. The payment is her fairest daughter. Ilmarinen agrees straight away and says why he can do it, in Crawford's words:

"Since I forged the arch of heaven, / Forged the air a concave cover, / Ere the earth had a beginning."

That boast matters more than it seems to.

Four failures and a fifth thing

Pohjola has no smithy, so Ilmarinen spends three days searching before he finds a rainbow-colored rock and builds his forge on it. Hired men work the bellows for three days and three short midsummer nights. Then the furnace starts making things, and every one of them goes wrong.

On the first day it makes a golden crossbow that demands a hero every day and two on feast days. On the second, a purple skiff that rushes into every quarrel. On the third, a heifer with golden horns that runs through the swamps and spills her milk as she goes. On the fourth, a plow that tears up fields of corn and barley. Ilmarinen breaks each one and throws the pieces back into the fire. The list is worth noticing: a weapon, a boat, cattle and a plow, every one a source of wealth that turns destructive.

Next he lets the winds work the bellows. They blow for three days, and on the third night the Sampo comes up out of the fire. It grinds one measure for eating, a second for the market and a third for the storehouse. Louhi takes it straight into the copper-bearing mountains of Pohjola. She puts nine locks on it and makes three roots grow from it, nine fathoms deep: one under the mountain, one under the sea-bed and one under the dwelling.

Then the daughter refuses him. Ilmarinen sails home and sums up the deal for Väinämöinen in Crawford's lines: "Louhi has the wondrous Sampo, / I have not the Bride of Beauty."

What Lönnrot did

This is the Sampo most readers know, and one man assembled it. Elias Lönnrot was a district health officer in Kainuu who made eleven collecting trips over fifteen years. His Old Kalevala of 1835 had 12,078 verses. The 1849 Kalevala, the standard text that is still translated today, has 22,795 verses in fifty poems. Lönnrot merged variants, dropped lines that did not fit, and wrote his own lines to join episodes into a single plot. The historian Väinö Kaukonen estimated that 3 percent of the lines are Lönnrot's own, 14 percent are his compositions built from variants, and only 33 percent are oral poetry left unedited.

The mill is one of Lönnrot's editorial choices. He read the Sampo as a quern, a hand mill that made flour, salt and gold out of nothing.

What the singers said

By the nineteenth century, even the Karelian singers had lost track of what the Sampo meant. Asked, they gave different answers: an iron kantele, a boat, the stars and the Moon, a millstone. So the mill was not invented from nothing. It was one answer out of several. The Forest Finn Maja Hindriksdotter said it was like a magical bird. In Kainuu and White Karelia, the Sampo holds words. One song opens a "chest of words" so that Samppu would not run short of them. The White Karelian singer Jaakko Huovinen said the Samma is where all runes and sorcery come from.

The scholars disagreed just as widely. Julius Krohn thought it was the Sun. Jens Andreas Friis thought it was a Sámi drum. Kaarle Krohn thought the theft story remembered a raid on Gotland. Other readings include a compass, a Byzantine coin die, a decorated shield and a Christian relic.

Toes, salt, and a pillar

The oldest written version of the theft was taken down from the Forest Finns in 1817, and in it the Sampo has toes. Väinämöinen and Joukahainen fetch the Sammas north by boat. When Väinämöinen finally sings, the Sammas jumps into the sky. Joukahainen cuts off two of its toes. One falls into the sea and makes it salty. The other falls on land, and wild hay grows there. If he had cut off the third, crops would grow without farming. This version still has salt, but nothing grinds it.

The sources also disagree about how the Sampo ends. In the Kalevala it is lost at sea and destroyed. In many White Karelian versions it sinks into the water and makes the seas rich. Estonian songs put the Sammas somewhere else entirely. It is an oak or an ash standing at the center of the world, on a grassy island in the sea, beside a well. The archaeologist Elena Kuz'mina traced the Sampo myth to the Indo-European skambhá, "support, pillar," the thing that holds up the universe in the Atharvaveda. Early in the twentieth century, Pekka Ervast, Uno Harva and Eemil Nestor Setälä all argued that the Sampo was the world pillar.

The most detailed account comes from a Forest Finn tietäjä, Kaisa Vilhunen. She described a golden pillar with a golden head and a copper foot. The head is Polaris, which fixes the pillar to the sky. The foot runs underground like a tree's roots and is fixed to a copper mountain. The sky turns around Polaris, and Vilhunen called that turning the Sammas "grinding."

Put her description next to Louhi's hiding place in the Kalevala: copper mountains, roots nine fathoms deep, one of them under the sea-bed. Lönnrot's mill still has the roots and the copper mountain of a pillar.

The smith who forged the sky

This brings back Ilmarinen's boast. The scholarship summarized on Wikipedia says the runic singers first understood the Sampo as an image of growth and its mythic origin, not as an object. Ilmarinen could forge it because he was a god, the one who had made the sky. One of the Sampo's names in the songs is Kirjokansi, a term scholars connect to the sky. Matti Kuusi read the whole myth as a ritual song about the birth of agriculture. Anna-Leena Siikala thought the theft and the mill-like features came in through contact with Norwegians.

No one version is the real one. The 1849 Kalevala has a mill that grinds flour, salt and money. The 1817 Forest Finn version has a creature with toes that salted the sea. Estonian songs have a tree, and Vilhunen describes a pillar that turns the sky. Lönnrot's mill grinds flour, salt and money. Vilhunen's pillar grinds the turning sky. In the 1817 version and the Estonian songs, nothing grinds at all.

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