Ilmatar vs Väinämöinen

The virgin daughter of the air who, in the Kalevala's first rune, descends to the primeval sea, becomes pregnant by wind and wave, and on whose knee a duck lays the eggs from which earth, sky, sun, moon, and stars are made; mother of Väinämöinen.

The daughter of the air, living alone in the heavens before she descends to the sea (Kalevala, Rune 1).

Lönnrot's epic opens with the maiden of the air, long alone in the empty heavens, who descends to the sea. The east wind and the waves make her pregnant, and she drifts for seven hundred years, unable to give birth. A duck, searching for a place to nest, sees her raised knee as a grassy hillock and lays six golden eggs and one of iron there. When the knee grows hot, Ilmatar jerks it, the eggs fall and break, and their pieces become the earth below, the vault of heaven above, the sun from the yolk, the moon from the white, the stars from the speckled parts, and the clouds from the dark. Ilmatar then shapes the coasts, bays, and reefs with her body, and finally gives birth to Väinämöinen.

The 'steady old' singer and sage of Finnish runo-song, named by Agricola in 1551 as the maker of songs, who in the Kalevala is born of Ilmatar, sings his rival into a bog, builds the first kantele from a pike's jawbone, leads the theft of the Sampo, and finally sails away.

Born of Ilmatar after thirty years in her womb on the primeval sea (Kalevala, Rune 1).

Agricola's list of 1551 says that Väinämöinen 'forged songs'. In folk poetry he is the eternal sage (*tietäjä iänikuinen*), a singer whose words have creative and magical force: he sings the world into order, sings rivals into the ground, and knows the 'origins' of things, the charms that give power over iron, fire, and wounds. In many folk variants he is himself the one on whose knee the world-egg is laid.