Louhi vs Väinämöinen

The powerful, gap-toothed mistress of Pohjola, the dark North, who demands the forging of the Sampo in exchange for her daughter, pursues the heroes as a giant eagle when they steal it, and hides the sun and moon in a mountain.

No origin is told; she is simply the mistress of Pohjola.

In Finnish folk poetry the Old Woman of the North, *Pohjan akka*, rules Pohjola, a cold, dark, hostile land somewhere to the north, and is a formidable sorceress; in charms the related *Louhiatar* or *Loviatar* is the mother of diseases. The Kalevala makes Louhi the chief antagonist of the Kalevala heroes, though an ambivalent one: she rescues the shipwrecked Väinämöinen and bargains fairly for her daughter's marriage.

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.