Ilmatar

In the Kalevala

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.

Lönnrot's arrangement

In most of the folk variants Lönnrot knew, it is Väinämöinen himself, floating on the sea, on whose knee the bird lays its eggs. The name Ilmatar and her role as creator-mother are largely Lönnrot's shaping of scattered material; the first edition of 1835 differs from the canonical edition of 1849. The world-egg motif itself is old and widespread in Finnic tradition.