“When you hear the secret words, arise, sword, and kill … collect the debt of a murderer and fulfil the wish of your creator,” Ilmarinen instructs, after Kalevipoeg slays his son in a drunken rage, with a magic sword that had been 7 years in the making, and which the epic hero had bought for a kingly price.
Eventually, and after many hard-fought battles, Estonia’s national hero is felled by the very same sword – his own words and actions unleashed the Finnish smith’s death command, so completing a self-fulfilling prophesy.
A smith’s cursing a sword that later kills its master is a trope in Norse folklore, eg the Tyrfing cycle, dating back 1000 years. A king, Svafrlami, kidnaps two dwarf smiths, and compels them to make him a magical sword. Deeply offended, the dwarfs lay curses on the sword, including one that it kill its owner.
To cut a long saga short, Svafrlami fouls his sword in the ground in battle on striking at an adversary who then slices off the king’s hand, grabs Tyrfing and ends the king’s life with it.
Friedrich Kreuzwald brought Ilmarinen into the Kalevipoeg epic, referring to him consistently as Sooma sepp, or Finnish smith. This is one of few correspondences between his masterpiece and the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, “the land of Kalev” (1835), the creation of Elias Lönnrot, a compiler of Finnish folklore.
Ilmarinen is the diminutive of Ilmari, a name of power; in Finnish, the word means the sky, and the sky god, the most powerful of all the gods. In Estonian, the word, ilm, has to do with the weather, and maailm means the world or cosmos.
No ordinary smith then, Ilmarinen has been living in obscurity with his family when Kalevipoeg tries to find him. An old woman he meets in the wilderness points him in the right direction after a long and fruitless search. He finally meets the smith who offers various swords of his making for sale.
Understanding that Kalevipoeg will destroy his entire armoury by striking the stone walls of the smithy with one blade after another, Ilmarinen draws forth a sword of power, one capable in a powerful hand of splitting an iron anvil in two, which Kalevipoeg immediately demonstrates.
Evald Okas charcoal: Ilmarinen (left) in awe of Kalevipoeg's handling of his magic sword
The negotiations for purchase begin, and Ilmarinen’s price, though unreasonable, meets Kalevipoeg’s acceptance; already he is drawn into the sword’s power.
In Wikipedia’s words, “A great feast and drinking bout is held. Unfortunately, Kalevipoeg argues with, gets angry, and fells the head of Ilmarinen’s eldest son (who is also intoxicated at this point, as is Kalevipoeg) with the very sword he helped create. Ilmarinen curses the sword.”
The deathly power of a sword also appears in the Kalevala, to slay the tragic hero, Kullervo, the only surviving son of the family of Kalervo, after a massacre. He swears revenge on their killers, and grows into a strong and masterful swordsman.
Events follow that resemble the Greek myth of king Oedipus (who fulfilled a prophesy that he would slay his father and marry his mother). Grief-stricken by his deed, Kullervo has a conversation with his sword - as did Kalevipoeg with his magic sword, though in different circumstances, on sighting it lying quietly in a river bed.
Kullervo asks his sword if it would be willing to kill its master. The sword cheerfully agrees, saying that since it had put many criminals to death under Kullervo’s hand, it would be happy to do the same again. Kullervo dies, by his own weapon.
To complete the borrowing from others in crafting the Kalevipoeg, the severing by a sword of the hero’s legs has its origins in a tale from the Hurrians, an obscure Bronze Age people who inhabited the Middle East and were later superseded by the iron-weaponed Hittites.
Iron and steel were beyond the old Estonians’ reach, the limestone and sandstone geology preventing its discovery. Finland’s crystalline rocks and boglands, on the other hand, provided the conditions, also the case in Sweden, for unearthing iron ore, and learning the magic of how to fire it from chemical concealment into molten metal.
Until that time iron was known only in meteorites, a godly metal having an otherworldly origin. Hence, perhaps, the figure of Ilmarinen as both a sky god and a smith, and Estonians’ dependence on others to secure iron weaponry to defend their territory against attack.
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