The Defense of the Sampo

In my last post I wrote about the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic and about Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), one of the poem’s most famous illustrators. I mentioned the tale’s major themes: battles, magical adventures, a virgin birth, a miraculous child, and so on, but I didn’t include vengeance, incest, betrayals, jealousy, shamans, murder, blood feuds, suicide, child abuse, shape-shifting, fratricide, magic spells, kidnapping, theft, heroes, incantations, “nameless diseases,” sacred groves, death and resurrection, thwarted loves. And the Sampo.

In this image, Gallen-Kallela has painted Väinämöinen, a godlike shaman, and his crew, defending the Sampo from Louhi, an evil witch from Pohjola, the dark, cold, and dreaded North. (Of course, Pohjola also happens to be the home of beautiful, inaccessible women.) Louhi has changed herself into a predatory bird and, like everyone else in the story, she wants to possess the Sampo.

Why? It’s not a ring like that in Tolkien’s epic, but it is a magical artifact, a talisman, a vessel that confers nourishment, wealth and power on whoever has it. It was forged by a human blacksmith, but it always remains enigmatic. It’s never illustrated because it’s never clear exactly what it is, or looks like.

As you might imagine, not even its magical powers and magnetic attractions for humans can save it from destruction: In the battle painted here, it breaks apart and the fragments sink below the waves, lost forever, like thwarted loves, and other human dreams.