Lemminkainen

The most famous Lemminkainen episode is his death and restoration, one of the great scenes of Finnish poetry. Sent, in his reckless courting, to shoot the swan of Tuonela, the river of the land of the dead, he is himself killed there, cut to pieces and thrown into the black water. His mother, learning of it from a sign, rakes the river of death with a long copper rake, gathers the scattered fragments of his body, and by charms, salves and the sung word reassembles and revives him.

The pattern, descent to the realm of the dead, dismemberment, and reintegration by ritual power, is recognisably shamanic, and comparativists set it beside other myths of the torn-and-restored figure. Within the epic it also defines Lemminkainen against his companions: where Vainamoinen embodies grave wisdom and Ilmarinen patient craft, Lemminkainen is the reckless, boastful, endlessly reviving hero whose life is a series of headlong disasters survived.

Lemminkainen's death at the river of Tuonela while hunting its sacred swan became, at the end of the nineteenth century, one of the most internationally performed pieces of music to come out of Finland, when the composer Jean Sibelius wrote The Swan of Tuonela as part of his Lemminkainen Suite, four tone poems based on episodes from the hero's story, first performed in 1896. The movement, scored around a long, mournful cor anglais solo representing the swan gliding on the black waters of the death-river while a muted string orchestra suggests the current, has become a staple of the international orchestral repertoire performed and recorded far beyond Finland, often programmed independently of the other three movements of the suite, so that many listeners worldwide encounter this specific image from Lemminkainen's myth through Sibelius's music with no knowledge of the Kalevala narrative that inspired it.

Sibelius's suite as a whole, composed while Finnish artists were actively drawing on the Kalevala to build a distinct national cultural identity under Russian imperial rule, treats Lemminkainen's reckless courtship and his death and restoration with a seriousness and orchestral grandeur that helped cement the epic's status as source material worthy of major concert-hall treatment rather than only folkloric curiosity, giving the hero's most famous ordeal an afterlife in the international classical repertoire considerably wider than the audience for the original sung poetry could ever have reached on its own.