One more group of variants may be touched upon to show the hesitation one may feel at necessarily attributing to archaic times — and by that I mean before the Finns came in contact with European races — a mode of origin which, on the face of it, seems to belong to that epoch. It must be remembered that the following words, on which much depends, are importations from without: Bride and salmon are old loans from the Lithuanian; iron, gold, and churn are from the Gothic, or from old Scandinavian ; while the suffix -tar, in 'Luonnotar', is from one of these three extraneous sources. In one of the origins of iron (25e), three maidens, all of them brides, are engendered in a bubbling spring from the spawn of a golden fish, from the thrust[1] of a salmon, and become the origin of iron ore. Now, undoubtedly, one is tempted, at first sight, to remit such a conception to archaic times. In a variant, all three Luonnotars (daughters of nature) are evolved from Jesus rubbing his two hands together. In another version (25b) the three maiden brides simply grow upon an island, and afterwards shed their milk on the ground, from which sprouts of iron grew up. In a fourth version (25a) it is Ukko, the creative god that dwells in the air, who produces the three daughters of nature to be mothers of iron ore by rubbing his two hands together on the top or end of his left knee. I take this to mean that he was seated, and that, resting his left hand on his left knee, he rubbed with his right hand. This is very much the motion of grinding with a quern, where the lower stone is fixed and the upper one rotates. The fact of seeing meal, or perhaps fire, generated, so to speak, from a handmill, may have given rise to a figure of speech, by which living beings were developed from rubbing the hands together. For this is not an uncommon mode of generation in Finnish poetry, and also occurs in a prose origin. This
- ↑ In my previous translation I have translated 'thrust' by 'aperture', in accordance with a note sent me by my friend Lektor Raitio, but louke certainly has the meaning of 'thrust, push, knock', etc.
