farewell, the mother
telling the daughter of what she will have to endure in a strange
home: 'Thy life was soft and delicate in thy father's house. Milk and
butter were ready to thy hand; thou wert as a flower of the field, as
a strawberry of the wood; all care was left to the pines of the
forest, all wailing to the wind in the woods of barren lands. But now
thou goest to another home, to an alien mother, to doors that grate
strangely on their hinges.' 'My thoughts,' the maiden replies, 'are as
a dark night of autumn, as a cloudy day of winter; my heart is sadder
than the autumn night, more weary than the winter day.' The maid and
the bridegroom are then lyrically instructed in their duties: the girl
is to be long-suffering, the husband to try five years' gentle
treatment before he cuts a willow wand for his wife's correction. The
bridal party sets out for home, a new feast is spread, and the
bridegroom congratulated on the courage he must have shown in stealing
a girl from a hostile tribe.

While all is merry, the mischievous Lemminkainen sets out, an unbidden
guest, for Pohjola. On his way he encounters a serpent, which he slays
by the song of serpent-charming. In this 'mystic chain of verse' the
serpent is not addressed as the gentle reptile, god of southern
peoples, but is spoken of with all hatred and loathing: 'Black
creeping thing of the low lands, monster flecked with the colours of
death, thou that hast on thy skin the stain of the sterile soil, get
thee forth from the path of a hero.' After slaying the serpent,
Lemminkainen reaches Pohjola, kills one of his hosts, and fixes his
head on one of a thousand stakes for human skulls that stood about
the house, as they might round the hut of a Dyak in Borneo. He then
flees to the isle of Saari, whence he is driven for his heroic
profligacy, and by the hatred of the only girl whom he has _not_
wronged. This is a very pretty touch of human nature.

He now meditates a new incursion into Pohjola. The mother of Pohjola
(it is just worth noticing that the leadership assumed by this woman
points to a state of society when the family was scarcely formed)
calls to her aid 'her child the Frost'; but the frost is put to shame
by a hymn of the invader's, a song against the Cold: 'The serpent was
his foster-mother, the serpent with her barren breasts; the wind of
the north rocked his cradle, and the ice-wind sang him to sleep, in
the midst of the wild marsh-land, where the wel