Join us at the campfire for tales from around the world, told by storytellers of all backgrounds and creeds. From the heros and heroines of old, let us relearn and rediscover the wisdom of our ancestors. Shhh..the story begins..
In a time before time itself, there lived a young goddess. She had two names which marked the two phases of her shadowy existence...first, as the Virgin of the Air and, later, as the Water-Mother. Her origins were shrouded in mystery. It was said that she was the daughter of the King of the Air, but nothing more was known of her father or of his realm, except that he owned a palace which floated in the empyrean, high above an endless expanse of water. The palace remained hidden behind a curtain formed by the Northern Lights, walled by mist and roofed by rainbows.
Within the eight thousand chambers of the palace, echoed the sighs of eight thousand kinds of emptiness. The glittering windows looked out upon nothing and its corridors meandered forever...meeting and branching...widening and narrowing...their furthermost ends extending somewhere beyond the vanishing point.
This then was the home of the Virgin of the Air. How she lived, what foods she ate, in what tongue she spoke are all matters of conjecture, but it is known that she was as restless as the wind that scoured the shining halls of the palace.
One day, she leapt...or maybe fell...or was, perhaps, even pushed by some unseen, fateful force...through an enormous door or window that opened out onto the void. She plummeted through the bottomless caverns of cloud. If she screamed, it surely must have reverberated throughout the universe, for she was a giantess of vast dimensions, but the currents of the wind caught her as though she were merely a weightless wisp, and carried her gently downward to the waiting ocean.
As she tumbled toward the whitecaps, the waves crested and reached up to break her fall. For a while, the forces of water and air tossed her back and forth between them. The sea lifted her upward to receive the caresses of the wind and then snatched her suddenly away.
All too soon, the game between the two elements grew deadly serious. The ocean surged up into angry billows; the wind whipped itself into a ferocious tempest and stirred the waves into a whirlpool. They savagely fought for possession of the goddess, with no regard for her frantic cries. When the maelstrom finally stilled and the roaring gusts eventually subsided, the giantess floated...no longer a virgin. Her body swelled with new life growing inside, planted there by the violent and competitive courtship between storm and sea.
Then came the time of gestation. While she waited for this strange fruit to ripen, the goddess swam through the waters, and, it was from this point in the tale, the bards began to call her the Water-Mother. To and fro she swam, finding nothing but ocean. Sometimes she floated on her back, gazing up toward her former home in the Kingdom of Air, but she had fallen so far in her headlong dive that the palace was lost to view. If her father, the elusive King, knew of her predicament, he certainly gave no sign.
As a goddess and, therefore, an immortal, the Water-Mother had no means or need to measure time, but it has been recorded that she drifted in the waters for the equivalent of seven hundred years. Century after century, she wafted first east, then west, then north, and then south. Occasionally, restless and fretful, she thrashed about in the sea but, more often than not, she simply drifted in a deep trance, nourishing the child within with her life's blood and divine powers.
For all those years, she waited, complete in herself, her energies and attention directed inward, contemplating the secrets of life. Then the moment arrived when she was no longer alone. Inexplicably, from out of the nothingness or perhaps from some other, more populous sphere where deities danced and made magic, appeared a winged messenger...a huge teal, boldly striped and speckled. The bird dipped low over the surface of the water, then rose and swooped again, searching urgently for a place to land.
The Water-Mother watched its weary wings beating until its bright and beadlike eye caught her own. Between them flashed perfect, wordless sympathy...silent communication of divinity with divinity. In response, the giantess lifted one knee out of the water. The bird wheeled, calling out with a startling and lonely cry, before landing easily on the great, smooth mound. However large the teal and however wide its wingspan, it was dwarfed by the magnitude of the Water-Mother's kneecap. The creature stood still for a moment, then settled itself and began to construct a nest from its own soft feathers, as if satisfied that it had, at last, found the ideal place.
Still, the Water-Mother continued to float, watching as the bird produced a shining gold egg, followed by a second. Then came a third, fourth, fifth and sixth...all of them round and lustrous and golden as the first. Finally, the teal brought forth a seventh egg which was different from its fellows...a dark and heavy egg of iron, dull and gray. If there had been any doubt that the bird came from a domain outside the common realm of nature, this extraordinary progeny would have put any qualms to rest. The teal fluffed out its feathers and sat, broody, on the Water-Mother's knee, keeping its eggs warm and safe from the chill of the waters. Any communication which might have passed between them, bird and giantess, were unrecorded, but they kept each other company in that period of tranquil waiting.
Gradually the time of peace came to an end. In the beginning, the clutch of eggs had been as cool as the metals of which they were made, but as the bird sat over them, they slowly began to warm. Soon they glowed red with heat, then white-hot, searing the flesh of the Water-Mother's smooth knee. Goddess though she might be, she was not immune to pain. With a roar which ruptured the air, she lashed out in agony. Her frenzied kicking churned the waters into great tidal waves, and, one by one, the seven burning eggs slipped from the nest and rolled into the ocean. When they struck the surface, they smashed and shattered. Despairingly, the Water-Mother looked about for the teal, but the mysterious bird had flown.
Suddenly, something wonderful happened. The splintered fragments began to rise from the waters and not one scrap of outer coating nor drop of contents were lost. From half the opalescent golden shells came the earth itself and from the remainder came the cap of the heavens curving over it. Bright yellow yolk shone out as the sun, the whites formed the moon, and whatever specks and particles were left rose up to become the stars and the clouds. The dark remnants of the iron egg were transformed into the storms which blackened the sky.
Afterward, the Water-Mother again drifted, cumbersome and gravid, but now she had the sun to cheer her days and the moon to light her nights. Serene, she began to dream. Countless times she saw the sun come up and countless times she saw the moon chase it from the sky, as the unborn child remained, as ever, within her body.
Warmed by the solar orb, pulled this way and that by the moon-driven tides, the Water-Mother felt her time approaching. Following the example set by the teal, she began to prepare a nest for her own offspring. She lifted up her head and looked about her. Reaching out with a massive hand, wherever her all-powerful fingers pointed, there soared jutting headlands, cliffs, coastlines and promontories...the boundless sea was finally embraced by a shore.
She spread out her palm and shaped the sandy beaches, the dunes behind them, the flatlands and the gently rising downs. She fashioned the higher hills and the towering mountains. With the tips of her fingernails, the Water-Mother traced patterns on the slopes of the high elevations, carving out clefts and fissures and striations into the face of the rock. When she was finished, she turned head-over-heels and plunged beneath the surface of the sea with an almighty splash that nearly soaked the brand-new heavens.
Swimming underwater, diving deep, she made the ocean floor, opening subterranean caves and grottoes that would serve as hiding-holes for little fish and lurking-places for the bigger fish that would come to hunt them. She planted islands, both large and small, as well as rocks rising out of the water and hidden reefs that would some day become the bane of mariners.
She had barely completed her assigned task when she felt a violent stirring in her womb. The child she had carried so long was growing impatient. Its own time had arrived to become part of the world its mother had made. The giantess groaned and with a triumphant gasp arched her body to thrust the child on its way toward freedom and light.
Everywhere there was blood and foam and a great fermenting of the waters. Then all was blackness as the goddess ended her birth agonies. The Water-Mother looked down into the sea and saw her newborn son, Vainamoinen, who had tarried within her for so long that he had grown to full size...indeed, his period of maturity had been such that he had grown old in the process. From the moment of his birth, he was possessed of infinite wisdom and sported a well-lined forehead and long, venerable white beard.
It is not known for certain what the Water-Mother said to her son by way of welcome, but it was just as well that he came to her fully-grown without the need for nursing or swaddling or tending or teaching, because there was still much work to be done. The Water-Mother had made the world, but she left it to her son to clothe and cover it.
And so the goddess floated idly upon the surface of the waters, enjoying her well-earned rest, as she watched Vainamoinen, her son, flex his muscles, tax his wits, and summon up his power. She saw him bring forth grains and grasses, meadows of hay, fruits and flowering trees. He filled the sea with creatures and populated the land. He placed pine trees on the hilly slopes, heather among the rocks, cherries where the earth was damp, bright-berried junipers on stony ground, rowans in the holy places, willows on the fens, tall oaks along the riverbanks, and all the living things of green that would make food and fuel and shelter in the areas where people would live.
And he, Vainamoinen, son of the Water-Mother, would be the first among them: the first farmer; the first forester; the first gardener; and, above all else, the first poet and storyteller, who would hand down the memory of the beginning of the world for all time.