The practice of producing iron and steel is one of scientific precision today. Modern facilities, with sensitive gauges and sharply defined methods, churn out high quality steel at a rate of more than 100 million metric tons (MMT) per month. The World Steel Association reported 119 MMT produced in sixty-six countries during the thirty days of June of 2010 alone (worldsteel.org). The entire process, from ore extraction to shipment of the final product, is overseen by highly trained individuals with degrees in the hard sciences such as geology, chemistry, metallurgy, and mechanical engineering. The improvements in the iron/steel making process in the past couple of centuries have come through the scientific method: hypothesis, controlled experimentation, evaluation, and confirmation of results. In the modern mind there has formed an adamantine bond between the empirical scientific method and the making of iron products which, when projected upon the early practitioners of the craft, precludes one from understanding the relationship ancient man had with iron. Seeing the ancient blacksmith as a primitive metallurgist, experimenting with new materials to make harder tools, or tweaking his process to find more efficient formulas, leaves an incomplete impression of ancient man’s relationship to iron. As Theodore Wertime puts it: “…the scientific revolution of this century has altered enormously the old appreciation of iron” (Wertime 6).
A study of iron references in the folklore and literature of ancient cultures leaves a very different impression of the early blacksmith. From The Odyssey to The Prose Edda, the lines that speak of iron or blacksmithing in epic poems and folklore are invariably filled with magic potions, ritual incantations, and supra-human craftsmen. The Finnish folksongs recorded by Elias Lonrott in The Kalevala are an excellent example of this. The Kalevala is replete with references to iron or iron making, including a section called the Iron Charms. The humanities have studied these verses for their literary values, usually with little concern about their accuracy in describing the actual process of forging iron tools. However, the gulf between these two visions of the early smith may not be as wide as once believed.
The central conflict of The Kalevala is the struggle over a magical tool called the Sampo. This amazing three-sided tool provided for the immediate, short term, and long term needs of the people of North Farm by producing “one binful of things to eat… a second of things to sell, and a third of household supplies” (Kalevala 60). Nobody knows for sure (although opinions abound) what this fantastic item really was or represented, but this much is undeniable: the Sampo is intimately connected with the magic of forging iron. In the ninth rune of The Kalevala Lönnrot has recorded a series of old iron charms, which tell of the origins of this precious metal and its first forging by the demi-god Ilmarinen. An in depth analysis of the Iron Charms reveals
that the work of the Finnish blacksmith was understood through a supernatural paradigm, but that underneath the mystic verbiage lays a pragmatic and accurate formula for finding iron ore, smelting it into blooms, and forging it into high quality carburized iron implements.
For the organizational purposes of this paper I have chosen to simply follow the text line by line through the relevant sections of Francis Peabody Magoun’s English translation, with some references to Kirby’s earlier translation. A brief synopsis of each section analyzed will be provided, but the reader will find that following along with the full text of the Iron Charms appended to this essay will be a great help in this exercise.
It is important to understand that the narrative song that Lönnrot places in this part of the epic was a separate creation from the iron charms themselves. There were two types of songs recorded by Lönnrot in The Kalevala: narrative songs and ceremonial charms or lays (Lönnrot 375). Lönnrot recorded that when the performers, always a pair singing in turn (Porthan 380), “c[a]me to such passages, often left them unsung, saying: ‘Here begins the usual course of the Iron Charms” (376). The Iron Charms, as well as the other ritual charms recorded in The Kalevala, stand alone, and during Lönnrot’s time, were still used by rural folk “for their normal use,” as ritual charms used in everyday life (376).
Rune IX lines 29-72. Väinämöinen sings of the creation of iron from three heavenly maidens who let milk of various hues leak from their engorged breasts onto the earth.
The very first line of the Iron Charms says, “Air is its first of mothers.” This opening line is short but contains deep significance as an insight into the early conceptual views of iron. The very first source of iron ore did, in fact, come to man from heaven, in the form of meteoric iron that literally fell from the sky. Douglas Fisher in Steel: From Iron Age to Space Age writes, "In nearly all languages at the centers of high civilization, iron was called 'metal, or something hard, from the sky.' The early Egyptians named iron ba-en-pet, variously interpreted as 'marvel from heaven' or 'hard stone from the sky.' Iron was named 'przilla' by the Assyrians and Babylonians, barsa by the Sumerians and Chaldeans, and barzel by the Hebrews. A popular translation for these terms is 'metal from heaven.'" (11)
Tools and ornaments made from meteoric iron have been found by archeologists excavating some of the earliest cultural sites in the world. Beads of meteoric iron were found in Tepe Salk, Iran and in El Gerzah, Egypt which are dated as older than 3000 BCE (Buchwald 26). A fragment of a flat tool was found in The Royal Cemetery of Ur, Iraq, 3000-2000 BCE, which was recently confirmed to be made of meteoric iron (27). A mace head of meteoric iron was found at the site of Troy in Annatolia dating to 2600 BCE (26). These few examples, of course, do not represent an exhaustive list of meteoric items found by archeologists in ancient sites, but are enough to exemplify the very old history that mankind has had with meteoric iron.
Meteoric iron was cold forged, meaning it was shaped by hammering or grinding without heat, and the difficult process produced a very hard edge, even by modern metallurgical standards (Coghlan 30). The most famous example of meteoric iron source material in northern regions is the Cape York Meteorite which fell in Greenland some ten thousand years ago. The meteor was enormous, leaving several huge fragments including one weighing over thirty tons, a second of twenty tons, and two other three ton pieces (Buchwald 21). These larger fragments were chiseled or hammered to remove flakes of material, and smaller pebbles of material were also used to produce valuable tools and weapons (Coghlan 29).
This initial line of the Iron Charms reveals a concept about iron that predates the Kalevala by 3000 years or more. Of course meteors were not plentiful enough to make iron a common material for use in tools or weapons. It wasn’t until man found terrestrial sources of iron ore that the Iron culture was able to take root (Buchwald 38).
Another significant nugget that can be mined from this line is the use of the word ‘mothers’ in the plural. This is an indication that the early Finns saw the smelting process as a birthing process, because it indicates that after Air, the furnace in which it will be smelted is the second mother. The symbolism of the birth of iron will be discussed in depth in the section analyzing lines 105-165.
Moving on to lines 30-32, iron is said to be the youngest of three brothers, water and fire being its older siblings. That iron is listed as the only other sibling to the life giving elements of water and fire speaks volumes about the importance of iron to this culture. Iron came to Finland remarkably late in history, which helps explain the Finnish people’s fascination with it. While the Hittites began smelting iron in 1700 BCE, the Finns did not begin to forge their own iron until around 300 CE. The first archaeological signs of iron being widely used in Finland are found in burial sites that date back to the beginning of the Christian era. (Kivikoski, 72) These burial sites are very different from those used before 200 BCE. The advent of a new technology and a new burial ritual coinciding leads archaeologists to assume that the technology of iron smelting was brought into Finland by an immigrant society. Buchwald claims that Iron Age culture entered Finland via Karelia around 500 BCE, the very area which supplied Lonnrot with much of his material for The Kalevala (Buchwald 195). At the time of its initial introduction of iron, Finland was not even truly integrated into the Bronze-Age. The tools being used by this hunter/trader culture were constructed primarily of bone, wood, or stone. As Kivikoski states, “The rarity of bronze finds suggests that the metal was so little known as to have made no significant alteration in the culture…the population continued at the Stone Age level” (60). In a sense, Finland skipped the Bronze Age and stepped directly into the Iron Age as iron technology was brought in by a new farm and livestock based culture. Iron would have been doubly impressive to a culture that did not have the benefits of bronze already. That the Sampo springs from the furnace of an ironsmith is a reflection of that fascination.
Also notable in this passage is that the three brothers: water, fire, and iron, are the three elements needed to make steel. Iron is brought out from water, placed in fire, and then finally quenched in water to bring it to its most useful state. Here the didactic value of the charms begins to be seen. For an illiterate smith, memorizing the complex process of iron making was made easier by turning the formula into a charm. As Budd and Taylor observe: “In non-literate societies, complex procedures are necessarily ritualized - a sequence of procedures that cannot be written down in a scientific manual must be committed to memory as a formulaic 'spell'.” The iron charms as recorded in The Kalevala are useful to the iron smith in all aspects of iron work, from finding ore, down to the last tempering of steel.
The next several lines of this section speak of Ukko creating three young women from his knee. Iron in various forms is spewed upon the Earth from the lactating breasts of the “Nature Spirits.” These maidens are also called the mothers of iron but are distinct from the “Air mother” and represent iron as having three distinct manifestations. In The Old Kalevala, Lönnrot’s first iteration of the songs of the Kaleva district, the distinction between iron's original mother and the three young maidens is made even more distinct. It says that after iron was already on the earth it hid in the breasts of the young women to escape a great fire. At any rate these women are the mythological source of the terrestrial iron that is used by Ilmarinen to make his great tools, and again we see the association of iron with birthing in the lactating women.
The bizarre visual image of the multi-hued milk that comes from the breasts of these nature spirits constitutes another instructional part of the charm. The milk refers to iron in three forms that the Early Finns would have been familiar with. Line 58 says that, “from the one who spurted red milk, iron ore was got.” This iron ore was undoubtedly bog iron, the primary source of ore in northern Europe at this time. Bog iron comes from iron deposits in underground mineral springs which feed the plentiful bogs of Finland. The iron deposits are lumped together by bacteria living in this anaerobic environment to form round lumps of porously constructed iron ore. Where the iron rich water reaches the surface and meets with oxygen it oxidizes and leaves a milky, rusty flow of water in the bog (USGS). This reddish “milk” is a tell-tale sign that iron ore is likely to be present in the bog. This part of the charm is another example of the ritual learning aspect of the charm; it ceremoniously teaches the art of finding iron ore to a successor.
Another important part of getting good iron ore in which the color red is an important indicator is in the roasting process. The early smith would “roast” the ore in an open fire which was not hot enough to melt any slag away but dried the ore and also revealed impurities. A by-product of the roasting process is a bright red dye; where as roasted copper produces a green color. The smith could then reject contaminated pieces on the basis of the purity of red color produced by the roasting process (Buchwald 91-92).
From the maiden who spurted black milk comes bar, or wrought iron. Wrought iron is the most rudimentary form of forged iron and is black in color. After several more steps of purification and tempering, the wrought iron is hardened into carburized iron, or steel. The fact that the white milk is the used to represent steel refers to iron in its purified state, or that in this state iron is in its most useful form. Thinking of steel as the purified form of iron is not an idea that is unique to Finns. Aristotle wrote in the Meteorologica that steel was the pure form of iron, and similarly to this charm lists water and heat as the constituting elements to iron (Aristotle 287-289, quoted by Wertime).
Rune IX Lines 72-104- After being sprayed on the earth, fire attempts to burn iron, but iron escapes into a bog or fen, “where swans lay their eggs, where the goose broods its young.”
This portion of the Iron Charms reveals several insights into the process of finding bog iron. As mentioned above, bog iron is found under water in the peaty bogs of Finland, and is created through a biological rather than geological process. The charm’s explanation for it always being in water is that it was frightened there by its older brother fire. While this passage could be dismissed as simply an etiological myth trying to explain the phenomenon of iron only being found in water, there may be something deeper to be found in these passages.
One early mining practice used from Pre-Roman all the way through the Middle Ages was that of fire setting. Breaking rock containing iron ore down into small workable pieces was extremely difficult work, but setting fire to the face of an escarpment and then throwing water on the rock would cause deep fracturing. The rock face would then be struck by a large maul, or picked apart using pickaxes (Coughlin 18). This method of ore extraction was used throughout mountainous regions of Europe (19). It should be pointed out that the pattern of the three brothers, fire, water, and iron, is developed once again here in the process of extracting iron ore.
Bog iron is a unique source of iron ore, however. Unlike other forms of iron ore, bog iron is naturally produced in nuggets, already manageable and relatively pure straight from their natural source. Of all the ancient ores, bog iron has the highest initial iron content, having a practical iron content of up to 55% (Coughlin 15). It did not need fire to extract it or break it apart.
The explanation of iron ore escaping fire and hiding in the bogs could be a latent reference to the manner in which iron ore was obtained through firesetting in regions without bog iron. The Old Kalevala alters this phrasing by having the iron hide from fire in the breasts of the nature spirits previously mentioned, and afterwards being sprayed into the fens. In either case however, the iron escaped fire as an ore and before it was found in the bogs. The implication here is that this ritual formula contains at least fragments which did were brought into Finland from elsewhere in Europe and are older than the Finnish Iron Age culture. This is supported by the anthropological data which suggests that iron technology came to Finland via immigrant groups (Kivikoski, 72; Buchwald, 195).
The reference to bird eggs further enhances the teaching aspect of these lines but also hearkens back to the creation story found in Rune I. Rune I tells the story of the creation of the world, in which a water fowl lays seven eggs on the knee of the water goddess, which break open and become heaven and earth. The seventh egg laid by the water fowl was of iron. The egg makes an interestingly adept metaphor for iron in several respects. The irregular round shape of the bog iron is similar in physical appearance to an egg, which would help anyone who had memorized these charms to know what to look for in the bog. Also, the fact that iron ore was always found in close proximity to water fowl added to the notion that bog iron was a magical egg from which would hatch iron. An egg magically produces a beautiful bird when it is incubated by the mother bird. Likewise, the bog ore that was culled from the murky fens was understood as containing a separate entity inside of it, which needed to be brought out by placing it in the warmth of its mother; the furnace. Iron may have been comfortable “sprawling in the fen” but, as the poem foretells, iron will not be able to escape fire forever.
Rune IX Lines 105-156- Ilmarinen is born out of a forge and builds a smithy. He finds iron and convinces it to come with him to his furnace.
In lines 105 and 106 Ilmarinen is born and grows up in one day. Lines 111 and 112 repeat the theme but add the fact that he made a smithy on the morning of his birth. Väinämöinen, the wise shaman, is also described in Rune I as being birthed fully grown. Ilmarinen and Väinämöinen share this aspect of their creation, and it underscores the idea that the iron smith was seen as a magic or semi divine man, much like a shaman. There is very strong literary evidence showing that the iron smith was thought of as a magical, or extra-human, member of society throughout Europe. In Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus thrusts the burning limb into the eye of Polyphemus, it mentions that the eye sizzled like water when a blacksmith thrust a red hot piece of iron in it to temper it. The word that is used for tempering, pharmassōn, is a Greek word meaning, more literally rendered, magic potions or drugs (Muhly 52, Wheeler 124). Even the rational Greeks saw the blacksmith as working magic to transmute the elements into steel.
Probably the most famous of Germanic blacksmiths is the legendary Weyland. He was apprenticed, “by the smith Mimir who employed dwarves to work for him, and…quickly surpassed the dwarves at their work” (Webber, 61). He is the main character of the poem Völundarkviða in the Poetic Edda, in which he is captured by King Nidud who forces him to make jewelry for him. Weyland escapes by killing the king’s sons and making himself wings with which he flies away. He is associated with the elves when Nidud calls to him as he flies away, “Tell me, Völund, Alfars’ chief! Of my brave boys what is become?” (Völundarkviða) Weyland is mentioned in several old Germanic and Scandanavian texts including Beowulf where he is credited with making Beowulf’s armor (Beowulf, 18). He is also credited with making Sigmund’s sword Gram, given to him as a gift by Odin himself, and in the end broken by Odin (Volsungs).
Many of the named smiths in Old Norse literature are dwarves, one of the most famous of whom is Regin. Regin is listed as the name of one of the dwarves in the Voluspa: “Veig and Gandâlf, Vindâlf, Thrain, Thekk and Thorin, Thrôr, Vitr, and Litr, Nûr and Nýrâd, Regin and Râdsvid. Now of the dwarfs I have rightly told” (Elder). It is worthy of note that the names of some of the dwarves in this passage end with the Old Norse word for Elf – ‘Alf’ (Lindow, 110). The difference between dwarves and elves is much fuzzier in the original texts than their rendering in the modern fantasy genre. In the case of Regin nothing of his stature is ever mentioned, and in consideration of the transformative power of both his brothers and the dwarf Andvari of that same story, it seems that the dwarves were associated with the magic of transformation rather than diminutive size per se (Elder). Regin asks Sigurd to kill his brother, who is turned into the dragon Fafnir, and reforges the sword Gram from the left over shards. As the story goes, “He made a sword, and as he bore it forth from the forge, it seemed to the smiths as though fire burned along the edges thereof…Then Sigurd smote it into the anvil, and cleft it down to the stock thereof, and neither burst the sword nor brake it” (Vulsung, 56-66).
Some other important items that were made by dwarves are Sif’s golden hair, the ship Skídbladnir, and Odin’s unstoppable spear Gungnir; all made by the dwarf sons of Ĭvaldi. The dwarf Brokk then tries to out-smith them by making the golden boar, the replicating golden ring Draupnir, and most importantly Thor’s mighty hammer, Mjöllnir, as told in the Skáldskaparmál (Lindow, 100). Following this pattern of magical smiths is Ilmarinen, who was born out of a forge as indicated by the lines, “He was born on a charred hill, grew up on a charred heath.” Kirby translates this more idiomatically by calling the ‘charred hill’ a ‘furnace’ and the ‘charred heath’ a ‘forge’ (Kirby, 90). Ilmarinen being born from the furnace again portrays the furnace as a mother to the iron, or in this case the iron smith. His mythic birth further underscores the idea that to the average Finn living at this time, an iron smith would have been seen as something more than human; possessing some magic that allowed him to control the transmutation of ore to iron.
Magoun translates line 20 as, “…in that he put his forge.” Magoun uses the word ‘forge’ consistently throughout the Kalevala to refer to that which Ilmarinen used to heat the ore. The furnace and the forge were in practice used in two different steps of the iron working process. This portion is certainly referring to the furnace, because that is where the ore would be initially placed. It was in the furnace that the real magic would take place: the transmutation of elements.
The furnace which the early Iron Age Finns would probably have utilized would have been a bowl or domed furnace (Coughlin 88, Tylecote 212). This type of furnace would be nothing more exciting than a hole dug in the ground with a mound, or shaft-like chimney built over the top. A hole would be made for the insertion of a bellows nozzle, also called a tuyere. A horizontal shaft would be dug under the furnace to allow the slag to escape (Fisher 13, Coughlin 90, Tylecote 211).
Illmarinen’s use of both bellows and wind power to heat his furnace in Rune X while making the Sampo leads to the conclusion that a dome furnace built on a slight hill was probably the furnace which was commonly used by the Finns at this time. Building a furnace in this way allowed the horizontal shaft beneath to catch the wind and blow into the furnace, and the same shaft could also be used to insert the bellows if the wind was not blowing hard enough. This type of furnace was also common in early Iron Age cultures of Europe (Coughlin 90, Tylecote 210).
The chamber of the furnace would be loaded with charcoal and pieces of bog iron. With the pumping of the bellows the fire inside could heat the furnace to temperatures of over 2000°F. When the temperature gets to about 2100°F., the iron expands and the silicates, magnesium and other impurities, called the slag, pours out of it, leaving a spongy piece of relatively pure iron in the belly of the furnace (Fisher 13).
In the cultures that still smelt iron in this ancient way the process is heavily associated with the reproductive process. In 2004, Randi Haaland of the University of Bergen performed a cross-cultural, ethnographic study of African cultures that still smelt iron in this type of furnace, and compared them to archaeological finds throughout Scandinavia. He writes:
For an observer of iron smelting, associations of sexual intercourse are easily evoked as tuyeres are inserted into the body of the furnace by the male blacksmith and as the bellows are blown. With the slag coming out of the tap hole, the association of this with women giving birth to the iron bloom is also obvious. The dominant feature in our four ethnographic case studies is thus the transformative aspects of iron making. This is also what comes across in European myths and legends as well as in the context of archaeological material. (Haaland, 15)
There are no explicit references in the Kalevala to child birthing per se, however, as was discussed in earlier sections, the furnace would have been seen as the second mother to iron, and there may be some sexual connotation to line 119 which says, “in that he thrust his bellows,” in reference to the furnace Ilmarinen was making. Also, it will be seen that in the next section of lines, iron takes on its human characteristics as it is transformed in the furnace.
Rune IX Lines 157-200- Ilmarinen finally gets to work with the iron, which promises to not hurt people in exchange for Ilmarinen letting it out of the furnace. Ilmarinen uses iron to make all kinds of useful tools.
With the overview of the smelting process from the previous section in mind, the strange actions of the iron in lines 161-164 becomes obvious; this is the transformation of iron ore into the iron bloom which occurs in the belly of the furnace. Immediately after this transformation takes place, the iron begins to cry out, begging Ilmarinen to remove him from the furnace. When iron melts, it absorbs large quantities of carbon, and when it cools it is very hard but also very brittle and could not be used for any type of tool that would be used for striking, such as hammers, hoes, or swords. The early furnaces in use at this time could not reach the 2800°F that it takes to melt the iron itself, so it should be recognized that this portion of the charms would have been only to teach that once the presence of the slag is seen, the bloom is ready to be extracted from the furnace (Wertime 13, Tylecote 210).
The concept of giving life in the belly of the furnace is portrayed here as well; iron takes on fully human characteristics only after the slag has left it. Before now iron was described as simply being afraid, but now it cries out in passionate language and talks to Ilmarinen. The iron attempts to bargain with Ilmarinen and swears an oath to not kill people before Ilmarinen will remove it from the furnace. The oath sworn in these verses is very relevant to the stage that iron is in at this time. In this form iron is called a “bloom” and is now ready for forging. The iron smith would at this time remove the bloom from the furnace, and move to the forge where he would beat the iron bloom to squeeze out any remaining impurities and form it into a bar. This is now wrought or bar iron, and is very useful in that it is relatively hard, but still malleable. While wrought iron is good for household tools, “until the ancient smith learned several new metallurgical tricks, it represented no improvement over copper or bronze because it did not retain a cutting edge.” (Fisher 15) The conversation between Ilmarinen and the iron bloom makes much more sense knowing this. The bloom swears to not, “cut my brother, carve up my mother’s child” but rather to coexist with man as his tools, and so Ilmarinen takes him from the furnace and forges him into tools of all kinds.
Rune IX Lines 201-258.- Ilmarinen finds iron lacking and searches for the correct hardening agent to make iron harder. Instead of quenching the iron with honey Ilmarinen unwittingly quenches it in poison and iron begins to wreck havoc on the people.
It is here that the story turns sour, as wrought iron is turned to steel and is put to ill use. Lines 201 and 202 say, “A little something was still lacking, wretched iron needed something.” To harden the iron into its most useful form, steel, the iron must absorb carbon to at least .3% of its content (Coughlin 52). Early smiths learned that heating and reheating the iron in the forge before or during forging it allowed the iron to absorb more carbon. If enough carbon was absorbed, the tool could be hardened significantly by quenching it in water. If not enough carbon was present then quenching would have no effect.
This repeated heating of the iron makes a dramatic appearance in the episode where Ilmarinen forges the Sampo itself in Rune X. In that rune the ore forms into various valuable objects in the furnace. But each item does not fulfill their purposes well, so Ilmarinen continually removes them and reinserts the ore back in the furnace until the Sampo appears and is ready to forge.
Here in Rune IX however, Ilmarinen is still trying to come up with a correct formula for what Magoun translates as “iron-tempering liquid.” ‘Tempering’ actually refers to the process of reheating the implement after quenching to mitigate some of the brittleness caused by the bath. Regardless of the technical misuse of these words it is obvious that Ilmarinen wants to quench the iron in honey to make it into a sweet metal. The “iron-tempering” liquid is simply the quenching medium, today simply water. At this time, however, the tempering process was still understood as part of the mysterious process of transmuting the elements into something new. The tempering agent contained elements which the blacksmith believed helped in the magic of tempering. In the case of Illmarinen, unfortunately a demon wasp poisons the quenching fluid and Ilmarinen unwittingly puts the iron into the venomous liquid making evil steel, which breaks its earlier oath and slays humans.
It is in the combination of the three elements of the first passage: iron, fire and water, that steel is made. Iron is violently reunited with its brothers, and obtains its greatest potential as a tool for mankind. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, it is also at this state that iron can now be used effectively as a weapon. Iron as steel can be so helpful to man, but instead it is used to destroy him. The final passages of the iron charms show that the process of quenching and tempering of iron into steel was understood as the turning of a good and useful device into an evil tool to the early Finns. This brings to an end the iron charms and, as the healer says after hearing them himself, “now [we] know the origins of iron, understand the ways of steel.” (Lönnrot, 50)
In the last twenty five years many anthropologists and historical metallurgists have come to recognize the importance of ritual to ancient cultures in the course of everyday, pragmatic life (Bradley 23). Richard Bradley observes in Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe that, “Metallurgy is not always regarded as an industrial process in the terms that are familiar today. It is a way of transforming raw materials that is attended by danger and magic, and the entire process is bound by social conventions. It involves restricted, even secret knowledge and has to be accomplished with the aid of specialized rituals” (23). The Iron Charms of The Kalevala confirm this view. They reveal that the early Finns had a deep ritualistic and religious understanding of iron production, rather than a proto-scientific one. The mythological descriptions of forging iron parallel the actual process of creating iron, and may have been a way of memorizing, and transmitting to future generations, the complex “recipe” for making steel.
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Wheeler, Tamara and Robert Maddin. “Metalurgy and Ancient Man.” The Coming of the Iron Age. Theodore Wertime and James Muhly eds. Westford MA, Yale Univ. Press, 1980. Print.
Appendix – Full text of F. P. Magoun’s Translation of The Iron Charms from Rune IX
The Creation of Iron (lines 29-104 of Rune IX)
Air is its first of mother, water the eldest of brothers,
iron the youngest of brothers, fire in turn the middle one.
Ukko, creator on high, god of the skies,
separated the water from the air, made the mainland into land from the water.
Wretched iron is not born, not born, not grown up.
Ukko, heavenly god, rubbed his two hands,
pressed both on his left knee.
From that three maidens were born, all three Nature Spirits
to be the mothers of iron ore, begetters of a steel-blue mouth.
The maidens walked along with a springy gait, the virgins stepped along the edge of a cloud
with full breasts, with aching nipples.
They milked their milk onto the ground, let their breasts spurt;
they milked onto the ground, milked onto fens, milked onto gentle waters.
One, the very oldest of the maidens, milked out black milk;
the second, the middle one of the maidens, spilled white milk;
the third, the youngest of the maidens, spurted red milk.
From the one who milked out black milk, bar iron was born,
from the one who spilled white milk, steel was made,
from the one who spurted red milk iron ore was got.
A little time passed. Iron wanted to meet
its elder brother, to go to make the acquaintance of fire.
Fire began to get bad, got quite horrible;
it was just about to burn the wretch, miserable iron, its brother.
Iron was able to hide, to hide, to save itself
from the hands of the fierce fire, from the mouth of the bright angry one.
Then iron hid from it, both hid and was saved
in a shifting quagmire, in a plashing spring,
on the very big surface of a fen, on the top of a rough bald hill
where swans lay their eggs, where the goose broods its young.
Iron lies sprawling in a fen, stretches out in watery places;
it hid for one year, hid a second, forthwith hid a third too,
between two stumps, at the foot of the three birches.
But it did not escape by flight from the grim hands of fire;
it had to come a second time, set out to fire’s dwellings
to be made into a weapon, be forged into a sword.
A wolf ran along the fen, a bear wandered in from the heath;
the fen stirred where the wolf stepped, the heath were the bear set its paws;
there bog-iron ore came to the surface and a steel ingot grew
in the prints of the wolf’s claws, in the marks of the bear’s heel.
Ilmarinen Discovers Bog Iron (Lines 105-156)
Craftsman Ilmarinen was born, both was born and grew up.
He was born on a charred hill, grew up on a charred heath
with a copper hammer in his hand, a little tongs in his grip.
Ilmarinen was born at night, the next day he made a smithy.
He looked for a spot for his smithy, an open place for his bellows.
He saw a narrow strip of fen, a bit of wet ground;
he set out to look at that, to examine it closely from near at hand;
in that he thrust in his bellows, in that he put his forge.
Now he reached the wolf’s tracks, the bear’s heel marks.
He saw sprouts of iron, lumps of steel
in the wolf’s big tracks, in the prints of the bear’s paw.
He speaks these words: “Woe is you, wretched iron,
for you are in a miserable situation, in a lowly position,
in a wolf’s claw marks in a fen, right in a bear’s footprints.”
He ponders, he reflects: “What would become of that indeed
if I should thrust it into the fire, put it into the forge?”
Wretched iron took fright, took fright, got terrified
when it heard fire’s messages, fire’s grim utterances.
Craftsman Ilmarinen said: “Do not be upset by that!
Fire will not burn you once it has made you acquaintance, will not abuse its kin.
When you come to fire’s dwellings, to the bright one barricade,
there you will become beautiful, rise up to be magnificent
as men’s fine swords, as the tips of women’s laces,”
By the end of that day bog-iron ore had been got loose from the fen,
Got separated from the miry place, been brought to the craftsman’s smithy.
Iron is Forged (Lines 157-200)
That the craftsman thrust into the fire, forced it into the depths of his forge.
He blew his bellows once, blew twice, blew a third time too.
The iron gets liquid like gruel, heaves like slag,
stretches like wheat paste, like rye dough,
in the craftsman’s great fires, in the power of the glowing flame.
Then wretched Iron howled: “Oh great craftsman Ilmarinen,
take me away from here, from the agonies of red fire!”
Craftsman Ilmarinen spoke: “If I take you out of the fire,
perhaps you will grow to be terrible, will start raging exceedingly,
cut your brother even further, carve up your mother’s child.”
Then wretched iron swore, swore a solemn oath
by the forges, by the anvil, by the hammers, by the sledges;
it says these words, made this utterance:
“There is indeed wood for me to bite, heart of stone for me to eat
so that I will no cut my brother, carve up my mother’s child.
It is better for me to exist, nicer for me to live
by going about as a comrade, going about as a work tool
than to eat my own clan, abuse my tribe.”
then craftsman Ilmarinen, eternal smith,
pulled iron out of the fire, put it on the anvil;
he works it soft, makes it into edged tools,
spears, axes all kinds of tools.
The Missing Tempering Agent (Lines 201-258)
A little something was still lacking, wretched iron needed something.
Iron’s tongue was not boiling, steel’s mouth is not born,
iron will not get tempered without being wet in a liquid.
Then craftsman Ilmarinen ponders that.
He prepared a little lye, dissolved the leach
as a steel-tempering venom, as an iron-tempering liquid.
The craftsman tested it with his tongue; he tasted it all he wanted.
He uttered these words: “these are no good for me
as bitter steel-tempering liquids, as preparations for making iron.”
A bee rose from the ground, a blue-wings from a tussock.
It flies about, it keeps moving around the craftsman’s smithy.
The craftsman spoke thus: “Bee, lively fellow,
bring honey on your wings, carry honey on your tongue
from the tops of six flowers, from seven sheaths of grass,
for steel objects to be made, for iron objects to be prepared.”
A wasp, the Demon’s bird, looks about, listens,
looked from the eaves of the roof, stared form under the birch bark roof,
at the iron objects to be prepared, at the steel objects to be made.
Humming it flies along, it hurled abroad the Demon’s terrors,
carried the poisons of a snake, the black venoms of a reptile,
the poisonous acids of an ant, the secret poisons of a toad
to be poisonous venoms for steel-tempering, iron-tempering liquid.
Craftsman Ilmarinen, eternal smith,
thinks, reflects that the bee has come,
that the latter has brought honey, carried honey.
He uttered a word, spoke thus: “Just look at those things good for me
as steel-tempering liquids, things for preparing iron!”
He grabbed the steel and put it in this, taken it from the forge.
Steel got bad, iron got raging,
the wretch violated its oath, trifled like a dog with its honor;
it cut its brother, the wretch, took hold of its relatives with its mouth,
let blood loose to flow, gore to stream.
The old man growled from the stove, the gray beard sang: his head shook:
“Now I know the origin of iron, understand the ways of steel.”
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