Aino's Death

Aino's Death is the tragic culmination of Aino’s grief: after mourning for days and wandering through a landscape of water and lament, she sinks into the sea with a rainbow-colored rock and does not return. The episode turns the image of water as an imagined refuge into the means of her disappearance, and its aftermath makes that loss public through a later account of her fate and her mother’s tears.

Grief and the Unanswered Consolation

Aino’s mother addresses her while she is weeping, describing her as beautiful and queenly, more beautiful than moonlight. The mother’s words affirm Aino’s beauty, but the scene does not show them changing her daughter’s distress: the narrative immediately stresses that Aino bears her sorrow poorly. The difference between the mother’s praise and the daughter’s continuing grief leaves consolation incomplete. Aino’s suffering is not resolved by being admired or reassured.

The lament takes time to unfold. Aino weeps for one day, continues through a second, and weeps through a third from morning until evening. This counted repetition gives her distress a duration rather than presenting it as a passing impulse. Her later wandering and singing carry that sorrow outward: she moves from place to place, and the narrative presents her mournful song as an echo of her hard-fated life and broken heart. Her grief is both bodily and voiced, but neither movement nor song brings her back from the course toward the sea.

The Sea as Imagined Refuge

In her lament, Aino imagines making her bed in crystal waters, with water-ferns for couch and pillow. The image gives the sea the language of rest and shelter. It is a stark contrast with the danger that follows: the water that first appears in her song as a place to lie down becomes the depth in which she vanishes. The episode does not describe a rescue or a return to shore; its movement is downward, from the imagined bed to the bottom of the sea.

Aino’s wandering continues through a third day, from morning until evening. Before she approaches the rock, her shining necklace, rings, and other jewels are left in the sand. These objects mark a material remainder on the shore, distinct from Aino herself, who will disappear from view. The narrative places the ornaments beside the sea’s boundary and then shifts attention outward, to a considerable distance offshore, where a rock of rainbow colors stands glittering in silver sunlight. The bright, striking object draws the action away from the shore and toward open water.

The Rock’s Fall and Aino’s Disappearance

Aino wishes to rest for a moment on the beautiful rock. Its appearance suggests a place of repose, but it proves unstable: it sways among the billows and falls with a crash and roar of waters. Aino falls with it. The reversal is decisive: the place she approaches for a brief rest becomes the vehicle that carries her away from the surface.

As the rainbow-colored stone descends, Aino clings to its craggy edges. She sinks below the surface and reaches the bottom of the blue sea with it. The account specifies both her grip and her descent, making her disappearance an action witnessed in stages rather than a sudden unexplained absence. The narrative then states that she has vanished and perished. Her song continues as the stone descends, joining the earlier pattern of wandering song to the final movement beneath the waves. The voice that carried her grief across the shore accompanies her into the depth; it does not prevent the ending.

The Report of Her Fate and Its Aftermath

A later scene gives Aino’s fate another voice. The haughty hare chants an account of what happened to her, connecting the death episode to a subsequent telling rather than leaving her disappearance without a report. In that account, Aino is described as becoming the whiting’s sister and the friend of nimble fishes. The narration thus associates her afterlife with the sea and its creatures, while retaining the prior account’s explicit confirmation that she sank and perished.

The loss also returns to the family through the ancient mother’s grief. She weeps bitter tears and expresses her sorrow in mournful measures. This later lament gives the ending a second emotional register: Aino’s own song accompanies her descent, and her mother’s wailing follows the report of her fate. The episode therefore closes not with a recovery but with confirmed death, a remembered account of what became of Aino, and mourning that continues after she has vanished beneath the sea.