Ilmarinen’s plowing of the serpent-field of Hisi turns the Maiden of the Rainbow’s marriage condition into a trial of practical skill and supernatural danger. Faced with a land no hero has cultivated, the blacksmith makes protective equipment, rides a horse of fire into the field, and buries its venomous inhabitants beneath the furrows. He completes the task and returns to report it to the hostess of Pohyola; the feat establishes that he has met this particular condition for wooing the maiden, though the episode does not itself conclude the marriage.

The Condition for Courtship

The trial belongs to Ilmarinen’s effort to win the Maiden of the Rainbow. Her affianced status does not mean she is ready to marry: the song stresses that she is not yet prepared, and makes wooing or winning her conditional on accomplishing a task by magical aid. The demand thus places a boundary between desire and success. Ilmarinen cannot claim the maiden simply by arriving as a suitor; he must answer a requirement attached to the courtship.

The task is to bring a particular field into cultivation. The maiden presents it as an achievement beyond the reach of earlier heroes: none, she says, has ever cultivated it. The field is therefore more than an ordinary piece of land awaiting a plow. Its reputation defines the scale of the challenge, making the work a test whose completion can distinguish Ilmarinen from those who tried, or might try, before him.

Making Ready for the Field

Ilmarinen hastens to the Maiden of the Rainbow’s chamber and identifies himself through his craft, addressing the challenge as a blacksmith. Rather than meet the danger unprepared, he builds a forge and smithy and places gold in the furnace. The episode gives making and doing separate stages: first he prepares the means of protection, then he undertakes the work that protection makes possible.

He equips himself with safeguards for his limbs and body, and selects a horse of fire, harnessing the flaming stallion. These preparations answer the field’s particular hazards. Ilmarinen does not simply drive an ordinary team into hostile ground; forged protection and a fiery mount accompany him into a place where cultivation has been beyond heroic reach. The sequence makes his blacksmithing part of the action itself, not merely a title: the smith’s ability to shape materials becomes essential to carrying out the trial.

Plowing the Serpent-Field

The field contains countless vipers and serpents of every species. They crawl, writhe, hiss, and sting, turning the soil into an active threat to the plowman and his horse. The song’s accumulation of different kinds of serpents enlarges the danger: this is not a single creature to defeat but a field crowded with venomous life, encountered across the ground Ilmarinen must work.

Ilmarinen nevertheless plows safely. The account associates his success with magic, and describes the serpents being lifted by the plow and buried beneath the furrow. Their dangerous presence is not erased before the work begins; it is overcome through the act of cultivation itself. As the field is turned, its inhabitants are displaced and made harmless against his magic. The trial’s solution is therefore both protective and agricultural: he does not abandon the field or merely escape its serpents, but makes the ground workable by plowing through them.

Completion and Significance

Once the task is complete, Ilmarinen returns quickly and addresses the hostess of Pohyola. He reports that he has plowed Hisi’s field, stilled and banished its serpents. The report closes the practical sequence begun by the courtship condition: preparation leads to dangerous labor, and labor to a claim of completion before the household that set the test.

The episode establishes a limited but decisive success. The Maiden of the Rainbow’s condition has required magical assistance, the field was said to defeat every earlier hero, and Ilmarinen can now present the completed work as his answer. Yet the accomplishment is not itself a wedding or proof that every obstacle in the courtship has ended. Its narrative force lies in converting an apparently impossible demand into a finished deed, while showing the specific combination of craft, preparation, and magic by which Ilmarinen meets it.