Ilmarinen's marriage to the Maiden of the Rainbow

Ilmarinen's marriage to the Maiden of the Rainbow turns a promised match into a completed union, then makes its cost visible in the bride's departure from Pohyola. The wedding is marked by feasting, Louhi's formal consent, advice for the bride, and the bride's own leave-taking; its movement from celebration to separation gives the event both a public and a personal dimension.

From promise to marriage

Louhi's consent establishes the match before the wedding is complete. When asked whether the affianced bride is ready and whether she will be given, the hostess of Pohyola answers that she will give her daughter and prepare the snow-white maiden. Her words place the marriage within a family arrangement, but the later farewell gives the Maiden of the Rainbow a voice in how that arrangement is understood: she calls Ilmarinen her chosen husband and is urged to join him and follow him.

The exchange also recalls the delay before the union. Louhi addresses Ilmarinen as her daughter's suitor and says that he has waited three times in kindness. That detail makes patience part of the marriage's immediate background: the wedding follows a period of waiting, and Louhi acknowledges that history as she brings the match to its conclusion. The scene thus moves beyond a bare announcement of marriage. Consent, preparation, and the suitor's endurance precede the joining of the couple.

Feast and instruction

The wedding is presented as a completed communal occasion: the narrative says that the marriage was completed and that the many guests had feasted. Its scale is indicated by the guests and the feast, while the event's sequence places the bride's departure after the celebration rather than treating the marriage as a private agreement alone. The wedding also opens onto instruction. The next rune is titled Osmotar the Bride-adviser, and its stated concern is that the bride must be instructed. At the end of the advice, the bridegroom, too, has been instructed and the last counsels have been given.

The advice is not represented as a simple celebration of married life. One remembered example describes a wife responding with kisses when threatened with a lash, and the passage then turns back to the instruction given to the bridegroom. That unsettling example belongs to the counsel surrounding the marriage, not to a reported incident in Ilmarinen's new household. Its presence complicates the wedding's festive surface: the episode places marriage within a set of expectations and warnings about life between spouses, even as the couple's actual future is not fully narrated here.

The bride's leave-taking

After her mother has spoken, the Maiden of the Rainbow speaks as she departs. Her farewell remembers the scenes of childhood and the happiness of departed days. The narrative then makes the separation concrete: Louhi's daughter leaves her native fields and fallows and the darksome Sariola, setting out with Ilmarinen, identified as a famous son of Kalevala. The change is both geographic and familial. She leaves the place and past that formed her, and goes with her husband into a different home and community.

The departure gives the marriage an emotional counterweight to the feast. Louhi's earlier language of giving and preparing her daughter has treated the match from a mother's and hostess's position; the bride's own speech dwells instead on what she is leaving. Her parting does not cancel her stated willingness to follow her chosen husband, but it prevents that choice from making separation seem effortless. In the episode's order, joining and parting are inseparable: the marriage carries the bride forward only by taking her away from her childhood home.

Place in the narrative

The wedding does not end with the departure from Pohyola. A subsequent rune is titled Wainamoinen's Wedding-songs, and its opening shifts to Ilmarinen's home, where people have long been watching and waiting. The sequence carries the celebration into the bridegroom's household and places the wedding within a wider social response. Ilmarinen is later shown coming to his cottage and to his father's fireside, anchoring this continuation in the home as well as in the northern setting the bride has left.

The event therefore joins two movements that the surrounding narrative keeps distinct: a public match confirmed by Louhi and celebrated before guests, and an individual crossing marked by the bride's farewell. Its details do not describe every element of the ceremony; instead, the account concentrates on consent, waiting, instruction, feasting, and departure. Those emphases make the wedding a threshold in the story: Ilmarinen gains a wife, while the Maiden of the Rainbow enters that union with the memory of home still present in her final words.