The Maiden of the Rainbow Leaves Pohjola with Ilmarinen

The Maiden of the Rainbow Leaves Pohjola with Ilmarinen is the separation scene in which Pohyola’s daughter departs her native country with her husband. The song gives the departure weight through the bride’s own farewell: she cannot escape the journey, feels the debt of kindness she is leaving behind, and names the home and childhood scenes she must relinquish. Her passage from Pohyola is therefore not merely a change of residence. It is a parting from family, familiar landscape, and the life represented by her father’s dwelling, even as the account continues into Ilmarinen’s homeward journey.

The Necessity of Departure

The bride’s departure begins with constraint rather than an expression of uncomplicated eagerness. From the cottage and the old hills and mountains, she says, “But, alas! I now must journey,” because “Since I now cannot escape it.” The lines establish that leaving is necessary, while the lamenting address makes clear that necessity does not erase attachment. The farewell is shaped by a tension between the life she is entering with Ilmarinen and the places and people she is being made to leave.

The image of the “Empty is the bowl of parting” makes separation tangible in a domestic object. The passage also locates her at her father’s dwelling, looking out from a southward-facing break-board. These details keep the scene close to home: the departure is measured from the household threshold and its familiar surroundings, rather than presented as an abstract change of status. The song pauses over what she owes the people of that household before it carries her away.

The Debt of Kindness and the Farewell

The bride asks, “How shall I give compensation, / How repay, on my departure, / All the kindness of my mother,” turning the leave-taking into an acknowledgment of care received. The passage does not describe a repayment or resolve the question. Instead, the question makes the kindness itself part of what travels with her in memory, while the departure prevents her from remaining in the place where that care was given.

Her farewell expands from the homestead to the landscape around it: “Fare thou well, my dear old homestead, / Fare ye well, my native bowers.” She recalls that the flaxen fish-nets remain untouched on the shores awaiting her coming. That detail gives the parting a particular force: objects and places are represented as still oriented toward her return, although she is leaving. The scene does not say that the nets are used or that she will come back to them; their waiting presence instead sharpens the difference between the familiar life she is leaving and the journey now underway.

The farewell reaches beyond the household into memory. She addresses the “dear scenes of childhood” and the “Happiness of days departed!” before the narration states that she leaves her native fields and fallows and darksome Sariola. The sequence moves from intimate domestic obligation, through the homestead and its surroundings, to childhood and the wider country. In this way the departure accumulates its losses rather than reducing them to a single goodbye.

Leaving with Ilmarinen

The narration identifies the departing woman as Pohyola’s daughter and names Ilmarinen as her husband. She leaves her native fields and Sariola with him; he is also identified as a famous son of Kalevala. This joining of places and identities frames the marriage as a movement between homes: the daughter of Pohyola sets out beside the man connected to Kalevala, while the song preserves her own words about what remains behind.

The passage also says, “But the youth remained for singing,” creating a contrast between the bride’s physical departure and the continuation of song. The statement is brief and does not further explain who sings or what follows, so its effect lies in the contrast the text supplies: the departing household can be rendered in song even as the bride leaves it. The words of farewell hold her attachments in the narrative while the action carries her away.

The Homeward Journey

After the leave-taking, Ilmarinen appears as a “happy bridegroom” and hastens homeward with the daughter of the hostess of Pohyola. The account gives the journey a measured duration: they travel one day, then a second, and continue onward through a third. He holds the reins of magic in one hand. These details shift the scene from the bride’s inventory of what she must leave to the forward motion of travel, while preserving the connection between the couple and the home they are approaching.

The three-day journey gives the departure a span rather than treating it as a single threshold-crossing. Yet the emphasis remains divided: Ilmarinen is called happy, while the bride’s preceding farewell has dwelt on obligation, childhood, and separation. The scene does not cancel one perspective with the other. Its significance lies in holding both together—the movement of a married couple toward home and the cost, voiced by the bride, of leaving her own.