The Restoration of the Sun and Moon resolves the darkness left after the fire has returned to Northland: the Sun and Moon remain imprisoned, and Wainamoinen must discover where they are held and how they can be released. Its movement from failed artifice and divination to confrontation, smithcraft, and renewed appeal to the heavens makes the recovery a test of the limits of magic as well as a restoration of the world’s celestial order.

The Lights Still Missing

The episode opens with an incomplete recovery. Fire has returned to Northland, but the golden Moon is still absent, and the Sun has not resumed its place in the sky. The return of fire therefore does not end the crisis: warmth and light are not interchangeable, and the celestial disorder continues to mark the land.

A maiden, running to Ilmarinen’s furnace, urges the smith to rise. His proposed answer is to make replacements and swing them into the heavens, an attempt to manufacture celestial objects rather than recover the originals. Wainamoinen rejects this as futile. The contrast is decisive: Ilmarinen’s craft can shape metal, but a forged Sun or Moon cannot correct the loss of the actual lights. The Moon’s failure to shine from the pine tree’s highest branches confirms that the proposed solution has not changed the sky.

Discovery in Pohyola

Wainamoinen turns from manufacture to knowledge, proposing that the Fates be consulted and the oracles examined. The inquiry produces a concrete answer: an alder speaks truthfully and identifies the Sun as hidden in the stone-berg of Pohyola, in its copper-bearing mountain. The revelation transforms a mystery into a specific task. The missing light is not simply extinguished or lost in the sky; it is concealed in a hostile place under Louhi’s power.

Wainamoinen sets out for Northland and addresses Louhi’s hosts, declaring that he has come for the Sun. Louhi’s answer makes clear that she intends the imprisonment to endure: the lights are not to regain their freedom or shine over Northland. Wainamoinen counters with the stakes of the confrontation. If the Sun is not uncovered and the Moon does not leave her dungeon, the dispute cannot be settled by negotiation alone.

Combat and the Failure of Wainamoinen’s Magic

The heroes rush into the courtyard and hasten to deadly combat on the plains of Sariola. During the encounter, Wainamoinen finds a crevice in the rock from which a gleam of sunlight escapes. The narrow opening is evidence that the light remains present behind its confinement, but it does not itself provide a way to release it. Wainamoinen draws his broadsword and strikes the pillar, yet the struggle does not end with this discovery.

He next seeks to open the portals through magic, using his hands and words. The attempt fails: his hands have lost their cunning, and the ordinary authority of the wizard-singer cannot undo the locks. The episode thus places a limit on Wainamoinen’s most characteristic power. Knowing where the lights are hidden, and possessing magical speech, are not enough to free them; the obstacle requires another kind of work.

Wainamoinen is not discouraged by the failure. He hastens to Ilmarinen and tells him that the smith’s skill is needed to free the sunshine and moonlight from their dungeon. The sequence gives Ilmarinen’s craft a different purpose from the earlier proposal to forge substitute heavenly bodies. The first plan sought to imitate what was missing; now smithcraft is enlisted against the actual confinement.

Louhi’s Transformations and the Return

Louhi prepares to resist the approaching danger. She fastens wings to her shoulders, while Wainamoinen imagines binding her with a collar to the iron rock of Ehstland. Seeing misfortune approaching, Louhi changes her withered features and becomes a dove of good luck. Her repeated changes of form make her resistance unstable and difficult to meet directly; the threat is not confined to the mountain, but is embodied in a ruler who can alter her appearance as the conflict turns against her.

The account returns to the mountain’s iron-banded caverns and copper-bearing heights, then follows Ilmarinen as he hurries to the threshold of his smithy and scans the distant horizon. Wainamoinen, too, goes out to the courtyard and looks toward the sky. His appeal is no longer a plan to create new lights or an attempt to force open the prison with his own magic: he calls the Sun and Moon from their long-neglected places and stations in the sky-vault. The episode concludes with the restoration of the celestial lights, completing the recovery begun when fire returned but leaving the Sun and Moon still absent.