Untamo's Attempts to Kill the Infant Kullervo

Untamo’s Attempts to Kill the Infant Kullervo are a sequence of failed executions prompted by a startling declaration: at three months old, Kullervo announces that when he is grown he will avenge the murder of Kalervo and his people. The threat turns an infant whom Untamo has power over into a feared future enemy. Each attempt is meant to prevent that future, but the repeated failures instead make the boy’s survival—and the danger Untamo sees in it—more emphatic.

The threat that provokes Untamo

Kullervo has thrived for three months when he begins to speak. His words look forward to a time when his form has reached its full stature, and promise vengeance for Kalervo and his people. The declaration gives the attempted killings their cause: Untamo hears a child who cannot yet act as a future avenger, and tells those around him that the boy threatens his tribe. The episode makes the threat consequential before Kullervo has the strength to carry it out; speech alone changes how Untamo treats him.

Water and fire

The first attempt is organized with the agreement of those present. Kullervo is put into a basket, the willow fastenings secured, and the basket lowered into the deepest water so that he will perish there. After three nights, Untamo’s messengers go to learn whether the child is dead. Their return to the problem is registered not as a successful execution but as the prelude to another one: Untamo continues to seek a way to make the boy sink and perish.

For the next attempt, Untamo orders his messengers to gather dry brushwood, including birch trees with many branches. The pyre burns for three days: the first and second days pass, and on the third it burns from morning until evening. Untamo then sends heralds to inspect the pyre and discover whether Kullervo has perished. The duration and the inspection make the effort more deliberate than the drowning, but it still does not end the threat. The repeated question of whether the boy is dead becomes the measure of Untamo’s failure to secure the outcome he wants.

The oak and the failed executions

Untamo’s third method is to have Kullervo hung from an oak and crucified in its branches, again with the stated purpose of making the wizard perish. The image escalates the sequence from confinement under water, to fire, to suspension high in a tree. Yet the oak does not resolve the danger either. Kullervo’s words turn the tree’s branches into an image of force: he says that the branches could be filled and every leaf become a soldier. The poem thus places the threatened child’s power in speech and imagined numbers, set against Untamo’s successive physical methods of killing him.

Consequence and narrative significance

The attempts establish a pattern: Untamo responds to Kullervo’s survival by changing the means of execution, while the boy’s threat remains in place. Water, a prolonged fire, and the oak are not three unrelated dangers but successive tests of whether force can erase the child and the future he has announced. The messengers and heralds make each attempt a matter of inspection as well as violence; Untamo repeatedly seeks confirmation that Kullervo has perished, and the need to try again shows that confirmation has not come.

The sequence also fixes the conflict in terms of kinship and retaliation. Kullervo’s stated aim is vengeance for Kalervo and his people; Untamo’s fear is destruction for his own tribe. Before Kullervo can pursue that aim, his survival makes him the object of repeated attempts to prevent it. The scene therefore introduces the feud not through an accomplished act of revenge, but through a threat spoken in infancy and the escalating efforts it provokes.