Ilmarinen's name survives in contemporary Finland attached to an institution about as far from myth and metalwork as it is possible to get: Ilmarinen Mutual Pension Insurance Company, one of Finland's largest pension insurers, founded in the twentieth century and still operating today under a name drawn directly from the Kalevala's eternal smith, part of a wider and still-active Finnish habit of naming serious modern institutions, insurance companies, banks, industrial firms, after figures from the national epic to lend them a sense of enduring, foundational reliability. The choice trades specifically on Ilmarinen's reputation as the maker of things built to last, the sky he forged shows no hammer-mark, an image well suited to a company selling long-term financial security.
A more directly commemorative afterlife stands in bronze outside Aalto University's main campus near Helsinki, formerly the Helsinki University of Technology: a large sculpture of the smith-god by the prominent Finnish sculptor Wainoe Aaltonen, installed to link the nation's engineering tradition symbolically to its oldest mythological craftsman. Between an insurance company's boardroom and a university forecourt, Ilmarinen's reputation as the maker of durable, world-ordering things has proven remarkably adaptable to twentieth and twenty first century Finnish institutional life, a considerably more mundane destination than forging the vault of heaven, but one that keeps his name in everyday circulation for ordinary Finns who may never have read the Kalevala closely.