Vainamoinen, the ancient and powerful singer of Kalevala, whose songs can shape the physical world itself, is challenged to a contest of knowledge and singing by the brash young Joukahainen, who boasts of his own wisdom. Vainamoinen easily defeats him in the contest, and Joukahainen, humiliated and refusing to accept the loss gracefully, shoots Vainamoinen's horse out from under him as he rides home, throwing him into the sea, where he drifts for days before finally washing ashore in Pohjola, the dark and hostile northern land ruled by the powerful witch Louhi.
Louhi takes Vainamoinen in and, in exchange for guiding him safely home, extracts a promise: he, or someone on his behalf, will forge the Sampo, a device of uncertain but immense power said to grind out grain, salt, and gold without ever emptying, securing Pohjola's prosperity. Vainamoinen, no smith himself, returns home and persuades the master smith Ilmarinen to travel to Pohjola in his place, promising him Louhi's daughter in marriage as further incentive for the difficult journey and even more difficult task ahead.
The Kalevala as it survives today is not an ancient text transmitted whole but a compilation assembled by the Finnish physician and folklorist Elias Lonnrot in the nineteenth century from oral poems he collected on repeated journeys through rural Karelia, a border region where the old singing tradition survived longest; W. F. Kirby's 1907 English translation, made directly from Lonnrot's Finnish rather than through an intermediate German version, remains one of the standard English renderings of the epic.