Vainamoinen is the supreme master of the runo, and in Finnic thought the sung word is not decoration but force. To know the true origin-song of a thing, its synty, its birth-account, is to have power over it, so that a wound is healed, iron is subdued, or an enemy is sung down into a bog by reciting how it first came to be.
Vainamoinen wins his contest with the upstart Joukahainen not by arms but by singing him into the mud; he builds the first kantele, the Finnish zither, from the jawbone of a great pike, and its playing enchants every living thing. This is the world of the tietaja, the "one who knows," the Finnic ritual specialist whose craft is verbal power, and Vainamoinen is that figure raised to mythic scale, the archetype of the shaman-singer whose knowledge is his weapon and whose songs outlast him. Even his name resists easy translation: most philologists connect Vainamoinen with vaina, a slow-flowing strait or stretch of water, which would make him in origin a river- or water-being, though rival attempts to link the name to the Germanic god Woden have found little support, and no explanation commands full agreement. That a figure this central to Finnish national memory carries a name whose root is still argued over says something about how much of his character has had to be reconstructed from scattered song rather than inherited as settled doctrine.