First, the son-in-law enters the house of the parents of the bride, saying, ‘Peace abide with you in this illustrious hall.’  The mother answers, ‘Peace be with you even in this lowly hut.’  Then Wainamoinen began to sing, and no man was so hardy as to clasp hands and contend with him in song.  Next follow the songs of farewell, the mother telling the daughter of what she will have to endure in a strange home:  ’Thy life was soft and delicate in thy father’s house.  Milk and butter were ready to thy hand; thou wert as a flower of the field, as a strawberry of the wood; all care was left to the pines of the forest, all wailing to the wind in the woods of barren lands.  But now thou goest to another home, to an alien mother, to doors that grate strangely on their hinges.’  ’My thoughts,’ the maiden replies, ’are as a dark night of autumn, as a cloudy day of winter; my heart is sadder than the autumn night, more weary than the winter day.’  The maid and the bridegroom are then lyrically instructed in their duties:  the girl is to be long-suffering, the husband to try five years’ gentle treatment before he cuts a willow wand for his wife’s correction.  The bridal party sets out for home, a new feast is spread, and the bridegroom congratulated on the courage he must have shown in stealing a girl from a hostile tribe.

While all is merry, the mischievous Lemminkainen sets out, an unbidden guest, for Pohjola.  On his way he encounters a serpent, which he slays by the song of serpent-charming.  In this ‘mystic chain of verse’ the serpent is not addressed as the gentle reptile, god of southern peoples, but is spoken of with all hatred and loathing:  ’Black creeping thing of the low lands, monster flecked with the colours of death, thou that hast on thy skin the stain of the sterile soil, get thee forth from the path of a hero.’  After slaying the serpent, Lemminkainen reaches Pohjola, kills one of his hosts, and fixes his head on one of a thousand stakes for human skulls that stood about the house, as they might round the hut of a Dyak in Borneo.  He then flees to the isle of Saari, whence he is driven for his heroic profligacy, and by the hatred of the only girl whom he has not wronged.  This is a very pretty touch of human nature.

He now meditates a new incursion into Pohjola.  The mother of Pohjola (it is just worth noticing that the leadership assumed by this woman points to a state of society when the family was scarcely formed) calls to her aid ‘her child the Frost;’ but the frost is put to shame by a hymn of the invader’s, a song against the Cold:  ’The serpent was his foster-mother, the serpent with her barren breasts; the wind of the north rocked his cradle, and the ice-wind sang him to sleep, in the midst of the wild marsh-land, where the wells of the waters begin.’  It is a curious instance of the animism, the vivid power of personifying all the beings and forces of nature, which marks the ‘Kalevala,’ that the Cold speaks to Lemminkainen in human voice, and seeks a reconciliation.