Songs of Vaadin
help him find the precious components and the knowledge he required. The magical tools became the skeleton of Vaadin. "Lost, his mind was, gone, was his understanding, ran away, were his memories, in the vast land of hills of stone. Make a steed he had to, forge bone out of stone, flesh out of moss, and skin of bark of the birch. The length of his hammer, he put as the spine and the hip, bellows as the lungs, tongs as the legs, paired. So woke Vaadin from the first slumber, lichen did Seppo give her for eating, mead did he give her for drinking, then mounted her for the journey." Other versions associate the creation with Väinämöinen instead of Seppo Ilmarinen, and give different accounts for the materials. This ambiguity can be largely explained through the frequent cooperation between Väinämöinen and Seppo in the mythos. Nevertheless, the identity of the steed or steeds is largely implicit in the myths and, because of the differences in the origin myths, can not be unambiquously associated with a unique identity. The theme of animal ancestor gods is common in the Finnish myth, as we can see in the widespread worship of Tapio, the lord of the bear and the forest. With respect to Vaadin, the identification of the animal is not completely clear. The Finnish word vaadin refers specifically to an adult female of the semi-domesticated mountain reindeer, which lives in the Northern Finland in Lapland as well as in the Northern Sweden and Norway. On the other hand, the Finnish folklore represented in Kalevala and other collections has been collected from Southern Finland, where the mountain reindeer does not exist. Nevertheless, Southern Finnish folklore and Kalevala do include many other elements as well that are distinctively from Lapland, so we may assume that the folklore reflects a record of cultural interaction. The distinction between the northern mountain reindeer and the deer species of Southern Finland, the forest reindeer and the elk, is clear in the modern language, but may not have been in old Finnish dialects. For example, peura, reindeer, may have been a generic word for a wild animal, as can be seen in jalopeura, the old Finnish word for lion. The identification is further complicated by the fact that the line of poems included in Kalevala often refers to a horse. This could be due to the use of the word for horse as a generic name for a steed. While a mountain reindeer is not suitable for riding, animal gods are typically portrayed as uncommonly large in mythology, even to the extremes, so the identification fits quite well in the variety of magical mounts. The mythology related to Vaadin, especially as represented in Kalevala, locates some important characters and people in Pohjola, a mythical land in the north from where all evil originates, according to most accounts. For example, Louhi or Pohjolan emäntä, Queen of Pohjola, is the primary antagonist in the Kalevala mythos. Both Seppo Ilmarinen and Väinämöinen make services to Louhi to earn the hand of her daughters for marriage. Vaadin is often mentioned in connection with these services, such as the making of Sampo. On the other hand, as Sampo can be identified with the mill mentioned in creation stories of Vaadin, its identification in the stories becomes unclear.
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