Creation from duck's eggs. Upper vault from half shell, lower vault from half shell, moonbeams from whites, sunshine from yellows, starlight from motley parts, clouds from dark parts.
Mythological motifs. · Cosmogony and cosmology. · The universe. · Creation of the universe. · Other means of creating the universe. · view the constellation · filed as A641.2
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On our shelf — the index’s citations, resolved to served chapters
The motif on our shelf
— written from the served texts; every claim cited receiptThis sub-address is Thompson writing with the Kalevala open before him: the label — upper vault from half shell, moonbeams from whites, sunshine from yellows, starlight from motley parts — tracks the served rune clause by clause. The duck, nesting on the water-mother's knee, lays "Six, the golden eggs she lays there, / Then a seventh, an egg of iron" [The Kalevala, Rune I]. Jarred loose, "the eggs fall into ocean" and shatter; but "In the sand they do not perish" [ibid.]. The fragments reassemble by kind: "From one half the egg, the lower, / Grows the nether vault of Terra", the upper half becomes heaven's vault, "From the white part come the moonbeams, / From the yellow part the sunshine", "From the motley part the starlight, / From the dark part grows the cloudage" [ibid.]. One thing the label drops: the seventh egg. Six are gold, one is "an egg of iron", and the rune never says which portion of our world is the iron one. Thompson's apparatus here is a single row — Kalevala rune 1 — served and verified end to end: the rare address where index and shelf coincide exactly. (The parent address A641, the cosmic egg at large, has its own page from this same rune in the pilot.)
Witnesses: The Kalevala, Rune I