The boat is not hammered together but sung into being. On a fog-point jutting seaward, Wainamoinen works long for lumber and finds his aspen and pine unworthy — worm-eaten, hollow, raven-haunted — until a sound oak three fathoms round consents to give its wood. From that timber the eternal wonder-worker "Builds his vessel with enchantment", he "Builds his boat by art of magic": he "Sings a song, and joins the frame-work", sings a second and sets the siding, sings a third and sets the row-locks. This is the magic-made craft of our served witness, The Kalevala (Finnish oral tradition; compiled 1835–1849), rune sixteen.

But song alone cannot finish it. When the ribs are fastened and the sides jointed, "three words were wanting" — the singer has "Lost the words of master-magic" that would fasten in the ledges and complete the stern and forecastle. He hunts the lost-words in the brains of swallows, the heads of dying swans, the tongues of reindeer, and finds nothing; so he journeys to Manala, the death-land, to wrest the missing sayings from Tuoni's kingdom. The making of the boat by magic thus opens straight onto a descent, for the craft cannot be completed until the three master-words are found.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this shape its number, files the magic-made boat with a Breton authority beside this Finnish one, but only the Kalevala rune is wired to served text today; the Breton witness waits unread. A quiet door stays open: if a boat can be sung into shape but not sung to completion, what is it that the last three words hold — the craft, or the crossing it was built for?