A ship that knows its own errand — that grieves when left in harbour and answers when addressed — is the shape gathered under the magic ship. Two witnesses hold it, one Finnish and one Greek, and between them they mark the two things a living vessel can do: speak, and endure.

The Kalevala (Finnish oral tradition, compiled 1835–1849) gives the ship a voice and a temper. Coming to the harbour at dawn, the reckless minstrel Lemminkainen "Finds the vessels sorely weeping" and "Hears the wailing of the rigging"; the ships complain that they must lie and rot while their master no longer wars. He strikes them with his copper-adorned gloves and quiets them — "Mourn no more, my ships of fir-wood" — and promises them the seas of battle. Later the malice of the North falls on the boat itself: the wicked hostess sends the black-frost to freeze "Lemminkainen’s bark of magic" on the open water, and the cold "Froze the hero’s ship of beauty" until the wizard, raging, hurls the frost into the fire and bargains it into surrender. The ship here is nearly a crewman — moody, loyal, and, in the end, abandoned frozen in the ice while its master walks home across the sea.

The Greek witness, preserved in Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE), gives the ship not a temper but an oracle. For the voyage after the fleece, the builder "built a ship of fifty oars named Argo" and at the prow "Athena fitted in a speaking timber" cut "from the oak of Dodona" — the oak whose rustling leaves the Greeks read as the voice of Zeus. So the Argo carries a mouthpiece of prophecy in its very bow, a beam that can warn the crew of what lies ahead.

One ship weeps and must be consoled; the other speaks and must be heeded. What does a people ask of a boat, that it should give the thing not only motion but a mind — and which is stranger to carry, a vessel that mourns or a vessel that foretells?