A man wounds his knee with an axe and does not bind it — he sings it shut. In the Kalevala (compiled 1835–1849), the old singer Wainamoinen, bleeding from a hatchet-stroke while building a boat, "begins his magic singing" — not a spell against pain but a song of beginnings, "Of the origin of evil", and then "Sings the origin of iron", for to know a thing's birth is to hold power over it. An old man at a roadside cottage confirms the creed of this world: "Greater things have been accomplished", he says, through only "three words of the master", through "the telling of the causes" — song here is not ornament but the deepest engineering, able to staunch blood and temper the seas.

The same power turns generous elsewhere in the record. In another rune (one of the poem's cantos), the reckless Lemminkainen, also called Ahti, is given leave to "sing my songs of magic" on an island of maidens; he opens his mouth "To intone his wizard-sayings" and simply sings a world into being around him. "Sang he alders to the waysides", "Sang the oaks upon the mountains", "Sang the stones to pearls resplendent", "Sang the island full of flowers"; and when he wants a knife for the feast he has conjured, he "Sang a blade from purest silver", while the maidens "Stood entranced at Ahti’s wisdom". The magic song is one instrument with two edges — it can close a wound or clothe an island — and both are the same act: naming a thing rightly until the world obeys.

Only the Finnish runes are wired to served text; the Irish, Greek, and African songs named at this same address wait unread. If to sing a thing's origin is to command it, what would it cost to learn the song of one's own?