An old singer plays until the whole of the North falls silent to listen, and then weeps until his own tears, gathered from the lakebed, harden into pearls. The one witness wired to served text for this transformation is the Kalevala (compiled 1835–1849 out of Finnish oral song), where Wainamoinen, the "ancient minstrel" and "eternal wisdom-singer", takes up his "harp of fish-bone" and plays a first day, a second, and a third, until there is "neither man nor hero, / Neither ancient dame, nor maiden" whom he does not "touch to weeping".

Then his own grief overtakes him. "Wainamoinen’s tears came flowing", the rune says, "Welling from the master’s eyelids", drops "Larger than the whortle-berries" and "Finer than the pearls of ocean" that run down his beard and girdle into the water. He asks whether anyone in the assembly can "gather up my tear-drops / From the deep, pellucid waters", and promises the gatherer "a beauteous plumage". A raven tries and fails; then a duck dives and brings the tears up again "Beautifully formed and colored", fit at last to be "Jewels for the maids of beauty". The rune closes on its own quiet etiology: "This the origin of sea-pearls, / And the blue-duck’s beauteous plumage".

Only the Finnish witness is wired to served text; the Irish, Indian, Jewish, and North American authorities that Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this shape its number, filed beside it wait unread. What is it about weeping — not blood, not sweat, but weeping — that the record keeps turning into treasure?