The magician does not raise the storm by praying for it; he sings it. High in a golden fir-tree the smith Ilmarinen has climbed to fetch down the moon and the Great Bear, and the old singer below opens his mouth and the sky obeys — he "Sang a storm-wind in the heavens, / Sang the wild winds into fury", and then bends the gale to an errand: "Take, O storm-wind, take the forgeman, / Carry him within thy vessel". At once the air itself is conscripted into a ship. The wind "Makes of air a sailing vessel," lifts the blacksmith from the branches, and bears him off "Riding in the track of storm-winds" toward the far, dark Northland where a bride and an impossible task await.

This is the tenth canto of the Kalevala (compiled from Finnish oral song, 1835–1849), and its magic is worked entirely by voice: the same singer earlier "Sang aloft a wondrous pine-tree" until it pierced the clouds, and sang the moon to shine in its branches. Wind here is not weather but rhetoric made physical — a sung sentence that becomes a vehicle. Later in the same runo the winds are pressed to humbler labour, set to "attend the bellows" so the forge-fire roars hot enough to hammer out the wondrous mill called the Sampo; and when the smith at last sails home, the hostess of the North simply "Called the winds to his assistance," as one might summon a servant.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this shape its number, filed magically-raised wind widely — Irish and Icelandic, Jewish and Chinese, across the Pacific to the Marquesas — but of those authorities only the Finnish and the Chinese are tied to served text today; the rest wait on the shelf. Here the Finnish witness is the vivid one, and it leaves a strange question hanging: if a storm can be sung, what is the difference between a spell and a song?