A boat half-built on a fog-point of the sea, its maker stalled for the want of three words of magic — and so a living man goes down to wrest them from the dead. This is where the record opens the road to the land of the dead, and its served witness is the Kalevala (compiled from Finnish oral tradition, 1835–1849). Wainamoinen, the "eternal wisdom-singer," has sung his vessel nearly whole but finds "three words were wanting" to close its stern and forecastle; no swan or reindeer or squirrel he kills will yield them. So he sets out for "the kingdom of Tuoni" — Tuoni being death itself in the Finnish reckoning, his realm called Tuonela or Manala — pressing week by week through bramble and juniper until its islands and castles rise ahead.

At the black river he calls out, "Bring a boat, Tuoni’s daughter," and the ferry-maid takes him across only after he drops a string of lies and admits why a hale, unburied man has come. The dead keep a working household here. Their hostess pours him beer in which he sees "the spawning of the black-frogs" and writhing adders, and he refuses it; then a wand of slumber lays him on a couch while a crook-fingered fisher strings "a thousand nets of copper" across the water, so the guest can never leave. Wainamoinen escapes only by changing shape, crawling free "like a worm of magic" through the copper mesh.

The rune closes as a warning to the young: the cruel and the false will do penance on "ever-flaming couches" beneath the fire-rock, pillowed with serpents. Only this Finnish telling is wired to served text; the record's Egyptian, Babylonian, and North American authorities for the abode of the dead wait unread. What does this land of the dead guard so fiercely — not gold, but three lost words a living man would risk everything to learn?