When his sledge shatters on the rocks, the old singer must go down among the dead to mend it. At the wedding-feast in Wainola, Wainamoinen sings his way homeward until his magic sledge breaks "into many pieces", its runners torn asunder — and to repair it he needs a tool no living smith can lend. He asks the assembled company whether any among them "will go to Mana's kingdom", "To the empire of Tuoni", "There to get the magic auger" from the master of Manala. None will dare; the answer of the young is the answer of the old, that no hero has courage enough for so reckless a journey to the land of the dead. This is the descent our served witness records, from The Kalevala (Finnish oral tradition; compiled 1835–1849), rune twenty-five.

So the wisdom-singer goes himself. He "Crossed the sable stream of Deathland" to the castles of Manala, "Found the auger of Tuoni", and "Brought the instrument in safety" — and with it sings a whole purple forest into being, birches and mighty oaks, and shapes them anew into shafts and runners. Here Tuonela, the Finnish underworld, is not a place of judgment but a workshop of last resort: the dead hold the one tool the living lack, and the errand is repair, not rescue.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this address its number, gathers journeys to the lower world from Icelandic, Greek, Indian, Eskimo, and many other shelves, but the Finnish rune is the one wired to served text here today; the rest wait unread. It leaves a plain question: what does it mean that the hero braves the country of the dead not for a soul or a secret, but only to fix a broken sledge?