A living man walks down into the country of the dead and must talk his way across its river. In the Kalevala (Finnish oral song, compiled 1835–1849) the old singer Wainamoinen, short three words of magic, journeys a week through brambles, a second through hazels, a third through junipers, until he reaches the realm of Tuoni, lord of death (the song names his kingdom Mana and Tuonela by turns), and calls across the water for "Bring a boat, Tuoni’s daughter". The tiny ferry-maiden interrogates him — did iron bring you here, or water, or fire? — because the dead arrive marked, and he is not. She warns him plainly: "Many they that visit Mana, / Few return from Mana’s kingdom."

Once across, the death-land closes its hand. The hostess Tuonetar sings him to sleep and "Lays him on the couch of Mana", while her crook-fingered son strings "a thousand nets of copper" across the river so the sleeper can never leave. Wainamoinen wakes, and escapes the way heroes of this song always do — by unmaking his own body: "Like a serpent in a circle" he pours himself through the iron-threaded mesh and out of Tuonela. He had come only "to learn these magic sayings", and he leaves without them, carrying instead the one lesson the dead give freely, that the way down is easy and the way back is not.

The Greek witness on our shelf is thin here: Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE) touches the theme only glancingly, noting Hercules "saving the dead Alcestis for Admetus", with the famous descent for Cerberus surviving as an editor's aside about the "ascent of Hercules" rather than the going-down itself. Frazer's Golden Bough offers Persephone's descent, but as analysis, not narrative. The Finnish song alone carries the full round trip. What is it that the underworld withholds — the words, or only the promise that you may come back to use them?