An old singer goes down into the belly of a dead giant to steal the words that raise the dead world into song. In the Kalevala (Finnish oral tradition; compiled 1835–1849), Wainamoinen wants the lost-words no one living can teach him, and a shepherd sends him "In the mouth of wise Wipunen" — a sleeping bard so long buried that trees have rooted in his flesh, the aspen on his shoulder, the birch on his temples, the oak from his forehead. Wainamoinen fells the grove, pries the giant's jaws apart with a staff of iron, and then, "Careless walking, headlong stumbles" into the vast mouth. Wipunen simply "Opens wide his mouth and swallows" him whole, shoes and staff and armor, and boasts over the meal: "Never in my recollection, / Have I tasted sweeter morsels".

What follows is the strange heart of this witness. The swallowed man does not die; he colonizes. He builds a boat from his poniard's birch handle and rows "Through the entrails of the hero", and then, more astonishing still, "Makes a smithy from his armor" — bellows from his sleeves, anvil from his knees — and sets to forging inside the giant's abdomen until, "Like the thunder rings the anvil". The giant, who has eaten heroes past counting, has never swallowed one who worked. He rages and pleads and pours out a hundred banishing-charms, yet the smith within him only threatens to strike deeper.

The swallowing, then, is not an ending but a passage: Wainamoinen refuses to leave until Wipunen opens his stores of song, "Filled with old-time incantations", and sings the origin of earth and sky. Only when the hero has the lost-words does the giant, almost tenderly, bid him "Open wide thy mouth and fauces", and the singer glides out to build his boat and finish his task. Thompson files this address under extraordinary swallowings, and here the belly of the giant is less a grave than a locked library — the one place the oldest wisdom could still be found. What does it cost a living man to be eaten, if being eaten is the only road to what he came for?