Weary of her ageless life in the sky, the "Beauteous Daughter of the Ether" lets herself down into the sea, and there the wind, not any god, gets her with child. Our one Finnish witness, the Kalevala (compiled 1835–1849), opens with her plight: "Thereupon the rising storm-wind", "Flying from the East in fierceness," beats the ocean white and tosses the lone maiden until, "Till at last in full conception," a "Union now of force and beauty," the storm sinks — "Sink the storm-winds into slumber" — and leaves her heavy with a child. "Overburdened now the maiden" can no longer lift herself above the surface; "Thus she swam as water-mother" through every quarter of the sea, "Seven hundred years she labored / Ere her first-born was delivered."

What she at last brings forth is no common child but "the wonderful enchanter", the singer Wainamoinen, who after his ages in the dark bursts his own way out and wades ashore to look on the sun and the Great Bear. The rune closes by naming them both, mother and son: he "Was delivered from his mother, / Ilmatar, the Ether’s daughter." The only father in the tale is the storm-wind on the water.

Only the Finnish witness here is wired to served text; the record's Chinese, Japanese, and North American Indian authorities for conception from wind wait unread on the shelf, so the shape reaches us in this single Northern voice. It is a curious reversal of the usual shame around fatherless birth — this mother mourns not disgrace but the cold, crying to Ukko, "the ruler of the heavens," to deliver her from her travail. When the wind alone is the father, whom is the child left to resemble?