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Fieldfare chirps:
'In her father's house a maiden
Lives like strawberry in the garden,
But a bride in house of husband,
Lives like house-dog tightly fettered.
To a slave comes rarely pleasure;
To a wedded damsel never.'

Good advice, Fieldfare!

The Maiden sets the Old Man all kinds of impossible tasks: splitting a horsehair with a blunt ; tying an in invisible knots; peeling a stone!

When he completed these tasks, she cries:-

'No, I will not yet go with you,
If a boat you cannot carve me,
From the splinters of my spindle,
From the fragments of my shuttle....'

A boat that will propel itself...

Vainamoinen sets to work.

But on the third day, spirits Hiisi and Lempo come to the Maiden's aid, turning Vainamoinen's , blade and handle, against him:

'From the rock the axe rebounded,
In the flesh the steel was buried...'

in his knee, in his toes

'In the flesh did Lempo drive it,
To the veins did Hiisi guide it,
From the wound the blood flowed freely,
Bursting forth in streaming torrents.'

The Old Man tries to utter incantations for healing the wound but can't think of any words for the origin of iron
'which might serve to bind the evil,
And to close the gaping edges
Of the great wound from the iron'

#Kalevala Runo 8

This blood has cosmogonic proportions!
'Rushing like a foaming river,
O'er the berry-bearing bushes
...
There remained no single hillock,
Which was not completely flooded
By the overflowing blood-stream,
Which came rushing forth in torrents
From the knee of one most worthy,
From the toes of Vainamoinen.'

So, the Old Man has to travel place to place bleeding across the whole landscape until eventually in Runo 9 he finds an even Older Man from before the age of Iron who knows how to staunch the flow of blood

All because a Maiden on a said NO!

#Kalevala Runo 8