Põhjanael
The Põhjanael, the 'North Nail', the Estonian folk name for the North Star: in the old Baltic-Finnic worldview the sky was an upturned cauldron or great wheel turning on a nail driven through its centre, and that nail is Polaris. Farmers read the seasons from the stars turning around it, and folk sayings spoke of the sky-wheel's spokes and of the nail that holds the heavens fixed. The folklorist Matthias Johann Eisen recorded the motif in his 'Eesti Mütoloogia' and folk-astronomy notes, preserving a sky-picture in which the fixed North Star is the axle of the whole turning world.