An Armchair Traveller's History of Finland

Jonathan Clements

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781909961012
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

In the American mind, Finland is often swept up in the general group of Nordic countries, little known and seldom gaining prominence on its own. But as Jonathan Clements shows in An Armchair Traveller's History of Finland, it has a long and fascinating history, one that offers oddities and excitements galore: from prehistoric herders to medieval lords, Christian martyrs and Viking kings, and the war heroes who held off the Soviet Union against long odds.Clements travels the length of the country as he tells these stories, along the way offering accounts of Finland's public artworks, literary giants, legends and folktales, and famous figures. The result is the perfect introduction to Finland for armchair and actual travelers alike.

1

From the Fenni to Lalli: Prehistory to 1159

THE ROAD LEADS to part of Lake Köyliö in south-west Finland, near the village that also bears that name, winding downhill through a forest park, some distance from the island church. The statue itself seems nondescript and anonymous. From a distance, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a soldier, standing almost to attention, his left hand holding a long spear. The man is larger than life, clad in furs with a bulky hat more likely to be associated today with the Russian Arctic. In his other hand, resting against his thigh, is a tangle of straps and slats – old-fashioned snow shoes. He holds an axe under his armpit, as if just about to don the shoes, but keeping his weapon close at hand.

One wonders how much fun the Finns have with local visitors, asking them who they think the statue represents. Is it a war memorial? Is it some famous Russian trapper? Is it Mannerheim (if in doubt, say it’s Mannerheim), that most famous of Finns, his officer’s moustache grown out into a bushy beard on some long mission? Is it a famous Arctic explorer, clutching some kind of harpoon, ready to take on an unlucky whale?

It was sculpted by Aimo Tukiainen in 1989, commissioned by the local bank, Köyliön Säästöpankki, in celebration of its centenary. You will hear things like this a lot in Finland, a country young enough that not only the subjects, but also the initiators of its public artworks are still acknowledged. The Finns, perhaps more than many other nations, appreciate the value and use of public art. The statues you see are there for a reason, and the reason is often relatively recent – some bank or factory with a desire to commemorate itself by siting itself in older traditions. In this case, the bank chose to make a name for itself by commissioning a statue of an illiterate, brawling country bumpkin, infamously henpecked husband and notorious murderer. The statue is of a man who may never have even existed, called Lalli.

The Martyrdom of Saint Henry

There are many conflicting stories about Lalli. The original, basic version may not have even given him a name, but during the later Middle Ages the tale was augmented, accreting additional data like a rolling snowball. However it begins, it ends the same way, sometime around AD 1155, with Lalli, a dim-witted Finnish forester, accosting the saintly Bishop Henry of Uppsala on the winter ice of Köyliö lake. There is a misunderstanding – in the most embroidered of versions, Lalli’s wife Kerttu has told him that the Bishop came to stay, ate their food, drank their drink, and left ‘nothing but ashes’. Lalli swings his axe, and murders the defenceless Henry, inadvertently creating Finland’s first martyr, and its patron saint.

Lalli hacks off Henry’s finger to get at his papal ring. He sticks the Bishop’s mitre on his head. He rifles through Henry’s positions and returns home to the shrewish Kerttu, boasting of his deed. But when he tries to take the holy hat off, part of his scalp comes with it. His remaining hair starts falling out in clumps. He tries to take off the ring, but it strips the flesh from his finger, leaving only bone. Lalli eventually goes mad, and drowns himself in the lake.

Meanwhile, Henry’s servants come out of hiding. It is implied that he had ordered them to take refuge in the forest, seemingly in the knowledge that Lalli had murderous intent. According to Henry’s wishes, they gather up his remains and wrap them in cloth tied with blue string. Laid on a cart, they are pulled along by a stallion, until it gives up. This is then replaced by an ox. Where the ox stops, a church is built in Henry’s memory.

In distant Götaland, Sweden, a priest heard the story of Henry’s demise, and made some sort of wisecrack about it. He immediately developed an ominous stomach ache. Before long, more obviously miraculous phenomena began to occur. Two children supposedly rose up from the dead in Finland. A group of sailors prayed to Henry and were saved from a storm. In nearby Kyrö, a lame man walked and a blind woman saw.

By the end of the 13th century, Henry, Bishop of Uppsala, was known as Saint Henry, the ‘Bishop of Finland’, although he had never held that post in life. His unassuming stone cross on Kirkkokari Island in Lake Köyliö has become the start site of Finland’s only Catholic pilgrimage, Henrikin tie (Henry’s Road), along which believers annually walk the 140 kilometres from the site of his martyrdom to Nousiainen, the site of his alleged burial. On this journey, which ends the night before Midsummer’s Eve, travellers are entertained with the Death-Lay of Henry, which recounts the events of his life, death and miracles, in a considerably more sensational fashion than his medieval Vita Henricus.

Now the bishop is in joy, Lalli in evil torture.

The bishop sings with the angels, performs a joyful hymn.

Lalli is skiing down in hell. His left ski slides along,

Into the thick smoke of torture. With his staff he strikes about him:

Demons beset him cruelly. In the swelter of hell

They assail his pitiful soul.

But there is no statue of Henry at Köyliö. It’s his murderer who gets the permanent memorial, at least in part because Henry was a foreigner. He was a bishop from Uppsala in Sweden, but was widely believed to have come from England. Garbled references refer to his youth in Cabbage-land (Kaalimaa), a non-existent location that has puzzled Finns for centuries. However, any medieval historian is sure to recognise it from an infamous insult directed by Olaf the Stout at poor King Canute about the English food he had to eat.

Perhaps there was never a real Henry, either. Like so many other martyrs from before the Congregation on the Causes of Saints in 1588, his canonisation was never officially declared, nor was any diligent Vatican investigator put on his case. The Catholic Church has no record of a Henry of Uppsala that fits in with his timeline, and neither does the Bishopric of Uppsala. It is true that there were English missionaries among the Swedes in the ‘New Land’ to the east of the Gulf of Bothnia, and indeed likely that more Englishmen rose to prominence in the Church during the reign of the English Pope Adrian IV (r.1154–1159). Although ‘Saint’ Henry was barely even recognised or celebrated outside Finland, Sweden and a couple of parishes in north Germany, he achieved his popularity because, in the eyes of the Finnish devout, his story was, at least, local. Finns could point at Lake Köyliö, where he was supposedly killed; they could visit Kyrö, where his early miracles manifested. They could claim him as their own.

Lalli, however, was a different matter. He was a local. He was a Finn who stood up, in some misguided way, to the imposition of authority by Swedish masters. As the years passed, particularly whenever Finns debated ‘Finnishness,’ Lalli cropped up frequently as an icon of all that was not-Swedish, not-foreign, not-Catholic. The statue in Köyliö carefully redacts his iconic image as a thug murdering a holy man, presenting him instead with all the accoutrements otherwise implied by the story: the fur clothes of a trapper, the snowshoes of a wintry landscape, and the axe of a forester. At the most basic of levels, Lalli reduces Finnishness to simple woodland life in a freezing environment, with a little bit of bloody-minded, murderous resistance to authority thrown in. He is the first of the Finns.

Prehistory & Early Finns

In wonderful savageness lives the nation of the Fenni, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones. Their common support they have from the chase, women as well as men; for with these the former wander up and down, and crave a portion of the prey. Nor other shelter have they even for their babes, against the violence of tempests and ravening beasts, than to cover them with the branches of trees twisted together …

So wrote the Roman author Tacitus in his Germania (c. AD 98), identifying a tribe far to the frozen north. Fifty years later, in the Geographia (c. AD 150), the Alexandrian author Claudius Ptolemy similarly alluded to a tribe he called the Phinnoi, found in two separate locations in Scandia and Sarmatia. Both seem in agreement that wherever these Finns are to be found, their life seems rather miserable. This is a recurring concept in discussions of Finland, a land so far removed from the norms of established culture that its critics have often found it wanting.

‘Foreigners are conceited and envious,’ complained Daniel Juslenius in 1700, ‘they foolishly believe that there is no civilisation beyond the confines of their own country, and particularly not in these regions, which they have never seen. Indeed, they boast that their cabins are taller than our towers.’

Humans came relatively late to Finland, since the entire region was buried under ice until only 12,000 years ago. In geological terms, the last of the Ice Ages left Finland so recently that the land is still bouncing back up – lifting in relief after the weight of the snows, and rising fast. Many are the places in Finland where a town named as a harbour, or a mansion named for a beachside view, seem oddly far inland. Many are the historical town records in which townsfolk complain their harbour has become unsuitable, particularly in the north of the Gulf of Bothnia. There, in the 18th century, Anders Celsius conducted scientific experiments, and discovered that the coastal land was rising at the geological pell-mell pace of 13mm a year. By the year AD 4000, the north of the Bay of Bothnia will be a freshwater lake, walled off by a new ridge across its middle.

Archaeological evidence of the first inhabitants of Finland is largely lost, drowned or scraped away by several last gasps of the Ice Age that rolled back over the earliest places of habitation. There is only one place in the region that has offered possible evidence of earlier habitation, and that is the controversial Susiluola (Wolf Cave) near Karijoki, where archaeologists in 1996 found what may have been evidence of Neanderthal inhabitants some 120,000 years ago. This suggests there were inhabitants in the area between the Riss and Würm Ice Ages. However, Susiluola has become a matter of academic dispute, with some refusing to believe that the limited finds of flint chips are man-made at all, and others arguing that the cave would have been underwater at the time the finds were supposedly left there.

Sometime around 7200 BC, someone left a bone ice pick, a fish net and a ski runner near the site of modern Lahti. Hunters were converging on Finland from both the south and possibly north, from the Norwegian coast.

In Suomusjärvi, now part of Salo in south-west Finland, archaeologists found a Stone Age area of settlement, occupied for around 2,000 years after 6500 BC by humans who subsisted on hunting and fishing. Bone evidence and surviving artefacts suggest that their main prey were seals, perhaps not dissimilar to the endangered Saimaa ringed seal, only 310 of which currently survive – the last descendants of marine mammals left landlocked by the fast-rising lake land.

The world of these Stone Age people was very different, scattered not with the birch and firs of modern Finland, but with hazel, elm and oak. By 4200 BC, these primitive inhabitants were starting to settle, and trading with nearby tribes. The Comb-Ceramic culture, whose distinctive pots are found across a wide swathe of Europe, made inroads into the Finnish area, and these early users of stone tools began importing a better class of stone from the east – evidence survives in eastern Finland not only of tools made from Russian flint, but of entire slabs of green schist brought from Lake Onega, and wooden spoons made from a pine that only grows near the Urals. We have no idea what the Finns traded for such goods, but later accounts, particularly in Viking sagas, suggest that one of the things that Finland was best known for was animal pelts.

Finland entered the Bronze Age around 1500 BC, when the metal is first found, not mined locally, but brought in as another import. By this time, the archaeological evidence suggests, the Finns had turned to limited farming to supplement their hunting culture, although animal husbandry was more important for them.

So much of the material culture of this period was made from substances that readily decompose. Evidence suggests that all of Finland, along with the rest of the Nordic region, was widely but sparsely settled by the end of the Stone Age, but that the isolated tribes of reindeer herders and seal hunters had a culture much as Tacitus would later describe – of skin tents and wooden utensils, little of which has survived. At some point during the Bronze Age, there was a palpable split between the cultures. Some continued to follow the reindeer herds in the north, living a nomadic existence. Others cleared forest areas and focused on farming. Although the two groups remained closely interrelated, with regular contact and many shared beliefs, their languages began to diverge. We can still hear two accents on what is essentially the same word, used by each of the groups to identify themselves. The herders called their land Sapmi; the farmers called theirs Suomi.

Tacitus thought that the people of Sapmi had the better idea:

Such a condition they judge more happy than the painful idea of cultivating the ground, than the labour of rearing houses, than the agitations of hope and fear attending the defence of their own property or the seizing of that of others. Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malice of the gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them, nothing remains even to be wished.

The Rome of Tacitus was a world away from the Finns, although fragments of it did make their way to the far north. A handful of Roman coins have been dug up on Finnish sites, as well as two wine ladles, a glass drinking horn and a gold bracelet. These items, as well as several swords of Mediterranean origin, appear to have drifted up to Finland through the tribes of Germany, rather than being traded directly with any foolhardy or enterprising Roman merchants.

The Vikings & Balagard

By the Dark Ages, the people of the Suomi farmlands had advanced further to the north, pushing the ‘Saami’ people of Sapmi out of what is now Tampere and Hämeenlinna. It is possible, although difficult to prove, that this period is the source of certain references in Finnish folklore to Pohjola (the Northland), a rival realm ruled by a wise but vindictive witch-queen, ever at odds with the homespun heroes of Finnish epics.

Slash-and-burn cultivation was the rule – with forest areas cleared, crops sown for several seasons, and the land then abandoned to grow over once more with trees. The Finnish settlers had to contend with visitations from the north and west, as sailors from what is now Norway and Sweden ventured into the lakes. It was in Finland that Norse seamen are liable to have learned one of their most crucial and transferable skills. The skerries and islets of the archipelago in south-west Finland gave way to landlocked lakes and rivers, but portage, in which a ship’s crew clambers out and bodily hefts their vessel over a ridge or rapids, opened much of Finland’s hinterland to explorers, traders and raiders. By the time we first hear of the semi-legendary foundation of a ‘Viking’ state in what is now Russia, around the middle of the 9th century AD, it is likely that the rowers who ventured there sailed along a Gulf of Finland that was already either well-settled with homesteads, or entirely picked over for plunder.

Archaeological evidence, once more, is scant, but points to settlers and traders from Sweden. Viking swords have been found as far to the east as Kiviniemi, while in 1686, diggers in Uskela (now part of Salo) uncovered a hoard of coins from the Arab world and the England of Ethelred the Unready. Inexplicably tucked away in a corner of the Museum of Central Finland, in Jyväskylä, amid all the anonymous canoes and milk churns, is a striking Viking-era necklace, worn by some long-forgotten lady of what was plainly a culturally Scandinavian settlement.

Viking sagas might allude to ‘kings’ and chieftains in the lands of lakes and snow, although notably the word in Finnish for a king (kuningas) is a foreign borrowing, as if the Finns themselves never had much of a use for it. But there are occasional leaders of the Finns whose names are mentioned in old legends. Daniel Juslenius writes of the Finnish ‘king’ Rostioff, ‘who was worshipped as a god by the Swedes after his death’, and the feisty princess Skjalv. Dragged back to Sweden as a concubine of King Ingemar, who had killed her father King Froste, Skjalv bided her time and eventually strangled Ingemar with a golden chain. The Heimskringla, chronicle of the Norwegian kings, goes into greater detail:

Now when King Agne had got drunk, Skjalv bade him take care of his gold torc...

Table of contents

• An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. From the Fenni to Lalli: Prehistory to 1159
• 2. East of Sweden: 1159–1809
• 3. The Russian Century: 1809–1899
• 4. A Nation is Born: 1899–1939
• 5. In the Cold: 1939–1991
• 6. Finland in the 21st Century
• 7. Eating and Drinking
• 8. Travel Logistics
• 9. Gazetteer
• Chronology of Major Events
• Further Reading and References