Biography
Georg August Wallin was born on 24 October 1811 at Sund, in the Åland archipelago, the son of Israel Wallin, a civil servant, and Johanna Maria Ahrenberg. A pupil at the cathedral school of Åbo, which moved to Rauma after the great fire of 1827, he completed his schooling privately and enrolled in 1829 at the university of Helsingfors. There he attended the classics and oriental languages courses of Professor Gabriel Geitlin, also learned English, German and French, and obtained his master's degree in 1836.
In the years that followed, he taught at a private school in Helsingfors and worked as a supernumerary at the university library. A thesis on Arabic and Persian earned him in 1839 the post of docent in oriental literature. Around 1840 he left for Saint Petersburg, where the Egyptian Muhammad Ayyad al-Tantawi taught him living Arabic; this teacher's stories about Egypt fed his desire to see the East at close quarters.
Thanks to a grant from his university, he left Helsingfors in 1843 and reached Cairo by way of Marseille and Constantinople. Under the name of Abd al-Wali, he passed himself off as a Muslim and practised as a doctor. In 1845 he crossed northern Arabia by way of Ma'an, Al-Jawf, Jubbah and Ha'il to Medina, Mecca and Jeddah. In 1846 and 1847 he travelled through Palestine and Syria. A third expedition, aimed at the Najd, stopped at Ha'il: feeling that his borrowed identity had been compromised, he went north towards Mesopotamia and Persia, then returned by way of Baghdad and Damascus. His journal and letters, collected by S. G. Elmgren under the title Reseanteckningar från Orienten åren 1843-1849. Dagbok och bref, appeared in Helsingfors from 1864, in four volumes up to 1866.
Back in Europe in 1849, Wallin stayed in London, studied the Arabic manuscripts in its libraries and wrote in English the account of his journey, which the Royal Geographical Society published. According to the University of Helsinki, the Society awarded him its Founder's Gold Medal in 1850, and the Société de géographie of Paris a silver medal. He was the first Western scholar to collect the poetry of the Bedouins and to study their dialects. On his return to Finland, he became professor of oriental literature in 1851 and published a short Arabic grammar.
He died suddenly in Helsingfors on 23 October 1852, the day before his forty-first birthday, and lies in Hietaniemi cemetery. Written mostly in Swedish, his notebooks long remained unknown outside Finland, all the more so as Finnish ethnography at the time turned mainly towards the Finno-Ugric peoples. Knut Tallqvist published letters and extracts from the journal in 1905. The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland has issued a critical edition, the Skrifter, which appeared from 2010 to 2017 under the editorship of Kaj Öhrnberg, Patricia Berg and Kira Pihlflyckt. Today they are seen as an irreplaceable testimony to the tribes and oases of northern Arabia in the middle of the nineteenth century.
