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The history of Finland through the eyes of its early travellers

The earliest writers to mention Finland set it at the edge of the known world. Around AD 98, at the close of his Germania, Tacitus describes the Fenni, hunters of astonishing wildness who tip their arrows with bone and have neither horses nor houses. Around 890 the Norwegian Ohthere told King Alfred the Great of his voyages to the north, naming the Cwenas and the Finnas who lived by hunting and fishing beyond the mountains.

Finland enters written history through Sweden and the Church. Tradition holds that Bishop Henry joined a Swedish expedition around 1155 and was killed on the ice of Lake Köyliö by a peasant called Lalli. Turku Cathedral was consecrated in 1300, and the Treaty of Nöteborg drew the border with Novgorod in 1323. Soon the country began to write itself: Mikael Agricola, later Bishop of Turku, printed a Finnish primer in 1543 and the New Testament in 1548.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the road to the North Cape ran round the head of the Gulf of Bothnia. The Italian priest Francesco Negri travelled up through Tornio to the Arctic Ocean in 1664; his letters appeared in 1700 as Viaggio settentrionale. Jean-François Regnard reached Tornio in 1681 and, further north, left a Latin inscription: here at last we stopped, where the earth gave out. Meanwhile the academy founded at Turku in 1640 trained scholars of its own: Pehr Kalm sailed for North America in 1747, and from 1766 Henrik Gabriel Porthan studied Finnish folk poetry.

In 1799 the English naturalist Edward Daniel Clarke crossed the country on his way to Lapland. Travellers of the time described the saunas, the rune singers with their kantele, and boats shooting the rapids of the Oulujoki. After the war of 1808 and 1809 Finland became a grand duchy of the Russian Empire, with Helsinki as its capital from 1812.

The nineteenth century discovered a nation. Elias Lönnrot published the Kalevala in 1835, an epic gathered from the singers of Karelia; in the 1840s Matthias Alexander Castrén travelled through Lapland and Siberia in search of the Finns' linguistic kin. Xavier Marmier introduced the country to French readers from 1839, Louis Léouzon Le Duc translated the Kalevala in 1845, and Ethel Alec-Tweedie toured it by cart in 1896, two decades before independence in 1917.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a guide to other early narratives about Finland.

Our titles on this subject

Cover of The History of Lapland by Johannes Schefferus

The History of Lapland

Johannes Schefferus, 1673

The first great treatise on the Sámi: language, shamanism and survival in the heart of the Arctic.

In the seventeenth century, Sweden, now a great power, wants to know and convert the Sámi of the Lappmarken, and to silence the rumours of witchcraft that Europe spreads about them. Johannes Scheffer, a professor at Uppsala, does not travel: he gathers reports from the pastors of the North, seized objects and the accounts of Sámi students. This study-bound method, rare among the writings of the time, produces an orderly picture of a people hitherto known by hearsay, immediately translated across Europe.
Cover of Lachesis Lapponica, or a Tour in Lapland by Carl Linnaeus

Lachesis Lapponica, or a Tour in Lapland

Carl Linnaeus, 1732

A young naturalist among the Sami: Linnaeus in Lapland, 1732.

In 1732, Lapland was still poorly known to learned Europe. Carl Linnaeus, a young Uppsala student commissioned by the Royal Society of Sciences, spent five months crossing it, from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Lapland Alps and the fjords of Norway, before returning through Finland. His journal, which remained in manuscript until the English translation of 1811, captures the life of the Sami, their reindeer and their plants, and prepares the way for the *Flora Lapponica* of 1737.
Cover of The Figure of the Earth by Pierre Louis Maupertuis

The Figure of the Earth

Pierre Louis Maupertuis, 1736-1737

Four scholars set out onto the ice of the polar circle to measure the Earth, and their figure will change the image of the Earth.

The Figure of the Earth tells how Maupertuis and his companions settled, in 1736 and 1737, the great scientific quarrel of their age: the Earth is flattened at the poles, as Newton had predicted, and not elongated as the Cassinis maintained. Triangles cast from summit to summit through the forest, a baseline measured on the frozen river at the solstice, winter at Tornio: Enlightenment science becomes a journey to the Far North, between present-day Sweden and Finland.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

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