withal!

[cimorene]

the introduction to an online english translation of the kalevala, from 1888, has some really hilarious statements about finland.

The inhabitants are strong and hardy, with bright, intelligent faces, high cheek-bones, yellow hair in early life, and with brown hair in mature age. With regard to their social habits, morals, and manners, all travellers are unanimous in speaking well of them. ...

The skull of the Finn belongs to the brachycephalic (short-headed) class of Retzius. Indeed the Finn-organization has generally been regarded as Mongol, though Mongol of a modified type. His color is swarthy, and his eyes are gray. He is not inhospitable, but not over-easy of access; nor is he a friend of new fashions. Steady, careful, laborious, he is valuable in the mine, valuable in the field, valuable oil shipboard, and, withal, a brave soldier on land.

Comments

[oneko-briar.livejournal.com]

elves :)

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i was thinking dwarves...

[oneko-briar.livejournal.com]

'short-headed' & 'swarthy'?

[cimness.livejournal.com]

and how great they are for manual labour. ahahaha. omg so condescending.

[oneko-briar.livejournal.com]

wow. kalevala cool.

but they wrote it..about themselves. so. point of pride?

heh, i saw blonde. legolas blonde.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yeah, but of course that could apply to most scandinavians as well. and according to the article "the finns" have hair that turns dark when they become adults. actually, there are many shades of blond, but there's also a fair amount of brown hair here. it's really their folk songs and folk tales, more or less, so it's not strange that it is about their own people; that's pretty usual, it's just the epic-isation that is slightly unusual. kind of cool, like the way people say the iliad and odyssey were written.

[oneko-briar.livejournal.com]

"kind of cool, like the way people say the iliad and odyssey were written."

exactly! the first that came to mind to me was hindu stuff.

i'd never heard of finnish lore til now. the most i had to compare to was viking stuff.

your new icons (ok, since last i checked) are all so purty. i like the angles of the bodies, it's just really nice. to be specific, that runway one where they're laying down and there's crisscrossed diagonals..

[cimness.livejournal.com]

or in fact the eddas--i guess the scandinavian lore is similar. this one is the latest one i know of, though. it wasn't assembled and written until 1800s. i don't know, maybe the finns were an unusually primitive people--i mean, i know that they were, and maybe that was why.

as for finnish lore, tolkien dug it and in part based middle-earth and lotr on it, but it's not really one of the great civilisations of the world. there aren't even 5 million inhabitants in finland, and a couple of percent are of swedish or russian descent and some more are immigrants or sami. so it's really not very famous.

this icon? :) it's always nice when there's good composition in the source image and you don't have to work to get a good icon.

[oneko-briar.livejournal.com]

yes :)

it's like, aww. nap time.

what is sami?

[cimness.livejournal.com]

they live from lapland to siberia. in english people call them "lapps". they're a tribal culture who herd reindeer. they used to have shamans and live completely nomadically.

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

Both my brothers had very blond hair when they were kids, and it turned darker in their teenage years, into a fairly dark brown in my youngest brother's case. But I don't know if that's a Finn thing or just, you know, a hair thing. :D

[cimness.livejournal.com]

aahahha. i think it's just a thing that happens to some people's hair. it happens to almost everyone in my mom's family and they're polish and german.

all that race-describing stuff was way popular in the 1800s and the turn of the century and it's a very entertaining load of bullshit, sometimes.

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

Hee, yes. Classic Finnish nationalists - or fennomaniacs, as they were also called - were a crazy lot. But then, they had to be, what with the indigenous culture here being actively smothered from all directions. (Although since most of the fennomaniacs were Swedish noblemen anyway, it's debatable whether their idea of Finnish cultural heritage actually in anyway corresponded to what most of the people thought.)

[cimness.livejournal.com]

which i think is really hilarious.