The Lapp dialect is described as resembling the Finnish. When we remember that the Lapps and the Quénes, or Finns, wear a similar costume, are distinguished by very similar customs, and that the two people call themselves by the same generic name, Suomi, we can understand why some travellers persist in regarding them as sprung from the same common stock. But a careful investigation shows the absolute distinctness of the Lapps from the Finns, notwithstanding this similarity of name and language—a similarity due, as in many other countries, to the influences of conquest or colonization. Some ethnologists, and among them M. D’Omalins, include the Finns among the white, or Caucasian race, and leave the Lapps among the inferior branches of the great Mongol family. It seems certain that a greater difference exists between the Quénes and the Lapps of Northern Norway than between the Quénes and the Scandinavians of the same region.
The Quénes have adapted themselves completely to sedentary and agricultural habits, while the Lapps, as yet, have not made a single advance in the direction of raising themselves above a pastoral and nomadic life. On the other hand, Finns constantly intermarry with the Swedes or Norwegians; while unions between Lapps and Scandinavians, or even between Lapps and Finns, are regarded throughout the entire country as monstrous anomalies. Lastly: laying aside the arguments founded upon the physical conformation of the Lapps and the Finns, an important historical consideration seems to prove their distinct co-existence from a period far anterior to the settlement of the Suiones and the Goths in the peninsula; it is that in the Finnish mythology we constantly meet with legends of battles between dwarfs and giants. It is impossible that these can refer to the warfare between the Finns and the Scandinavians, for the latter were of the same stature as the former; and it is in comparison with the Lapps only that the Finns could relatively be called giants.
We borrow from Count D’Alviella a few particulars relating to the stationary Lapps, who inhabit the region of West Bothnia, or Westerbotten, a long, narrow strip of land dividing the Gulf of Bothnia from Lapland proper. These Lapps seem to be the product of a mixture of races in which the Scandinavian element predominates. They are of an ordinary stature, robust, with regular features, light hair, and clear gray eyes.
The country in which they dwell has a strange, an original, but a monotonous character. It is its monotony which wearies the traveller, though at first he will be impressed by its fresh yet severe beauty. The forests of birch and fir seem endless, and the great lakes in their depths fatigue the eye with their wastes of cold, drear water. Occasionally, however, the traveller comes upon a smiling plain, enamelled with myosotis, and brightened by a silver-shining, music-murmuring stream. Here and there the wood is thinner, and lean cows may be seen feeding among the half-stripped stems. Next comes a clearing, where the forest has been swept away by fire; a clearing with fields of rye and barley; a palisade enclosure, and a group of châlets, with a comparatively spacious and undilapidated building in the centre.
These gârds, as they are called, closely resemble each other throughout the North. Neither material nor space is begrudged to the West Bothnian architects. Even the smallest farm comprises three or four buildings, which generally form a square on the four sides of an inner court. These buildings—how unlike the wretched, filthy hut of the nomadic Lapp!—comprise three living-rooms, kitchen, and stables; and are divided from each other only by a partition of horizontally-laid planks, the interstices being filled up by moss. The furniture is simple, convenient, suitable, and shining with cleanliness, like a Dutch kitchen. Around the hearth is hung a series of brightly-coloured prints, representing either a Scriptural scene or events in the life of an illustrious personage,—King Charles XV., or the bishop of the diocese, side by side with the universal legendary figures, Napoleon I. and Garibaldi. Close by stands the old hereditary locker, in which the husband accumulates his money and the wife deposits her trinkets; to the wall is suspended a complete trophy of knives, pipes, belts with silver buckles, sledge-bells, and a whip with a carved horn handle. The whole scene is one of order and the proprieties of family life.
All these dwellings, it may be added, do not wear the same aspect of prosperous neatness; but even where poverty is present, it is unaccompanied by that sullen gloom and melancholy squalidness which, in other countries, is the painful indication and result of long-endured privation. And here, we must also remember, poverty and famine are not always inseparable companions. The shadow of hunger frequently darkens the rich man’s door, and a man might perish for want of food on a sack of gold. One winter, the wealthiest members of the community were reduced to the necessity of eating bread made of bark mixed with moss.
Still, we see how wide a difference separates the stationary from the nomadic Lapp, and how impossible it is for a wandering population to acquire or appreciate the comforts of civilized life. A pastoral race, in the present age of the world, is, and must be, a decaying, because a barbarous race. If it touches the borders of civilization, it is only to become infected with its vices, and thus to hasten its inevitable decay.