The Testimony of Tradition

by David MacRitchie

Indeed, the concluding lines of that verse are peculiarly appropriate to the Hebridean. For the "shöol skerry," which is the rocky islet of Sule or Sula, lying about forty miles N.N.E. of Cape Wrath, formed a very convenient refuge for him when "far from every strand," during his voyages between Shetland or Orkney and the Hebrides.[50]

And it is in this aspect, as tyrannical sea-rovers, that the "Finns" are often remembered in Shetlandic tradition. It was their custom to pursue the boats of the Shetland fishermen, and to exact from them a tribute in "silver money." So much were they dreaded that "it was dangerous in the extreme to say anything against them." The original feeling of respect must have been very strong, since it has survived into the present century.

This, of course, relates to the Finns considered as men and as fighters. The other side of the question shows us the Finn-women, and also the Finn-men in peaceful guise. And here, too, it is evident that those people were by no means regarded as an inferior race by the non-Finnish section of the Shetlanders (whatever that non-Finnish element may have been composed of), for those who claim a "Finn descent" at the present day regard this line of their ancestry as wholly superior to that which, for want of a better word, may be called "Shetlandic."

The Finn-women, we are told, very frequently became the wives of the islanders: and, consequently, they became the mothers of "half-breed" families—that is, in those cases where the husband himself was of a wholly different stock. In some instances, owing to a Finn connection in the previous generation, such children may have been more Finnish than anything else. Many of the Finn wives seem to have cast in their lot altogether with their Shetland husbands, to whom they brought dowries of cattle which—according to the peasant tradition—they "conjured up from the deep," of which the probable interpretation is that they caused them to be sent across from Bergen. Peaceful memories of the Finn-men may also be traced in such things as the rhyme of the medicine-man who "came ow'r fa Norraway" to conjure the toothache out of some unhappy Shetlander.

But these references, and apparently all the more recent of the Shetlandic traditions, point to Norway, and not to the Hebrides, as the home of the Finns; and it seems quite clear that the Bergen neighbourhood was a stronghold of this Mongoloid people within recent times.

Mr. H. Howorth,[51] in discussing these Mongoloid, or Ugrian people, remarks: "The Finns and Laps have been pushed back in Scandinavia to a very small portion of their ancient holding. In Livonia, in Esthonia, and in three-fourths of European Russia the Ugrians were, even in the eleventh century, the preponderating population"; that is, Esthonia and Livonia then formed a part of "Finland," and the Gulf of Riga was a Finnish sea. We are not given a date as to their "preponderance" in Scandinavia; but, if they were so numerous in the east Baltic districts during the eleventh century, it may be assumed that they were also of considerable importance in the Scandinavian peninsula at the same time, and even much later.

There is, at any rate, a very interesting reference to Finns of Swedish nationality, made in connection with these Finns of Orkney. A last-century reader of Wallace's "Description of Orkney" (whose occasional comments upon that book are included in the reprint of 1883) gives, as his opinion, that the "Finnmen" of Orkney, in the years 1682-4, belonged to "the Finns, or inhabitants of Finland, part of the kingdom of Sweden." Whether this writer meant the Finns of Esthonia and Livonia, or of Finland proper—for all these provinces were under Swedish rule in the seventeenth century—it is evident that he went too far afield for his "Finnmen." But what really is important is the statement which he goes on to make, incidentally, with regard to the Finns of Sweden. "They had," he says, "a settlement in Pennsylvania, near the freshes of the river Delaware, in the neighbourhood of the Dutch, who were the first planters here" (and he gives as his authority "The British Empire in America," vol. i. p. 309).

Now, this colony of Swedish Finns is clearly that which is otherwise spoken of as a colony of Swedes. When William Penn took possession, in the year 1682, of the territory which has ever since been associated with his memory, those "Swedes" were already settled there. "'He was hailed there with acclamation by the Swedes and Dutch,' says one authority, who informs us that the Swedes were living in log cabins and clay huts. The men dressed in 'leather breeches, jerkins, and match coats,' the women in 'skin jackets and linsey petticoats.'"[52] Those Swedes, then, of 1682, are identified by an eighteenth-century writer with the Swedish Finns of that period, and at the same time with the contemporary Finns of Orkney: who, also, according to Brand, wore "coats of leather." And their "log cabins and clay huts" were probably very much like the sod-covered dwellings of modern Lapps.

It is an interesting picture. Because this is plainly an infusion of unadulterated "Eskimo" blood, among the Pennsylvanians of that date, which is quite independent of the representatives of that family at present occupying Greenland and the northern parts of British North America. It is "Eskimo" blood that was "European" only two or three centuries ago. And it is quite likely that many modern Americans whose descent is drawn from those seventeenth-century colonists of Pennsylvania, referred to as "Swedes," have some of this blood in their veins. That they may have inherited a further share of it through other channels—"British," and perhaps also "Dutch"—is quite probable.