Skridfinn Archer (from Olaus Magnus)
“They are small people and are very hairy on their bodies, and have a bear’s nature....”
“The Sea Finns can for the most part speak the Norse language, but not very well.... And they have also their own language which they use among themselves and with the Lapps, which Norse Men cannot understand, and it is said that they have more languages than one; of their languages they have however another to use among themselves which some[213] can understand, so it is certain that they have nine languages, all of which they use among themselves.”[214]
“Of the Mountain Finns the same is to be understood as has now been noted of the Sea Finns; the others [i.e., the former] are small, hairy folk and evil, they have no houses and do not dwell in any place, but move from one place to another, where they may find some game to shoot.[215] They do not eat bread, nor do the Sea Finns either.... And he [the Mountain Finn] has tame reindeer and a sledge, which is like a low boat with a keel upon it....”
From this description it appears with all desirable clearness that, on the one hand, there was no noticeable external difference in the sixteenth century between the small Fishing Lapps and the small Reindeer Lapps, and on the other there was no essential difference between the Lapps of that time and the Finns described by Ottar—we even find the decoy reindeer still used in the sixteenth century; further, that the Lapps were unusually skilful hunters and archers, for which they were also praised by earlier authorities (we read in many places of Finn-bows, Finn-arrows, etc. Some thought that the man who at the battle of Svolder shot and hit Einar Tambarskelve’s bow so that it broke, was a Lapp). We see too that the Reindeer Lapp was not exclusively a reindeer nomad, but practised hunting to such an extent that he moved about for the sake of game, and it even looks as if this was his chief means of livelihood, which is therefore mentioned first. That the reindeer-keeping mentioned by Ottar should have been so essentially different from that of the present day, as A. M. Hansen asserts, is difficult to see. That the decoy reindeer which Ottar tells us were used for catching wild reindeer, and which were so valuable, are no longer to be found in our day is a matter of course, simply because the wild reindeer in northern Scandinavia has practically disappeared from the districts frequented by the Lapps with their tame reindeer. Furthermore, with the introduction of firearms decoy reindeer became less necessary for getting within range of the wild ones; but we see that they were still used in the sixteenth century, when the Lapps continued to shoot with the bow. So long as there was abundance of game, before the introduction of the rifle, the Reindeer Lapp also lived, as we have seen, to a large extent by hunting; but then he was not able to look after large herds of reindeer. It is therefore probable that a herd of 600 deer, as mentioned by Ottar, must then have been regarded as constituting wealth, although to the Reindeer Lapps of the present day, who live exclusively by keeping reindeer, it would be nothing very great.[216]
Those of the modern Lapps whose manner of life most reminds us of Ottar’s “Finns” are perhaps the so-called Skolte-Lapps on the south side of the Varanger Fjord. Helland [1905, p. 157] says of them: “They have few reindeer and keep them not so much for their flesh and milk as for transport. Their principal means of subsistence is salmon and trout fishing in the river, and a little sea-fishing in the fjord on Norwegian ground. They are also hunters.”
We must suppose that the “Finns” who according to Ottar, or to Alfred’s version of him, paid tribute in walrus-hide ropes, etc., lived by the sea and engaged in sealing and walrus-hunting, and in any case they cannot have kept reindeer except as a subsidiary means of subsistence, like the Fishing Lapps in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But Alfred’s expressions do not exclude the possibility of there having been amongst the “Finns” some who were reindeer nomads like the Reindeer Lapps of our time. That they already existed at that time and somewhat later seems to result from the statements in the sagas of the sheriffs of Hâlogaland (e.g., Thorulf Kveldulfsson), who in order to collect the “Finn” tribute travelled into the interior and up into the mountains. It cannot have been only wandering hunters who paid this tribute, and they must certainly also have had herds of reindeer.
Decline of hunting
That the Lapps have degenerated greatly as hunters and sealers in the last few centuries, and that the Fishing Lapps no longer enjoy anything like the same prosperity as they did in Ottar’s time, and even as late as the seventeenth century, is easily explained. For on the one hand the game both in the sea and on land has decreased to such an extent that it can no longer support any one, and on the other it is a well-known fact that a people originally of hunters loses its skill in the chase to a considerable extent through closer contact with European civilisation, while at the same time it becomes impoverished. How this comes about may be accurately observed among the Eskimo of Greenland in our time. So long as the Lapps were heathens, as in Peder Claussön Friis’s time, and were still without firearms and, what is perhaps equally important, without fire-water, and not burdened with schooling and book-learning, they retained their old hunting culture and their hereditary skill in sealing and hunting; but with the new culture and its claims, the new objects, demands and temptations of life, their old accomplishments suffered more or less; nor were they any longer held in such high esteem that the Lapp child had to shoot three times running through an auger-hole before he might have his breakfast. And just as the Eskimo of the west coast of Greenland have been obliged to take more and more to fishing and bird-catching, which were looked down upon by the old harpooners, so have our Fishing Lapps become more and more exclusively fishermen.