The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

A short analytical sketch of the component parts of the Russian populations will now be given.

The western half of the government of Arkhangel is Lapp, the eastern, Samoeid.

The Russian Lapps are all more or less Christianized. Reindeer and fish are their chief aliments, their habits being migratory.

Except in language, the Samoeid of the Arctic Circle differs but little from the Lapp, and even this difference has lately been shown to be less than was previously supposed. In manners they are somewhat ruder; whilst their Christianity is far more incomplete. Indeed, the old Shamanistic Paganism is their dominant religion. This they share with the Ostiaks, their neighbours on the south. But the most important fact connected with the Samoeids is their distribution and affinities. Along with populations more or less closely allied to them, they originally covered the whole of the vast region of Siberia; a region even at present occupied by them partially, and in detached localities, though the greater part of it is in possession of Mongol, Turk, and Tungusian populations—populations whose primary homes were in Central, rather than Northern Asia, but who have in all cases pressed northwards, and, in some, reached as far as the shores of the Arctic Sea. But as their occupation is incomplete, isolated fragments of the original populations still remain. Some of these are absolutely Samoeid, i.e., belonging to the same division of the same branch of the Ugrian stock. Others belong to different divisions. All, however, agree in speaking a language more akin to each other than to the Turks, Mongols, and Tungusians, by whom they are surrounded or separated.

The particular affinities of the Samoeids are with the Koibal, Kamash, and other tribes of Southern Siberia on the upper part of the Yenesey and on the very frontier of the Chinese empire.

Between these and the Samoeids of Arkhangel the population belongs to the class called Yeneseian. Now the language of the Yeneseians, though less like that of either of the Samoeid branches, than they are to each other, is still Ugrian rather than Turk, Mongol, or Tungusian. The same remark applies to a population as far east as the Kolyma, the Jukahiri. It is more Ugrian than Turk; yet the Yakut Turk of the Lena, rather than any Ugrian tongue, is the language with which it is in geographical contact. Lastly, it should be added that, according to a table of Ermann’s, the language of the Ugrian Ostiaks of the Obi, is more like that of the Kamskadales of Kamskatka than it is to the Turk tongues by which it is most immediately bounded. The inferences from all this are enormous extension and subsequent displacement of the Ugrian family.

The Lapps and Samoeids alone, of all the European populations, have been considered savages. They, too, only have been classed amongst the so-called inferior races. And it is undoubtedly true, that if we look to Europe alone, the line of demarcation which separates them from the Finlander (Ugrian as he is), and a fortiori from the Scandinavian and Slavonian is clear and trenchant. But Europe alone must not be looked to; neither must the Lapp and Samoeid be considered to cover the whole of their original area. Encroachment has taken place from the south, whereby the transitional varieties have become either extinct or amalgamate.

This is what we infer from the broken-up character of the Ugrian area in Siberia, as well as from the fact of the southern Samoeids, the Yeneseians, the Ostiaks, and several other populations being transitional in form and manner to the Ugrian of the Arctic and the Ugrian of the Southern, or Danubian, types.

The true Kwain of Finland, as contrasted with the Lapp, is light-haired, grey-eyed, and well-grown. The admixture of Swedish blood is considerable. A poem, approaching the character of the epic, and, at any rate, national and heroic, favourably represents the early capacity of the Kwain for appreciating song and music; and, in confirmation of the doctrine of a considerable displacement of the more southern members of the Lapp and Samoeid families, its subject is the conquest of Finland by the ancestors of its present occupants. The later civilizational influences are Swedish. So, too, is their Protestant and Lutheran Christianity. A sturdy tenacity of temper, combined with considerable bravery and power of endurance, has fairly been attributed to the Kwains. In Karelia the Swedish elements diminish. In Olonetz the Russian increase.

Of the government of St. Petersburg the original inhabitants were the Kwains of Ingria. In Esthonia the type changes. The population calls itself Rahwas, speaks a language akin to, but different from, the Kwain, a language, too, which from falling in, at least, two well-marked varieties, the Esthonian proper and the Esthonian of Dorpat, presents internal evidence of being no newly introduced form of speech, but, on the contrary, an old and original tongue.