Accompanied by my two companions, I retraced my steps through the wild, desolate country, in which none but the most intrepid of sportsmen could find any pleasure. It is a land in which there are neither hotels nor houses; a land which seems to take one back to some remote age of innocence, when simple, honest human beings drove their flocks and herds before them, chanting the while a hymn to the delights of a pastoral life.
What souvenirs, you ask, can one carry away from this strange country, where the reindeer rules supreme, and which, without the presence of that useful animal, would sink into a condition of abject poverty and utter desolation? Appropriately enough, there is nothing but carved reindeer bones. Some are carved in so extraordinarily realistic and expert a fashion that more than one eminent sculptor to whom I have shown them has lifted his hands in admiration.
LAPP ARTISTS AT WORK CARVING REINDEER BONES.
From a Photograph.
Like all true artists worthy the name—like the Japanese, for instance—the Laplander will only reproduce what he sees. Consequently, in nine cases out of ten his carved reindeer bones show only reindeer—reindeer at rest, reindeer jumping, reindeer harnessed to sledges, and reindeer browsing. The thing becomes an absolute obsession. And what realism is displayed by these unconscious artists! What long hours of patient observation are implied by the life-like attitudes they depict, and which might almost have been photographed, so true are they to Nature! One gets the impression, watching the Lapp carver at work, that one is in the presence of an artisan of a bygone age, before rules had been laid down and become stereotyped—an age when each individual worker was guided by his personal inspiration alone.
After all, then, in this strange country, where there is supposed to be “nothing but reindeer,” one may still find among these half-savage people financiers—like Mickel Nilsson Nia—poets, and artists—types which certainly go to show that the Lapps possess some of the attributes of a civilized nation. Music alone is unknown in Lapland, and this may be because the Lapp, with his boundless pride of race, considers he has no need of its chastening and refining influence.
BUYING SOUVENIRS—STRIKING A BARGAIN WITH THE CURIO PEDLARS IS A LONG AND COMPLICATED BUSINESS.
From a Photograph.