X . } SUPERS T1TI0N. 1 5 5 



been the first Lapp. Their acquaintance with any sacred 

 history — nay, with Christianity at all — is very limited. It 

 was not until after the thirteenth century that an attempt 

 was made to convert them ; and although Charles the 

 Fourth and Gustavus ordered portions of Scripture to be 

 translated in Lappish, to this very day a great proportion of 

 the race are pagans ; and even the most illuminated 

 amongst them remain slaves to the grossest superstition. 

 When a couple is to be married, if a priest happens to be 

 in the way, they will send for him perhaps out of complai- 

 sance ; but otherwise, the young lady's papa merely strikes a 

 rlmt and steel together, and the ceremony is not less irrevo- 

 cably completed. When they die, a hatchet and a flint and 

 steel are invariably buried with the defunct, in case he should 

 find himself chilly on his long journey — an unnecessary pre- 

 caution, many of the orthodox would consider, on the part 

 of such lax religionists. When they go boar-hunting— the 

 most important business in their lives — it is a sorcerer, with 

 no other defence than his incantations, who marches at the 

 head of the procession. In the internal arrangements of 

 their tents, it is not a room to themselves, but. a door to 

 themselves, that they assign to their womankind ; for woe 

 betide the hunter if a woman has crossed the threshold over 

 which he sallies to the chase ; and for three days after the 

 slaughter of his prey he must live apart from the female 

 portion of his family in order to appease the evil deity 

 whose familiar he is supposed to have destroyed. It would 

 be endless to recount the innumerable occasions upon 

 which the ancient rites of Jumala are still interpolated 

 among the Christian observances they profess to have 

 adopted. 



Their manner of life I had scarcely any opportunities of 

 observing. Our Consul kindly undertook to take us to one 

 of their encampments ; but they flit so often from place to 

 place', it is very difficult to light upon them. Here and 

 there, as we cruised about among the fiords, blue wreaths of 

 smoke rising from some little green nook among the rocks 



