218 BUSSIA IN EUROPE. 



more civilised than are now the Ugrian tribes of East Russia and Siberia. They 

 lived chiefly on the chase and fishing, possessing no more than a rudimentary 

 knowledge of agriculture, and unacquainted even with the art of preparing butter 

 and cheese from the milk of their own flocks. Their religion, analogous to that of 

 the Lapps and Samoyeds, seems to have been a sort of fetishism mingled with the 

 shamanist practices of the Mongolians. They relied more on the virtue of spells 

 than the sword, and the poetic fancy inspired by their lonely solitudes was still 

 further stimulated by an excessive nervous sensitiveness, easily rising to ecstasy. 

 The Tavastians have little poetic genius, and are seldom heard to sing, whereas, 

 besides their religious incantations, the Karelians possess a store of national song, 

 transmitted orally from age to age, and now embodied in the national epic known 

 as the Kakrala, or " Land of Kaleva," the giant god. Some of these songs were 

 revealed by Schroter and Topelius, but they were first collected in one body of 

 poetry by Elias Lonnrot in 1835, and later on translated into Swedish by Castrèn. 

 The second edition of 1849, double the size of the first, consists of five runof, or 

 cantos, making altogether 22,800 lines, all except the fiftieth dating from pagan 

 times. The poetic language of the Finns is remarkably soft, harmonious, and rich, 

 Lonnrot's dictionary contains -no less than 200,000 words, including derivations. 



" Turanian " in speech, and probably also in origin, the Finns yield in no respect 

 to their neighbours, and their ambition is to take their place as equals amongst the 

 European peoples. They are on the whole certainly more active, thrifty, and especially 

 more honest than the surrounding races, and Russian writers praise their endurance, 

 probity, and self-respect. Their good qualities may be partly ascribed to the 

 relative degree of freedom they have long enjoyed. During the Swedish rule they 

 shared in all civil and political rights, and most of the peasantry retained possession 

 of the soil. At present nearly all can read and write, but the passion for drink 

 has kept many, especially in the north, still in a barbarous state. Distress is also 

 chronic in several districts, and famine has often decimated the land. When cold 

 and wet summers prevent the crops from ripening before the autumn frosts, want 

 follows inevitably amongst the rural classes. Then they are often reduced to eat 

 straw, or the bark of trees, mixing corn flour with " mountain flour," a sort of 

 meal composed of dried infusoria gathered on the beds of old lakes. In 1868 

 one-fourth of the people in some districts perished of hunger, and the deaths were 

 three times in excess of the births throughout the land. 



The blind are more numerous in Finland than in any other European country 

 except Iceland. There were 4,000 stone blind in 1873, besides over 4,000 partially 

 so. This is ascribed in part to their smoky huts, vapour baths, and stoves used in 

 heating the places where they dry and thresh their corn. 



A portion of the country is exclusively occupied by the descendants of the old 

 Swedish invaders, whom the Finns call Ruotsalaiset. The Aland Islands have been 

 entirely Swedish since the twelfth century, and the Swedish colonisation of the 

 mainland began in the middle of the next century, after the conquests of Birger 

 Jarl. The Swedes now occupy besides some of the Abo Islands, the coast lands 

 south of Gamla Karleby, and a strip 18 miles long west of the village of 



