Finlandia [antikvár]

THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE The rigorous climate, the landscape, the alternation of bright nights and days without light have confronted the inhabitants for centuries with what Toynbee would call a singular challenge. It is fascinating to study how these men have accepted the challenge and have responded to it. (Jean Paul Sartre in the Nagel Guide to Finland) Finland has been described as a country situated between west and east but somewhat further north. It lay even further to the north for Tacitus who, in a much quoted passage, muddled up Finns and Lapps. The Swedish Bishop in exile, Olaus Magnus, and other renaissance humanists did not do much either to bring the country any nearer. They did admittedly provide a good deal of information about geography and natural history in their latin texts, but they also told many tall stories adapted to the tastes and superstitions of their period. Even in more recent times romantic travellers have painted a rather exotic picture of the northern countries. One of the first to make a more realistic account of Sweden and Finland available to a larger public was Voltaire in the preface to his book on Charles XII: "The kingdom which is made up of Sweden and Finland is, according to our measurement, about 200 leagues broad and 300 long, and stretches from south to north as far as the 55th degree or thereabouts. The climate is severe; there is scarcely any spring or autumn, but there are nine months of winter in the year, and the heat of summer follows hard upon the excessive cold of winter. Frost from the month of October onwards is continuous, nor are there any of those imperceptible gradations between the seasons which, in other countries, render changes less trying. In compensation Nature has endowed the Swedes with clear sky and pure air. The summer sunshine, which is almost continuous, ripens fruit and flowers very rapidly. The long winter nights are shortened by the twilight evenings and dawns, which last in proportion to the sun's distance from Sweden; and the light of the moon, unveiled by any clouds, and intensified by reflection from the snow-clad ground, and often too, by lights like the Aurora BoreaUs, makes travelling in Sweden as easy by night as by day. "The fauna are smaller than in the more central parts of Europe, on account of the poor pastures. The people are well developed; the purity of the air makes them healthy, and the severity of the climate hardens them. They live to a good old age when they do not undermine their constitutions by the abuse of strong drink, which Northern nations seem to crave the more because they have been denied them by Nature."