The Finn in 1926

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It's always dangerous to pay a visit to the Hagelstamin Antikvaarinen Kirjakauppa [nice old used bookstore] because it's easy, too easy, to find something of interest. The lastest find is Finland To-day by Frank Fox printed in 1926. I've got a small collection of English travelogues and other writings about Finland but this is the earliest I've found so far. I can't find anything about the author from the non-existent colophon or from the net, but he was likely a post-Imperial Englishman who smoked a pipe and embraced all the things we commonly think of when we imagine such people. His preface is, however, rather amusing and says more about him than about his subject.

The Finns -- what is the key to an understanding of this race, with so much stubborn courage and yet so much cautious prudence; so fertile in imagination and yet with such a gift for methodical organization; so strong in race pride and yet able to come from out a long period of subjection to a foreign power with no painful record of revolts and martyrdoms?

I have sought that key by a visit to their country and by a study of their history and their art and literature, and can offer to my readers perhaps some clues, certainly not a clear explanation, of a people who remain still to me enigmatic. How can one explain a people who suggest at one time the Japanese, at another the Irish, at another the Scots, at another the Americans, at another the citizens of one of the little states of ancient Greece? Certainly they cannot be classified. They are their own genus.

It will be worth while for students of mankind to keep an eye on these Finns (not four millions in number if one leaves out of the count emigrants) who have already made a small mark in the world and who are destined to make a much greater mark. Fate has placed them athwart Russia, whose development from Bolshevism will give the chief interest to the future history of the twentieth century; and this outpost position will keep Finland prominent on the world's stage. By character they are eager to try out all those problems of post-war civilization which have to do with the reconciliation of democracy with authority, of capitalism with the rights of labour, of art with mechanical industry, of woman's claim to civic equality with the institution of the family. Both in issues of foreign politics and social polities, therefore, the world is likely to hear a great deal of Finland in the future.

But I wish to emphasize that this book does not pretend to offer more than a traveller's impressions of the Finns and Finland. Statements in it of historical or economic fact are, to the best of my knowledge, accurate. The rest -- criticisms, opinions, surmises-are those of an observer who does not speak the Finnish tongue and had to rely much upon interpreters and Finns who spoke English. Fortunately English is very generally spoken by educated Finns; with others, interpreters helped. To know what "the others"-i.e. the people of merely elementary education-thought was, to my mind, essential.

On which point, a memory from another land. I was seeking once to know what the Arabs in a Near East territory were thinking and saying on a certain subject. An excellent interpreter helped me to get the views of many notables-priests, merchants, officials, journalists. But he made a meek protest when I sought his aid to get bazaar gossip at first hand. It was in the days before Angora had made the wearing of a bowler hat a test of sound nationalism, and every good Moslem wore the fex. The fez, like the silk hat which used to be a badge of British respectability, needs frequent ironing to keep it shaped and comely. The little shops where the fez is ironed are the great gossip centres of the East. My interpreter objected to my plan of haunting these places whilst he translated to me what was said.

"These people are of no importance at all," he pleaded. "They will say nothing valuable."

Nevertheless we listened to the gossip, and there were good gleanings: valuable evidence to check and to explain the statement of more responsible people.

When I first read the paragraph insinuating that most educated Finns spoke English and 'the others' were merely less educated, I had to check the date of publication just to make sure it wasn't written far more recently. Outside of the major cities, even now, you can't expect people to speak English. Perhaps he just hung around at the British embassy having tea and cakes while chatting up the Finnish Anglophiles. At the time, Finland had only recently asserted its independence and, as far as I'm aware, the languages taught in schools were Finnish, Swedish and German with English replacing the German much later. The author's little anecdote about the fez is also pretty funny as it conjures the image of some stuffy old fart in a smoking jacket and fez reclining in his library lined with books and glassy-eyed taxidermy waxing poetic about that last safari he took 20 years prior. Overall, though, his observations about the people and the political stage at the time seem rather prescient.

If he was looking for gossip with the lowly little people of Finland who didn't speak English, he sure as hell wasn't eating with them judging by his description of Finnish food experienced under what he calls "natural conditions."

[breakfast] It begins with the usual "continental" breakfast of coffee and rolls (no alcoholic drink is taken with this!), which discovers some new and delightful forms of bread. There is knackerbrod, for instance, made of rye, unleavened I should say, and, when properly crisp, of delightful taste. There is clean strength in it, too, far more than in the starchy white bread of Britain and of France. One could live a week on knackerbrod and butter and do a hard day's work all the while.

Lunch comes fairly early in the day and is generally the principal meal. It offers a variety of about thirty different snacks and trifles, such as little potatoes, cooked in their jackets and served to be eaten whole with plenty of butter, pepper, and salt; omelette and egg dishes; cheese with knackerbrod; sardines, lake trout, and half a dozen other varieties of fish; caviare; reindeer tongue, hard and smoked; a kind of reindeer biltong; various other dried and preserved meats; and various salads of cooked or of raw vegetables-radishes, onions, celery, cabbage, cauliflower, etc. You choose about half a dozen of these "appetizers," consume them, and then try another half-dozen. A good Finnish appetite is able to encompass about twenty in all. Those who have lived in Russia will recognize that in this one particular at least, of making the little preliminaries the most important part of the midday meal, Finland follows Russian customs. There comes next one of a variety of set dishes-of meat, eggs, or of fish-and then coffee.

I've looked around a bit, but I've not found anything to support the idea that Finnish dining habits were of Russian fashion. The meal sounds like a typical buffet but, at the time, it likely was out of reach for most of the inhabitants of Finland given the post-WWI economy. It's funny how he whines a wee bit over no booze with breakfast since Finland was still enduring a brief and misguided bout of prohibitionism [he goes on at great length in the prohibition chapter on this topic where he descends into a non-sensical analogy of women's lust for draperies and lust for the demon drink]. But, considering I had a grandmother who boiled hamburger, the British were not a people in a position to critique the cuisine of other countries. :) The most fun comes when he tries to describe sauna to the British travelling class;

The tourist will be interested to sample the Finnish national bath. On this point a word of caution. In the capital and in the big towns the chief bath establishments are very good, but they follow the Swedish and not the Finnish mode. You are steamed in a cabinet, rubbed down by vigorous masseuses, put in a hot bath and rubbed down again; then have a cold douche bath. But a Finnish bath-house can be found on inquiry in every big centre, and in the country districts it is the only type of bath-house. Every village, every large farmhouse has one. The typical farm bath-house is a little log building, with no opening save the door. Inside is a rough heap of big stones, so placed that they leave a space beneath for burning wood. A fire is kept alight for some hours to make the stones very hot. Trunks of trees are arranged round the room, providing two or three tiers of rough seats. When the stones are very hot a big pail of water and some thin birch twigs (with the leaves on if possible) are brought in. then enter the bathers, and to give a Finn's own explanation:

"We close the door as we enter, and sit down on seats. Then one of us ladles out water on to the hot stones, and with a great deal of hisssing it turns into steam. We sit on the lowest seat till we get used to the heat, and then, as soon as we can stand it, mount up higher, getting into a great sweat. With the twigs we beat each other to stir up the circulation. Then we go out and roll over two or three times in the snow or plunge into a cold stream."

That is the national bath. You may enjoy it in the towns (with the exception of a roll in a snowdrift!) if you take care to enquire where the Finnish bath-house is.

You think he might have been hanging out with the Swedes of Helsinki for the majority of his time in Finland? Granted, the Finnish sauna, the word he curiously managed to avoid, doesn't have blonde babes named Ingrid giving you an envigorating rubdown, but the roll in the snow/ice cold shower really isn't all that bad. I mean, if you're going to go sweat naked with a bunch of peasants and beat each other with sticks, what's a roll in the snow going to hurt, huh? The chances of the British aristocracy, presumeably the intended audience of this book, taking a sauna out in the Finnish boonies with the locals is so remote as to be curious as to why he bothered to include it.

Overall, though, if you can ignore his using "The Finn" in every other sentence, his aristocratic gloss and pomposity and curious biases, it's reasonably accurate and insightful for the time it was written. Finland To-day is 182 pages long and has an intact fold-out map of Finland before the loss of Karelia and other parts after WWII. The table of contents list quite an interesting selection of chapter topics; "Where the Finns come from", "Finland, A Grand Duchy", "The Finn in His Capitol", "The Finn as Farmer", "The Finn as Forester", "The Finn as Manufacturer", "Art in Finland', "How Finland is Goverened", "Finland's Foreign Policy and Defence System", "Finland's Social Conditions", "Prohibition in Finland", "Finland's Financial and Economic System", and "Finland for the Tourist." It seems like a rather wide mix of topics given that it's a travel book for the British aristocracy with details on the best routes to Finland from England. Fortunately, Finland already had their own flag. :)