Ingy the mad Finn
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Feeling just Finn
Feeling just Finn
02/10/2004 02:47 AMI'm off this afternoon to Helsinki for a quick business trip. It
will be my first time in Finland; I'm looking forward to
it. I should be able to check email, but my responses will
probably be slow through the beginning of next week.
The Finn in 1926
The Finn in 1926
08/09/2004 06:31 PM
« A 'typical office building' in 1926 at the corner of
Lönnrotinkatu and Yrjönkatu. State office building, yes, but typical?
It's still there today. »
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. :)
Finn Fined Nearly $217,000 for
Speeding (AP)
Finn Fined Nearly $217,000 for
Speeding (AP)
02/11/2004 11:02 AMAP - Police gave a record $216,900 speeding ticket to a
millionaire under a system in which traffic fines are linked to an
offender's income.
Ainslie clinches Finn gold
Ainslie clinches Finn gold
08/21/2004 08:48 AMBritain's Ben Ainslie wins sailing's Finn class - his second
successive Olympic gold medal.
Finn and Belarussian win sauna contest
(Reuters)
Finn and Belarussian win sauna contest
(Reuters)
08/08/2004 03:43 PMReuters - A Finnish man and a Belarussian
woman have won a competition for sitting in a blisteringly hot
sauna, with both nations keeping the world titles in the bizarre
endurance test.
Finn ordered to pay Alanis Morissette
for Internet bootleg spreading (AFP)
Finn ordered to pay Alanis Morissette
for Internet bootleg spreading (AFP)
02/11/2004 03:01 PMAFP - A Finnish court ordered a 24-year-old man to pay Canadian rock
star Alanis Morissette 7,000 euros (8,965 dollars) for spreading
unauthorized recordings of her concerts on the Internet.
Finn ordered to pay Alanis Morissette
for Internet bootleg spreading
Finn ordered to pay Alanis Morissette
for Internet bootleg spreading
02/11/2004 04:26 PMAFP via Yahoo! Feb 11 2004 7:56PM GMT
Grok Description matches for Ingy the mad Finn
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Ingy the mad Finn
