Land of the Midnight Sun Turi's Book of Lappland. Edited
and translated into Danish by Emilie Dimant Hatt. Translated from the Danish by E. Gee Nash. (Jonathan Cape.. 7s. 6c1,) NORTHWARD some two thousand miles from Stockholm, some two hundred from where the arctic circle cuts across Sweden,
beyond the borders of Jamtland, beyond the big mining towns of Kiruna and Gellivare, beyond even the Great Akka moun- tains of Lappland, is the Lake of Tornetriisk. Many miles long, it lies at the foot of the Abisko Alps and reflects, in its quiet depths, the varied colours of the northern sky. At midsummer,- when for weeks the sun never sinks below the level of the mountains, the lake is a changing mirror of beauty ; and at midnight, when the snow-capped peaks turn faintly gold, it presents a sight which, once seen, is not quickly or easily forgotten.
In such a country, and on the high fells which stretch between here and the Norwegian coast, Johan Turi, author of this book, has lived for more than three-quarters of a century the nomad life of his people. Seventy-seven or seventy-eight years of age, he was as hide when a friend of mine visited him last summer as on the day, early in 1910, when he finished his remarkable work. That twenty years should have elapsed before the appearance of an English translation may strike some as curious, and certainly it would seem to be a sad reflection on the enterprise of English publishers. Be that as it may, the book is here finally, and those who are wise enough to read it are not likely to be anything but grateful for its appearance at last.
In England, I have found, many people are strangely ignorant of the Lapps and of the country in which they live.
It is supposed, very frequently, that the Lapp is a kind of Eskimo, living a precarious existence on the ice-floes of the arctic, nourished by tallow candles and dressed all the year round in a species of elaborate fur coat. That, of course,
is very far from the truth. Precarious enough his existence certainly is, but not for fear of icebergs and seldom for want
of nourishment. The Lapp is a mainland dweller and his home is anywhere from Finland to the North Cape. Roughly speaking, it covers the whole of the northern extremity of the Scandinavian Peninsula. In these parts Lapps have lived from 'the remotest times, and to this day retain many of their primitive manners, customs and beliefs. Of these, curious and fascinating examples are to be found in Turi's book. How exactly the Lapps first came to occupy this territory is largely conjectural. Turi himself says, " no one has ever heard that the Lapps came to this Land from any other place." But the modern ethnologist, no doubt, would talk learnedly of trans-Siberian invasion, for the Lapp is still markedly Mongol in type, from the almond shape of his eyes to. the curled up tips of his shoes.
Turi, however, is not concerned with ethnology, of which he has never heard, but with the story of the Lapp peoples as they were just before the War. And the first thing which strikes the casual reader, or the casual visitor to Lappland, is the complete dependence of the Lapp community upon the reindeer.
What money is to other inhabitants of the globe, the-reindeer, more directly, is to the Lapp. To him it represents at once meat, drink, wealth and currency. Everything that the Lapp does is centred round or connected with the reindeer.
Butter and cheese are made from the milk ; clothes, tents, harness, shoes, &c., from the hide ; implements and utensils of all kinds from horn and bone.. When a Lapp is married, presents of reindeer are exchanged. When he grows rich his wealth is estimated by the size of his herds ; and when he dies, his 'sons succeed him in their ownership. In addition, the reindeer constitutes the Lapp's sole means of transport. Harnessed to sledges or laden as pack-animals, they bear their master's goods, his tents and his children, across wastes of snow-covered ground, through swollen rivers, over almost impassable mountains. Small wonder that the Lapp, lacking any other means of support, is brought up from the cradle to understand the care and protection of these animals.
And let no one imagine that this is an easy matter. Some- thing of the immense difficulty and hardship involved in raising and keeping a herd of reindeer is to be found in Turi's pages ; but more—much more—must be supplied from the reader's imagination. For Turi is a Lapp, and to be a Lapp is to be accustomed to hardships of every kind. The Lapp is brought up to spend long nights out in the open, with the temperature many degrees below zero, watching restless herds of deer, bringing stray animals back to the main body, frightening away wolves, wolverines and other beasts of prey. He is used to being out in all weathers, in blizzards and storms, and to travelling long distances over difficult ground when the reindeer migrate. He learns by hard experience how to track lost or wandering animals, how to combat disease, and how to, find fresh pasture when an area is exhausted or the cons dition of the snow makes it impossible for the animals to feed: Of all these things Turi writes easily and naturally, with the detachment of one who has come to accept them as inevitable. Yet if anyone feels disposed to doubt the dangers and difficulties of such a life, let him read Turi's account of a wolf-hunt on skis. Here is a typical extract : " When you are on skis you kill a wolf like this. You ski after it when the snow is deep . . . and when you have caught him up. you hit him with the ski-staff on the head, or on the neck under the ear, or over the root of the tail, or on the nose, just on the black nose-tip, which is very tender ; in other places he will not feel anything however hard you hit. But the man must be quick, one who does not lose his staff or his skis, a wolf is very quick at snapping at the staff with his mouth, and he snaps at the skis too, and shakes them till the man falls off them, and when the man falls out of his skis, then the wolf leaps upon him, and bites him, wherever -he can get at him. . . . There is a special art—when the wolf seizes hold of a man's arm, the man must thrust his hand into the wolf's jaws, right down his throat, and then squeeze the lowest part of his- gullet, and then the wolf cannot bite, and with the other hand the man must strike with his knife, and then there is no danger."
Many other passages might be added to illustrate the extraordinary charm and fascination of this book, but it is better and fairer that the reader should go to Turi and discover them for himself. There he will find stories of every phase of Lapp life ; of childhood, marriage and burial rites ; of hunting, trapping and fishing ; of " joiking " and the art of Lapp doctoring. This last he will find strangely compounded of common sense and superstition, for the Lapps are still strongly superstitious, and attribute many things to the activities of Uldas, Stallos and other quasi-historical, quasi supernatural beings. But it is not, in the end, for its informai- tion, its stories, or its contribution to primitive mythology that Turi's book is to be valued. It is to be valued for what it is an absolutely undoctored account of Lapp life, written with a combination of simplicity and childlike naivete which is com- pletely captivating. It is to be valued, in fact, just because it is Tun's Book. To read him is to come in contact with a mind innocent alike of subtlety and sophistication, a mind still puzzled by the difficulties of the written word, but bright with the clear integrity which comes from long and intimate acquaintance with Nature. There cannot be many books of whose authors just this, and only this, need be said.
1. M. PARSONS. •
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