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<P align="justify"> Theories of Orig … <P align="justify"> Theories of Origin (pre-scientific). Before critical history became established as a discipline, the Saami identity was studied particularly from:
# a Biblical perspective in an attempt to show that the Saami were the descendants of the Hebrews;
# the perspective of Scandinavian myths and sagas; and
# that of the Kalevala, the Finnish national myth. </P>
<P align="justify"> 1) In the second half of the seventeenth century, Johannes Tornaeus, the informant of Johannes [[Schefferus, Johannes|Schefferus]], the author of Lapponia (1673), linked the Saami to the Biblical name of Javan, who was the son of Noah s son Japheth and the brother of Magog (Gen. 10:2 4). Admittedly at that time it was generally thought that all the peoples of Europe were descended from Noah s gandson, Magog. This race was supposed to have left Palestine on its own after the confusion of language in the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1 9) and ended up in Lapland. </P>
<P align="justify"> A little later, Olof → Rudbeck the Younger (1660 1740), thought that the Finnic peoples were the ten lost tribes of Israel, which Shalmaneser, the Great King of Assyria, abducted into exile (cf. 2 Kings 17:1 6). This interpretation is based on the pseudepigraphical IV Esdras (13:39 45), which was not admitted to the Old Testament canon of scripture, and which is in fact of fairly late provenance, from the second century A.D. It contained the following text written in the name of Esdras (Ezra): These are the ten tribes which Shalmaneser, the Great King of Assyria, abducted into exile in the reign of King Hoshea. He took them over the river into another land. But together they conspired to leave the whole profusion of peoples and move to some remote land where nobody had lived before; this they did, so that they could live there according to the rules they had inherited from their forefathers . Thus they set off along the narrow bed of the Euphrates . It was a long journey to that land, and it lasted a year and a half.</P>
<P align="justify"> According to Rudbeck, this journey from Mesopotamia northwest along the Euphrates eventually led them to Lapland. To lend support to his theory, Rudbeck tried to find connections between the Saami language and Hebrew, and he compiled a list of words, Fasciculus vocum lapo-hebraicarum, which contains hundreds of ingenious word pairings. It was probably due to him that it was still seriously claimed at the end of the eighteenth century that Hebrew and Finnish/Saami were related languages, as Tuneld did in the sixth edition of his History of Sweden in 1792. However, the seventh edition, which came out in 1795, no longer contained any mention of a Hebrew origin. Generally speaking, when the concept of a Finno-Ugric relationship began to become established, speculation about a relationship between the Saami and the peoples of the classical and biblical world became obsolete.</P><P align="justify"> 2) In the 1820s, Professor Erik Gustav Geijer (1783 1847), a leading member of the Romantic movement in Sweden, proposed that the Lapps (as he called them) were the autochthonous people of Scandinavia. Admittedly, this claim had already been put forward on the basis of linguistic arguments by the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1695. Geijer initially linked the Saami to a giant people called the Jotuns (→ Dvergs and Jotuns), whom invading Scandinavian tribes (Geats and Sveas) swept out of their way. The Geats pushed them up to the north, where Jotunheim was their last stronghold. Then the Sveas pushed them even further, and their last land was far up in Bjarmland on the shores of the White Sea. The problem with the theory was that the Jotuns were giants and even at the time it seemed unnatural to associate them with the rather stocky Saami. So in 1832, Geijer wrote that instead of the Jotuns he now considered the mythical Dvergs (dwarfs) to be the real ancestors of the Saami. According to him, the Jotuns were something quite different; they belonged to the taller Finno-Ugric race. In Finland, this association of the Saami with the Dvergs was supported by Yrjö Koskinen (1830-1903) among others.</P><P align="justify"> 3) In Finland during the nineteenth century scholars began to support a theory according to which the Finns and the Saami arrived in Finland at fairly late stage, around the beginning of the modern era, or in the first few centuries thereafter. This meant renouncing the idea of the Saami as the autochthonous inhabitants of Fennoscandia. The theory assumed that the Saami arrived as the vanguard of the Finnic peoples. This idea corresponded very well with the historical interpretation of the Kalevala epic, which regarded Pohjola (the North) as the land of the Saami.</P><P align="justify"> In 1832, Gabriel Rein had suggested that Väinämöinen, the hero of the Kalevala, was a real character, an important leader of the Finnish people, who had lived when the invading Finns fought against the Lapps, the earlier settlers of Finland. Elias Lönnrot, who compiled Finnish myths into the Kalevala epic, himself accepted the historical interpretation of the Kalevala, but he did not regard Pohjola as the land of the Saami. According to him, Pohjola was inhabited by some other group of Finns . Nevertheless, Rein s interpretation began a tradition that persisted for quite a long time. For example, according to A. A. Ahlqvist, The Kalevala took its subject from the dispute that existed between the Lapps and the Karelians, and the cause of which was the either believed or imagined wealth of the former, which the latter desired to seize. Later, Julius and Karle Krohn and Jalmari Jaakkola held more or less the same view; they believed that the events of the Kalevala described the migration of the Pirkka people into northern Finland and their earlier incursions among the Lapps as they plundered and levied taxes on them. </P>
<P align="justify"> Even today, scholars see in the confrontation described by the Kalevala possible reflections of the disputes between the new slash-and-burn farming economy of the Finns and the old hunting economy of the indigenous Saami, but they emphasize above all the mythical associations of Pohjola, and particularly on its being the land of the dead.</P> its being the land of the dead.</P> +
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