The Birth of the Finn-Devil – The Appearance of an Ethnic Stereotype

 

Studies concerning later migration from Finland to Sweden, especially during the twentieth century, have often been carried out by interviewing emigrants and their family members. It can be argued on the basis of these immigrant biographies and accounts personal experiences that most, probably all, Finns living in Sweden are fully aware that there exists a pejorative term with which every Finn can be described by members of the Swedish majority. The word in question is finnjävel. Especially during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s this word appeared in Swedish newspapers, when the media reported immigrants’ social problems and criminality. Finnjävel has also served as a title, when a novel written by a Sweden Finn was translated into Swedish in the early 1970’s.

It remains to be studied when the term finnjävel actually became a part of the Swedish vocabulary. Most dictionaries omit it, and this holds true even for the most notable of all Swedish dictionaries, Svenska akademiens ordbok, in also etymologies are usually clarified. However, the term can be found among the reference material in the SAOB archives, even though in only two excerpts, of which the first one was a text published not earlier than 1910 and the latter one was from a newspaper story published in 1970. One Swedish-Finnish dictionary gives a definition in Finnish: pirun tai perkeleen suomalainen, which can be translated as “damned Finn” or “bloody Finn”. In the original form of the word, finndjävel, as well as in its more archaic orthographic variants the reference to the devil (diævulen and djävulen in medieval and modern Swedish respectively) was more clearly perceptible, since the word literally means “Finn-devil”.

As a Finn acquainted with several aspects of Swedish culture I have, of course, an idea of the concept of finnjävel, but do my personal perceptions have any general validity? As a historian I am used to operate with literal material. Despite the fact that the finnjävel belongs clearly more to the spoken than the written language, a quick analysis can be based on the Internet, since this medium is relatively freely accessible and most likely reflects the sentiments at the grassroots level better than the traditional printed or electronic media. The leading (?) search engine Google gives currently (26^th September, 2004) approximately 1170 hits for the word finnjävel and its inflected forms (including the older variant finndjävel). The feminine equivalent finnjävla gives only 2 hits. Of course, while analysing these results one must bear in mind that not even the Internet can cover all semantic fields of any single word nor it is a completely free medium – most server owners probably follow the norms concerning the restrictions on permissible speech. The results can also be distorted because of the fact that not even the best search engines cover all existing web pages.

The Google hits prove that a typical finnjävel seems to be a Finnish man who drinks too much alcohol, behaves badly and is ready to attack any person with his knife – in short: finnjävel seems to stand for (almost) everything that the image of the cultivated Swede is not. However, only very seldom, can the purpose of using the word on the Internet be defined as openly racist. In most Internet hits the word is mentioned in a relatively neutral context (e.g. in a discussion on Swedish ethnic invectives or while reporting lesser pleasant experiences of the Finnish immigrants). Clearly the term is often furnished with negative connotations in these cases, too, but the context in which it is used can be described as impartial. Sometimes finnjävel can even have a positive content: for instance, Finnish ice hockey players can be spoken of as finnjävlar (plural), but this is done in a playful manner. In a similar fashion, a Finnish immigrant can describe himself as a “proud finnjävel”. These examples originate from articles published in online versions of the Swedish afternoon papers. These cases can be compared to what I heard from a Swedish colleague of mine: according to her, a family friend of hers is called finnjävel because of his Finnish origin, but in a completely humorous and benevolent manner. Nevertheless, the use of the term finnjävel in negative contexts – at least in the spoken language – is probably far more common than this brief analysis and the playful tones seem to indicate.

Since I am not a sociologist, my aim is not to go further into this topic in the context of modern Swedish society. Instead I am focusing on the distant past, when Finland was a part of the Kingdom of Sweden, and I will discuss why and how the negative image of finnjävel came into being. I am not able to specify when exactly the word finn(d)jävel did appear in the Swedish language, but I am going to begin my analysis with what probably is the first known literal description of a “Finn-devil”. This description, albeit fictitious, has been ignored by the earlier studies on Finnish migration to Sweden, although it casts light upon stereotypes concerning early Finnish immigrants. I will limit my analysis to a period between the start of the incorporation of the Finnish peninsula into the Swedish realm and the publication of the abovementioned writing, i.e. c. 1150–1650.

In 1647, at the latest, an interesting piece of literature entitled Alle Bedlegrannas Spegel (“The Mirror of All Picky Ones”) came out in Sweden. It is a work of drama written in doggerel verse by an anonymous author and it focuses on a young and proud maiden who refuses one suitor after another until she quite unexplainably accepts the proposal of the tenth one, a Finnish man who is characterised simply as “a Finn” (en Finne). The nine earlier suitors have all been honest men, but the Finn is described as a cruel and violent brute. He even speaks some kind of pidgin language mixing Finnish and badly pronounced Swedish with each other and that is why the earlier studies of the drama have concentrated on its linguistic aspects. It is apparent that the antihero of the story was meant to be a personification of already existing negative attitudes towards Finns: the Finn abuses his wife verbally and finally stabs her to death with his knife. In his last lines he tells the readers that the executioner will not be able to catch him, since he is going to flee back to Finland: “So do the other Finns, too, when they have misbehaved in Sweden; they move quickly to Finland. Who will find them then? So have they done earlier and so do they still today.”

However, despite these apparent ethnic prejudices the key message in Alle Bedlegrannas Spegel was not directed against the Finns; instead, the purpose of the story was to mock “too picky” young women by means of a warning tale. It is nevertheless revealing that a Finnish man was presented as the worst alternative a Swedish woman could choose. The anonymous writer belonged most probably to the somewhat educated circles, and that is why it can be argued that at least among these circles the Finnish immigrants could be looked at with negative sentiments.

While reading Alle Bedlegrannas Spegel, one must bear in mind that the main parts of the areas that the present-day Republic of Finland consists of belonged to the Kingdom of Sweden during the time when the story was published for the first time. When Alle Bedlegrannas Spegel was published almost five centuries had passed since the first “crusade” from Sweden to the Finnish peninsula. This partly mythical event, which took place around 1155, is regarded as the starting point for the history of Finns in the Swedish realm – a history which lasted till 1809. We do not know how the “crusaders” experienced the population that awaited them on the Finnish peninsula, but several scholars of antiquity and the early medieval West had characterised early Finns in a way partly similar to what we have just found in Alle Bedlegrannas Spegel: authors beginning with Tacitus had seen Finns as uncultivated barbarians or animal-like creatures. Although it has been proved that some of the descriptions concerning Finni, Fenni and so on, in fact, referred to the nomadic Sami people, early medieval Finns had clearly been seen as non-humans, or at least aliens living outside the civilised world.

But perceptions of this kind were hardly based on close interaction between Finns and other ethnic groups. Instead, they can be explained by the geographic remoteness of the Finnish peninsula and the fact that Finns had not come into close contact with the areas touched by advanced civilisation and Christianity. Descriptions of other peripheral peoples were very similar to those ones concerning Finns.  The cruel and untrustworthy character of the Finns was complained of in three bulls issued by popes in the thirteenth century, as the Christianisation of the Finnish peninsula posed problems for the Catholic Church. Descriptions of cruelty were apparently felt necessary as motivations for “crusades” and it has been proved that the popes could use exactly the same formulations while bemoaning the wickedness of other heathen nations, too.

While worshipping the two leaders of the first “crusade”, King Erik and Bishop Henrik, the Swedish Church (the Finnish bishopric included) maintained a tradition according to which the pre-Christianised Finns had been wild heathens who had caused harm to their neighbours. The tradition was carried on in late medieval aristocratic literature written in Swedish – apparently in order to glorify the past of the nobility. The heathen and wild past of the Finns was even expressed in visual form by the Finnish bishopric: one of the engravings on Saint Henrik’s sarcophagus, a fifteenth century product of Christian art commissioned by of the bishop of Turku (Sw. Åbo), shows more or less anachronistically armed Finns and Swedes fighting against each other during the first crusade.

The heathen past was not necessarily felt as a burden in late medieval or early modern Swedish society – Swedes, too, had originally been heathens and plundered other nations. At least in a non-theological context the heathen background did not necessarily play any significant role at all in the late medieval word: the heathens, even Muslims against whom the medieval West had fought for centuries, could be seen to share the same ethical and moral values as the Christians. Despite the public memory of the former or alleged conflicts between Swedes and Finns there is no information on any kind of large-scale bloodshed between the Finns and the Swedes after the period of the “crusades”. Nevertheless, there occurred nevertheless peasant resistance and even uprisings against the authorities in Finland, but the case was similar in the Swedish part of the realm. The uprisings seem to have been directed against tax assessments, local officials or wealthy landowners, not against being a part of the Kingdom of Sweden.

The outcome of the incorporation of Finland into Sweden was curious – even more curious than has been admitted in Swedish or Finnish history books. Usually ethnic groups conquered by their neighbours were treated as somewhat inferior to the conquering nation: for instance, the peoples subjugated by the Romans or the Irish conquered by the English were treated according to separate judicial norms. However, the Finns received, despite their completely different language, their partly different culture and their more recent conversion to Christianity, a judicial status equal to the Swedes through the legislation enacted by the Crown during the fourteenth century. The earliest written laws of the Kingdom of Sweden, the provincial laws (landskapslagarna) from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did contain certain ethnocentric features, as they regarded the legal status of a foreigner coming from outside the realm as somewhat inferior. But concerning the ethnic groups living within the Swedish realm the social hierarchies were in the later Middle Ages officially based on other factors than language or geographical background: family background, economic capacity, personal reputation, age and sex weighed most when a person’s judicial rights were defined according to the norm system. Thus the Finns had officially the same rights and the same obligations towards the Crown as the Swedish majority. Even documents telling of how the normative legislation was applied in practice bear witness to the equal status of the Finns in relation to the Swedes.

While treating Finns in a similar fashion as Swedes, the Swedish legislation spoke surprisingly little of the Finns as an ethnic group – in fact, its existence was never directly mentioned in the juridical texts during the Middle Ages. Instead, the term “Swede” (svensk) covered also the Finns. In the law texts Finland and Finnish provinces were mentioned seldom and only as geographic locations. The pattern is very similar in the chronicle works that reflect the world view of the late medieval Swedish aristocracy: they, too, mention Finns (or other tribes speaking some dialect of Finnish), but these are mentioned very seldom compared to Swedish-speaking tribes. The reason for this evident ethnic silence in the laws and the aristocratic literature is a complex one: it can probably reflect some kind of mental unwillingness of the Swedish Crown and the Swedish aristocracy to recognise in public the ethnically heterogeneous nature of the realm. But during the medieval period the silence can also be explained by the abovementioned dubious repute of the uncultivated Finns within Western European society – that is probably why the kings of Sweden never assumed the title “King of the Finns” or “King of Finland”, although they always were, among other things, kings of the svear and the götar. The Duchy of Finland had been only a temporary creation in the High Middle Ages and it was most certainly completely forgotten when King Gustav Vasa re-invented it in 1556 and gave it to his second oldest son, Johan. By then the patriotic scholarly tradition concerning the past of the Swedish realm had already “found out” that Finland indeed had been a mighty kingdom before the Swedish rule.

The works written within the learned Swedish-speaking circles during the sixteenth century show that at least two scholars, Peder Månsson and Olaus Magnus, did see the Finns as a distinct ethnic group and were ready to admit its existence. Peder Månsson presented Finns as an important resource due to their greater fertility and proposed that the Finns should be allowed to cultivate estates that had become uninhabited in the Swedish part of the realm during the Black Death. Olaus Magnus shared this view and gave lengthy descriptions of the Finns’ ethnic characteristics – mostly in a positive light. Of course, the purpose of Olaus Magnus’s Historia de septentrionalibus gentibus, which was published in Rome in 1555, was to make the Southern European audience aware of how large areas in the North had by then been lost to Protestantism, and that is why it is understandable that he did not pay too much attention to the negative qualities of any nation living in the North. However, Olaus Magnus did mention the widespread belief that Finns could control winds by means of ropes with “charmed” knots – the Finns used to sell those ropes to foreign merchants visiting their harbours. This belief bears witness on how the Finns living in a peripheral corner of Europe were in the beginning of the Early Modern Era physically integrated into Western European civilisation, but simultaneously mentally alienated in the eyes of the “more civilised” peoples.

The incorporation of the Finnish peninsula into the Swedish realm was secured by Swedish migration to the western and southern coasts of Finland. Migration in the opposite direction also occurred. It is not known when the first immigrants from Finland arrived in Swedish villages and towns, but it has been argued on the basis of archaeological evidence that persons of Finnish origin dwelled in Sweden even before the period of the “crusades”. However, the earliest literal sources on Finnish immigrants date from the fourteenth century. We do not know how big the percentage of newcomers who spoke Finnish as their mother tongue was – among the immigrants from Finland were most certainly also persons who were descendants of earlier Swedish settlers in Finland.

On the grassroots level the local population seems to have been fully aware of the cultural differences. Although the Finns were officially Swedes – at least from the point of view of the political elites, the writings composed within local communities, especially in towns, sometimes characterise Finnish immigrants in a way comparable to the usual characterisations of foreigners coming from abroad. The principles, according to which individuals were mentioned by the scribes who were responsible for composing the official records and other documents issued by the urban administration, reflected contemporary social hierarchies. Thus the members of the upper classes were likely to appear with their complete names and titles, whereas persons of lesser groups could be characterised with only their names, nicknames or occupational titles without names. The Swedish sources such as the minutes of the town councils and other official records and protocols show that persons of foreign origin could be spoken of completely anonymously, i.e. without their names or any other social indicators than words characterising their ethnic or geographic origin. The same patterns were applied to characterisations of Finnish individuals – they, too, could be spoken of without their names or any other social indicator than the word describing their linguistic or geographic origin. Thus, they could remain plainly as anonymous Finns in official records. Although this was rare, it is interesting to note that similar patterns of social anonymity can be found in Alle Bedlegrannas Spegel, where the earlier nine suitors appear with their occupational titles (ranging socially from a servant to a priest and a prosperous merchant), whereas the brutal Finn is characterised plainly as a “Finn”.   

In urban court records from the 15^th–17^th centuries Finland could be characterised as the fatherland (fädernesland) of the Finns, but contrary to the patriotic rhetoric of the elites, here the term did not have any connotations of any political or ethnic unity. Moreover, while speaking of Finns in relation to other persons of Finnish origin, the persons in question could be characterised as compatriots (landsmän) to each other. Otherwise the term referred to persons of foreign origin. Since Finns, too, could be spoken of in this way, Finland was apparently seen as a separate unity of its own – albeit within the realm. Usually both fädernesland and landsman appeared in negative contexts in urban records, referring to a place where a Finnish criminal had fled or had to be expelled, and landsman referred usually to a companion of a Finnish criminal.

Why were Finns at least from time to time seen as aliens still after a centuries-long co-existence in one and the same realm? The answer lies partly in the characteristics of being a stranger: not all “strangers” are necessarily a new group – since identities are based on defining borderlines between “us” and “others”, communities need strangers in order to maintain their traditions and mentalities. Thus a group consisting of persons perceived as strangers could, in fact, be quite a well-known group living within the community, albeit at the same time on its margins. Besides that, the Finns had preserved their own language and they still had a geographic location of origin of their own – Finland behind the Gulf of Bothnia. Clearly, they could not be Swedes despite what the laws said (or did not say).

It has been argued that the main reason for the low social prestige of the Finnish language and culture in Sweden has been the uneven socio-demographic distribution among the Finnish immigrants. Whereas Swedish settlers in Finland have represented all social strata, the elites included, the emigrants from Finland have mostly belonged to lower strata: during the pre-industrial time some immigrants were relatively well-to-do landowners, peasants or burghers or at least became that later, but the majority seem to have been rather poor men and women seeking an opportunity to get hired as servants or other workers. The Reformation and its demand for completely vernacular church services made a Finnish priesthood necessary, even in the Swedish part of the realm, but the number of educated Finns spreading written culture in Finnish remained very scarce with the exception of temporary periods of war, like the Russian occupation of Finland in the beginning of the eighteenth century, caused large-scale refugee movements over the Gulf of Bothnia. On the Finnish peninsula, on the contrary, Swedish became the major code of written communication. Despite the Finnish translations of the Bible and other religious texts, as well as legislative and administrative texts from the sixteenth century onwards, Finnish had a very restricted use as a written language in Finland before the nineteenth century and the situation started to change only decades after Sweden had been forced to cede Finland to Russia.

The majority of Finnish immigrants mentioned in analysed Swedish protocols in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era were persons sentenced for some serious crime. The men were mostly thieves, manslayer, bigamists or fornicators – the image of the brutal Finn in Alle Bedlegrannas Spegel was without doubt based on true-life crime stories. Numerous Finnish women, too, were sentenced for theft but, besides that, many of them were prostitutes, unmarried mothers or child-murderers, as well as victims for sexual assaults and breach of marriage agreements. As stated above, Finns were also imagined to possess magical powers, and consequently witches could be found among both sexes, although their recorded number was small.

In brief: many Finnish immigrants belonged to those social levels with which the burgher community did not want to come into close contact – at least not in public. Although it has been argued that towns were not residential communities, since the social heterogeneity of the population was reflected in differences between the town-dwellers’ legal status, in one respect urban societies were or, at least, were expected to be homogeneous: the land owning stratum regarded towns as moral communities where all inhabitants were expected to follow the official moral code of the burghers or to be expelled from the town or, depending on the seriousness of the offence against the code, even condemned to death.

There were two main reasons for avoidance of contact with low-status Finns: firstly, the honest burghers’ fear of becoming infected by the dishonour or shame, which was regarded as something concrete, and – in accordance with the projection theory – their efforts to restrain their own latent lusts and weaknesses by controlling and punishing the lesser strata, on whom they projected their subconscious desires. Both interpretations, of which one does not exclude the other, coincide well with Benedict Anderson’s statement that racist ideas are products of ideologies of class rather than those of nation. In this case, it was the purity of the burgher community that had to be protected.

Of course, there were also Finns whose immigrant biographies did not in any significant respect differ from the lives of Swedish individuals. The protocols do mention servants, peasants and burghers of Finnish origin also in other roles than the one of the accused, and the number of these kinds of immigrants may have been much greater than appears on the basis of the records, which deal mostly with criminal affairs. There were even Finnish men who attained a post on the town council, i.e. at the top of the burgher community, although they were not numerous. Only a couple of them seem to have originated from Finnish-speaking areas – in fact, many of the socially successful immigrants from Finland seem to have come from areas that were inhabited by the descendants of the Swedish settlers or where Swedish and Finnish were spoken side by side.

Despite the temporary success stories, the majority of the “honest” Finnish immigrants were, as the Swedish historian Sven Ljung has put it, “a proletariat of their time”.  This “proletariat” did not live in complete isolation. Instead, there seem to have developed networks between people of the same low social status despite their different ethnic background. Even Finnish witches had a clientele of their own and thus indirectly a place within the local community – until the authorities interfered in their business. But what weighed most socially within the pre-industrial urban communities was, of course, the opinion of the leading stratum, i.e. the Swedish burgher community. Thus the Finns became mentally alienated and the pejorative image exemplified by Alle Bedlegrannas Spegel came into being. The concept had seen the daylight and the next step was – we do not know when this happened – that it was summarised in one word, finnjävel.