Dan Milton wrote:
>See
>http://www.fire.uni-freiburg.de/programmes/natcon/natcon_1.htm
>for a summary of North European swidden agriculture. The real
>experts were the Finns. The Finno-Karelians started north in the early
>medieval period and reached the limit of agriculture in a few
>centuries. The King of Sweden then transferred a considerable
>population to areas on the Sweden-Norway border where they again soon
>reached the population limit the country could support. So in the
>1630's he sent a number to New Sweden on the Delaware. The colony
>didn't last long, it was taken over by the Dutch and then the British.
>However, there is convincing evidence that the Westward expansion of
>British America esssentially depended on Finnish techniques of burn
>the woods, build a log cabin (with very characteristic construction
>techniques) plant a crop, exhaust the soil in a few years, and move on.
> How about deriving "swidden" from "Sweden" (or vice versa)? Isn't
>that what etymology is all about? STOP, I'm joking -- don't correct me!
>Dan Milton
Dan:
I heartily second what you have written, and have read books to this effect (New
Sweden, 1639-1988? by?), and would be delighted if you could post the references
you are using. I hang onto a fond hope that one or two placenames in the
Delaware valley will turn out to be Finnish rather than native
American(?Perkiomen?) . I experienced my first log cabin in northern Finland in
the 1950s,
and in the area that was burned by the retreating Germans they were still using
what amounted to a form of swidden agricuture (drain the swamp, burn it, plant
it for a few years and move on). However, the timing of the events you relate
above seems a bit peculiar to me, and I'd like to read up on it.
Which part of the Norway-Sweden border are you talking about? Etymologically
Finnish (Lappish?) names extend almost down to Dalarna in the border area, but
it was my understanding that they dated to the era before Swedish settlement or
control.
The Finnish farmers reached Kajaani, 100 miles south of the Arctic circle, in
1659. Within a very few years fairs were being held at Puolanka, a few miles
further north, with a large Rom presence (according to a monument there).
Which in my mind shows you how important the itinerant traders/tinkers/etc./etc.
were in the survival of the farmers. In 1957 farmers 100 miles further North
still kept tethered reindeer instead of cows (apropos recent discussions on
herding vs. farming). This may have been partially a result of the fact that
they were still recovering from the devastation of WWII - many of the farms and
even mills away from the roads had still not been rebuilt (at least in the
commune of Kuusamo).
Linguistic questions: (1) how close is Saami to Finnish in actual fact? The
textbooks I have available are evasive on this - are the Saami dialects a
different language, or are they basically Finnish dialects?
(2) Is Romani (can't remember the PC name - the language of the Rom or gypsies)
an IE language, and if so, what are it's affinities? (obviously they would be
Indo-Iranian, but within that?)
(3) Non-linguistic question about Rom: is there anywhere else in Europe that
the Rom can be shown to have arrived almost simultaneously with the first
farmers?
John