Alexander,
I am afraid that you have sort of missed the "real thing" here...:) But never mind, I am obliged to give an earnest reply to you all the same...
On Tacitus: it would be a bit naive to take his description of far-flung tribes as an accurrate anthropological account. He was a Roman with a particular perspective on "barbarians" and he was, by his own admission, poorly informed of the people living in the Far North. However, this does not mean that we should dismiss his description of the Fenni as wholly worthless.
First, the poverty he describes may have something to do with the impoverished material culture of the Early Iron Age period in Finland, although things had by then taken a turn into a greater prosperity, precisely because of the stimulating influence of the Roman Empire on local trade. We know now that Finlans was not totally depopulated during the Early Iron Age period (just before the Common Era), but it is nevertheless true that compared with the relatively rich Bronze Age material culture, the Early Iron Age was a bleak period.
Given these conditions, the ethnic identity of the people (whether Finnish, S�mi or someone else) cannot have made much difference in the material culture and ways of living, at least for the eyes of Roman authors. After all, even the words "sabme" and "H�me" seem to have the same origin - which is just what can be expected if both S�mi-speaking and Finnish-speaking hunters and fishers were active in H�me at the time.
But all this presupposes that Tacitus� account deals with people living in the area of present-day Finland. This is by no means self-evident. The account in its totality is as follows:
Chapter 46. Here Suebia ends. I do not know whether to class the tribes of the Peucini, Venedi, and Fenni with the Germans or with the Sarmatians. The Peucini, however, who are sometimes called Bastarnae, are like Germans in their language, manner of life, and mode of settlement and habitation. Squalor is universal among them and their nobles are indolent. Mixed marriages are giving them something of the repulsive appearance of the Sarmatians. The Venedi have adopted many Sarmatian habits; for their
plundering forays take them over all the wooded and mountainous highlands that lie between the Peucini and the Fenni. Nevertheless, they are on the whole to be classed as Germans; for they have settled homes, carry shields, and are fond of traveling - and traveling fast - on foot, differing in all these respects from the Sarmatians, who live in wagons or on horseback. The Fenni are astonishingly savage and disgustingly poor. They have no proper weapons, no horses, no homes. they eat wild herbs, dress in skins, and sleep on the ground. Their only hope of getting better fare lies in their arrows, which, for lack of iron, they tip with bone. The women support themselves by hunting, exactly like the men; they accompany them everywhere and insist on taking their share in bringing down the game. The only way they have of protecting their infants against wild beasts or bad weather is to hide them under a makeshift covering of interlaced branches. Such is the shelter to which the young folk
come back and in which the old must lie. Yet they count their lot happier than that of others who groan over field labor, sweat over house-building, or hazard their own and other men's fortunes in the hope of profit and the fear of loss. Unafraid of anything that man or god can do to them, they have reached a state that few human beings can attain: for these men are so well content that they do not even need to pray for anything. What comes after them is the stuff of fables - Hellusii and Oxiones with the faces and features of men, the bodies and limbs of animals. On such unverifiable stories I shall express no opinion.
One could claim with equal justice that Tacitus is here trying to describe what his sources have told him about the S�mi or S�mi-like tribes living, say, in V�sterbotten. If this were indeed the case, then we could ask who were the "Hellusii and Oxiones with the faces and features of men, the bodies and limbs of animals"? It has been seriously proposed that the whatever information Tacitus may have had about Finnish speaking tribes might be related to these "Hellusii" and "Oxiones", not least because of their apparently totemic clan practices. And there are others who have suspected that the "Sithoni" of Tacitus may have had something to do with Finnish speaking tribes.
As for the �savagery� of the S�mi, well, that would be viewing cultures based on fishing, hunting and herding from the perspective of a poorly informed Roman patrician. Needless to say, that is not my perspective and I have no interest whatsoever to play down the ingeniousness of the S�mi people. The whole topic of the S�mi (pre)history is fascianating, both in its own right and because of the light it casts on the emergence and the evolution of Finnish language and culture as well as even on the problem of the Indo-European dispersal. But I will not take up this important issue here. It suffices to say that the �core areas� for the emergence of the distinctive S�mi language (family) and the S�mi culture seem to have been, already 5000 years ago, the very areas they have been living in ever since. That raises many interesting questions, but I shall leave them for some later occasion.
Best regards, Juha
Alexander Stolbov <astolbov@...> wrote:
I must apologize in advance: my knowledge about Finns and Saami is rather superficial.However everything I know about Saami disagrees with the Tacitus' information about "Fennians":- Saami (like all Finno-Ugric people) are stock-breeders: now they breed reindeers, however they have been acquainted with horses for a long time, while the Lord of the Underworld (it must be an archaic mythological theme) - Rota - was traditionally pictured as a horseman.- Saami have the sledge of original construction (a boat-like type with only 1 runner), which could not be borrowed from IE tribes. I guess that the sledge for summer driving described in Kalevala could have a similar construction.- Saami (like all Finno-Ugric people) had timberwork winterhouses (as well as _stationary_ sommerhouses "vezha" - sorry, if spelling is not correct, and portable sommerhouses).Thus Saami were far not "savages", they had a quite well developed economy (adequate for that times and conditions).Toponyms give an evidence that Saami occupied (for a while) the territory of today Leningrad and Novgorod regions. Perhaps Tacitus' words should be referred to really primitive tribes of hunter-gatherers who could occupy the territory of modern Finland in the 1st cent. AD and then were assimilated by moving northwards Saami, giving them "laponoid" admixture in appearance?Alexander----- Original Message -----From: Juha SavolainenSent: Friday, August 29, 2003 7:22 PMSubject: Re: [tied] Re: Indo-European for Indo-EuropeanPiotr,
I must confess that I sort of anticipated that you would, when the moment of truth would arise, sublimate this very potent issue into something less tangible�:)
But let us start with Tacitus:
According to the A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb translation of The Agricola and Germania (London: Macmillan, 1877) Tacitus describes the Fennians as follows:
In wonderful savageness live the nation of the Fennians, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones.
Their common support they have from the chase, women as well as men; for with these the former wander up and down, and crave a portion of the prey. Nor other shelter have they even for their babes, against the violence of tempests and ravening beasts, than to cover them with the branches of trees twisted together; this a reception for the old men, and hither resort the young.
Such a condition they judge more happy than the painful occupation of cultivating the ground, than the labour of rearing houses, than the agitations of hope and fear attending the defence of their own property or the seizing that of others. Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished.
http://www.helsinki-hs.net/news.asp?id=20020102IE16
Well, the Finns have not been too eager to claim these �Fennians� as of their own kin, perhaps because the description comes perilously close to what Madame de Sta�l says about the Finns in her �Dix ann�es d�exil 1812�
"They try to cultivate the mind a little there, but bears and wolves come so close in winter that all thought is of necessity concentrated on how to attain a tolerable physical existence."
and what Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin testifies in his �Life�s Little Things�
"The Finns also have a bent for drink, even though there is no wine here whatsoever, except for illicit tavern keeping, which is harshly suppressed. But, all the way to St. Petersburg, the Finn will drink himself into forgetfulness, lose his money, horse, bridle, and return home poorer than a church rat."
http://newsroom.finland.fi/finfo/english/finnseng.html
Instead, we have often politely enough given the honour of living in this happy state of nature (with a not-so-little help from potent intoxicants) to our S�mi neighbours who, while speaking a related language, have looked - for properly patriotic Finns � the perfect candidate for the job. But your ingenious derivation of the *Fenno:z could have changed everything�There is no doubt that more and more Finns, mainly males, would have had second thoughts on the matter�after all, even some Finnish scholars have accepted the identification of the Tacitian Fennians with the Finns of later day...and more to the point, the obvious marks of generously endowed *fenna are surely still there�
Hence I must reject, on behalf of the whole self-respecting nation of Finns, your consolation prize: no, mere magic will not do the trick. Instead, we will revert to our traditional hospitability towards the S�mi people. Let us grant them the privilege of being the direct descendants of those powerful witches that so vexed the mind of King James�
http://www.chronicon.com/noita/index.en.html
Cheers, Juha
Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Juha Savolainen <juhavs@...> wrote:
> This case of ancient and evident *fenna-envy is so hilarious and
intriguing that I have to ask when did it arise in your opinion?
The name was evidently in use in the first century, so it must have
arisen by then, perhaps during the initial contact between Finnic and
Germanic peoples. Opinions differ as to who was included among the
original *Fenno:z. OE Finnas and ON Finnar certainly included the
Saami. My comment about envy was of course a joke; the intended
meaning of the term was probably something like 'virile, potent' not
necessarily in the sexual sense (perhaps connected with the
non-Germanic Scandinavians' reputation as formidable wizards and
magicians); the Finns can take it as a compliment anyway ;-)
Piotr
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