Yggdrasil · Humankind

Northern Communities Behind the Goods

The northern people an English-recorded report calls Finnas, seen only through a traveller’s account of payments.

Myth and literature · Quotation

In Thorpe’s translation

But their wealth consists for the most part in the rent paid them by the Fins. That rent is in skins of animals, and birds’ feathers, and whalebone, and in ship-ropes made of whales’ hides, and of seals’. Every one pays according to his birth;

Myth and literature

The story

Near-contemporary travel account: a written report of a traveller’s own statements, in Old English, from the late ninth century, which describes the Finnas only from outside.

In Ohthere’s report to King Alfred the Finnas are scattered across the north. They live by hunting in winter and fishing by the sea in summer, and some of them live in the mountains beside the farmland of the Northmen. Ohthere tells the king that his wealth comes mostly from what the Finnas pay him. The payment is in animal skins, feathers, whalebone and ship-ropes made of whale or seal hide, and it varies with birth: the best-born are said to pay the most. We hear nothing from the Finnas themselves. They appear as hunters, fishers and the source of goods, in a story told by someone who gained from them.

This entry is not a description of Sámi history or of modern Sámi identities, which are far wider than one traveller’s paragraph.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: that a Northman told an English king that the Finnas paid him in skins, feathers, whalebone and ship-ropes, that payments rose with birth, and that these people hunted and fished across the north. Scholars read Finnas as the people now called Sámi.

What is not recorded: how the payments were agreed, whether they were taxes, trade, gifts or demands, what the Finnas received in return, what they called themselves, or what their own communities and beliefs were. The payments suggest unequal power, but the text does not explain them. Whether the word covers one people or several in the ninth century is also unsettled. This is an outsider’s picture, and it is not a history of Sámi life.

Historical evidence

The evidence

The evidence is one Old English report, set down in the circle of King Alfred and preserved in the Old English Orosius, in which Ohthere describes the payments. The Wikipedia article on the Sámi says Tacitus, about 98, is the first probable reference to such a people, under the name Fenni, and that Norse speakers later used the word Finn for the Sámi, as in the Eddas and sagas of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. The Fenni article adds that Tacitus’s Fenni were not necessarily Sámi: some scholars think the label may mean little, while others see evidence of a Sámi range wider than today’s. Scholars therefore read Finnas in Old English as a name for the Sámi, but the account itself does not call them that.