299

The westernmost representatives of this circumpolar ring of peoples are the Lapps, who call themselves, in their own archaic variety of Finnic speech, Samen. Their country, Lapland, has no political existence, but is no less real an entity. It consists of the forested highlands of northern Sweden, which afford ideal reindeer pasturage, and the tundra-covered stretches of northern Finland, with the Norwegian coastal provinces of Troms and Finnmark, and much of the Russian Kola Peninsula. Except for small patches of forest and mountain, the Lapps are not alone in this country, but share it with a more numerous population of Finns and Norwegians, with whom they have, for centuries, been mixing.

There are, in the whole world, probably no more than 32,000 Lapps.¹ Of these about 21,000 live in Norway, 7000 odd in Sweden, and 3000 more are evenly divided between Finland and Russia. In Norway, which holds thus two-thirds of the total, between ten and eleven thousand are concentrated in the province of Finnmark, where, in 1920, they formed 24 per cent of the population. In Sweden the greatest concentration is in Norrbottens lan, which holds 4500. The Lapps are not, from the stand­point of numbers, an important people in the world. They are one of the marginal, vestigial groups destined to disappear by the process of absorption. Their importance lies, however, in their taxonomic position, and in the influence which they have had in the past, and may have in the future, on other European peoples with whom they have blended and will blend.

Their predilection for this blending process is so great that it is really very difficult to estimate their numbers, and the figures given above are by no means definitive. They include Lapps who speak their own language and call themselves ethnically Samen, and exclude those who have passed over into other populations, notably the northern Norwegian. At the same time they include many Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish genetic lines which have been incorporated inter the culturally Lappish body.

Norwegian writers usually divide the Lapps into two main classes, the Reindeer Lapps, living in the forests and mountains, and the Sedentary Lapps, living along the coast and rivers, subsisting mostly on fish. It is generally believed that the original Lapps who entered Scandinavia were reindeer-herders, and that for many of them the sedentary life is a rela­tively recent readaptation. Today, however, no more than five thousand still herd reindeer, and of these five, three live in Sweden. Thus although Norway holds the majority of the world’s Lapps, those who preserve the purest Lappish type, both in culture and race, live over the Swedish border.

The Lapps present a distinct problem to students of race, which has been answered in one way or the other by various authors since the middle

I Wiklund, k. B., gb, vol. 13, 1923, pp. 223-242.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

of the last century. The problem is: are they primitive European brachy­cephals, related to the Alpines of west central Europe, or are they mon­goloid invaders from Asia? This question is of more than taxonomic value, because it is intimately concerned with the historical position of all the western European brachycephals as well as with the validity of the classifications employed by the present schools in Poland and Germany. Fortunately, with the publication in 1935 of Schreiner’s Z^ur Osteologie der Lappen,² we are at length in a position to answer the Lapp question in a definite manner, and with some degree of assurance. The answer lies partly in the historical field, and partly in that of somatology.

The historical evidence does not favor the Alpine or local shrunken- Palaeolithic-survivor theory. In the first place, the Lapps speak a Finnic dialect which is classified with the extinct Chude, spoken in the early centuries of the present era in Finland and the regions immediately east and north of the present city of Leningrad.³ The Chudes were Volga Finns who migrated in early times into the regions later to be occupied by their modern Finnish and Esthonian relatives, who eventually absorbed them. In the Lappish language are also found certain loan words from Letto- Lithuanian, and others from early Scandinavian. Letts and Lithuanians arrived in the Baltic lands only in the middle of the first millennium a.d. Then the Lapps could not have moved to the far northwest much before this time. Furthermore, in order to have borrowed their language from the Chudes, who themselves did not arrive there much earlier, the Lapps must have mixed to some extent with them, and indeed the Lappish skeletons disinterred in Scandinavia show mixture with a Finnic type from the beginning.⁴

In the fourteenth century the Lapps were mentioned in the Lake Onega region, and tax registers from the sixteenth century establish their pres­ence as far south as Lake Saima, a short distance farther north; hence it is certain that the Lapps had not been fully pushed up into their Arctic environment until recent times. In Norway, the earliest graves, found in Finnmark, may date from late “Roman” times, near the middle of the first millennium a.d., but the presence of the Lapps in this country is not absolutely certain before the ninth century. At this time Norse traders and settlers were sailing around the North Cape, into the previously un­known provinces of Troms and Finnmark, and they met Lapps there and mixed with them. A rich Viking grave of the tenth century, in eastern Finnmark, contains the skeleton of a twenty year old youth of manifestly mixed Norse and Lappish ancestry.⁵

2. Schreiner, K. E., Z^ur Osteologie der Lappen.

⁸ Wiklund, K. B., loc. cit

⁴ Schreiner, K. E., op. cit., vol. 2, p. 279.

6. Schreiner, Alette, Anthropologische Untersuchungen in Norge; Hellemo.