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Finland ORIGINS OF THE FINNS
Unavailable
Figure 2. Historical Regions
Present-day Finland became habitable in about 8,000
B.C.,
following the northward retreat of the glaciers, and at
about
that time Neolithic peoples migrated into the country.
According
to the legends found in the Finnish folk epic, the
Kalevala, those early inhabitants included the
people of
the mythical land Pohjola, against whom the Kalevala
people--
identified with the Finns--struggled; however,
archaeological and
linguistic evidence of the prehistory of the region is
fragmentary.
According to the traditional view of Finnish
prehistory,
ancestors of the Finns migrated westward and northward
from their
ancestral home in the Volga River basin during the second
millennium B.C., arriving on the southern shore of the
Baltic Sea
some time during the next millennium. According to this
folk
history, the early Finns began a migration from
present-day
Estonia into Finland in the first century A.D. and settled
along
the northern coast of the Gulf of Finland. Recent
research,
suggesting that the Finns arrived in the region at a much
earlier
date, perhaps by 3,000 B.C., has questioned this
traditional
view, however
(see
fig. 2).
Both the traditional and modern theories agree that in
referring to this prehistoric age one should not speak of
a
Finnish people, but rather of Finnic tribes that
established
themselves in present-day southern Finland, gradually
expanded
along the coast and inland, and eventually merged with one
another, absorbing the indigenous population. Among those
tribes
were the Suomalaiset, who inhabited southwestern Finland
and from
whom was derived Suomi, the Finnish word for Finland. The
Tavastians, another Finnic tribe, lived inland in southern
Finland; the Karelians lived farther east in the area of
the
present-day Karelian Isthmus and Lake Ladoga. On the
southern
coast of the Gulf of Finland were the Estonians, who spoke
a
Finno-Ugric language closely related to Finnish. North of
the
Finns were the Lapps (or Sami), who also spoke a
Finno-Ugric
language, but who resisted assimilation with the Finns.
Prehistoric Finnic peoples reached the Iron Age level
of
development, with social organization at the tribal stage.
These
Finnic tribes were threatened increasingly by the
politically
more advanced Scandinavian peoples to the west and the
Slavic
peoples to the east.
Data as of December 1988
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