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For over two centuries, Finland has been inspiring, delighting,
baffling, and terrifying British visitors and writers. This volume
collects a remarkable array of Finnish-British encounters and
adventures in both countries - including the perils of Finnish
horses in the nineteenth century and Finnish drivers in the
twentieth, Sibelius' and Mannerheim's repeated visits to England,
several daunting (and sometimes life-threatening) crossings of the
border with Russia, the challenges of dentistry in the wilds of
1950s Lapland, and the inevitably awkward collisions of traditional
British sensibilities with traditional Finnish sauna culture.
Several accounts are included from British visitors who lived and
worked for months or years in Finland, providing deeper and more
nuanced observations of periods ranging from the tense, austere
postwar years to the turn of the millennium. The long historical
perspective shows how experiences and perceptions have changed -
or, sometimes, persisted - on perennial themes such as Finnish
education, the Kalevala, and the sauna. A selection of English
poems about Finland completes the collection.
Finland in the eighteenth century was not a destination for the
faint-hearted. Travellers told of winter temperatures which froze
brandy in the bottle, and of summer journeys when they were eaten
alive by bugs and mosquitoes. But they also wrote lyrical accounts
of sledging over the ice from Stockholm, and of the idyllic beauty
of Finland's lakes and islands. Tony Lurcock brings to life these
forgotten journeys and the travellers who made them. Many were
upper-class gentlemen taking an alternative to the Grand Tour, and
interested in agriculture, landscape and the picturesque. Others
saw Finland as the home of a primitive race living in a virtuous
'state of nature' - but met the reality of primitiveness with mixed
responses. There were also scientists, adventurers, sailors,
missionaries ...Part anthology, part history, it gives a picture of
Finland at a time when it was little known to the outside world.
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