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.