The history of Finland is shown in a new light during the first couple of months of this year with a new TV series called Suomi on ruotsalainen, which translates as ‘Finland is Swedish’. And indeed when it comes to it Finland is indeed Swedish. Finland and Sweden were one country under one flag and one crown for about 700 years, and it is obvious that such a long time together left a lasting legacy.
The history of Finland is shown in a new light during the first couple of months of this year with a new TV series called Suomi on ruotsalainen, which translates as ‘Finland is Swedish’. And indeed when it comes to it Finland is indeed Swedish. Finland and Sweden were one country under one flag and one crown for about 700 years, and it is obvious that such a long time together left a lasting legacy.
In 1809, the soldiers of the Russian Empire conquered Finland so that our ancestors had to say farewell to the king in Stockholm and give their vows of loyalty to the Tsar in St Petersburg, a city that is indeed situated quite close to Finland.
When there still was a Soviet state, it was official policy in Finland to try to create goodwill towards the Soviet Union – or Russia – among Finnish people. Part of this was that the 19th century, when Finland was a Grand Duchy under Russian sovereignty, was described as the golden era of Finland’s pre-independence history. It was common to emphasise the well-developed home rule that we had back then, especially because we could promote Finnish as a cultural language.
At the same time it is often forgotten that that liberty was basically the same liberty we had under the Swedish kings, that home rule or autonomy essentially meant that the Russian Emperor allowed Finns to continue observing our old Swedish law. This was mainly a practical solution: when there was a well-established system of government in Finland, it would have been too expensive to abolish it and organise a new one.
The question of linguistic policy wasn’t as simple as often stated. When I was at school, the official truth was that the status of the Finnish language greatly improved during the 19th century because Russian emperors were generally happy to cooperate with the Finnish language movement. But it was more complicated than that. The language was not exactly persecuted before the Russian period, either: the Swedish laws were translated into Finnish in the 18th century because there were lay judges who had no idea of the Swedish language and who needed to be able to read the law.
If we compare Ireland and Finland, we immediately notice one important difference: the people of Finland converted from Catholicism to Protestantism along with the rest of the kingdom of Sweden when the Reformation came. Thus there was no religious contrast. Swedish kings saw Finns as loyal subjects and Protestants, and in their eyes the language didn’t represent sedition or rebellion.
If Finns had clung to the old Catholic religion, history would no doubt have turned out very differently. When Sweden became Protestant, it went kind of ”fundamentalist”, and no religious dissent at all was accepted. Indeed, those in eastern Finland who had adopted the Orthodox religion of Russia were greatly discriminated against when intolerant Protestantism was the norm in Sweden.
Probably the rest of the Finnish people would have been in the same predicament if they had kept their Catholicism after the Reformation.
Panu Höglund is an Irish speaker from Finland currently translating a number of books from English into Irish.
