Goahti
and founder of the Laestadian movement.
Lars Levi Laestadius
Lars Levi Laestadius was born in Jäckvik in southern Swedish Lapland on 10 January 1800 and died in Pajala in northern Sweden on 21 February 1861.
Laestadius' life can be divided into four periods, which were determined by diverse physical, social and cultural environments as well as by different roles, tasks and interests.
Each period is characterized by its own personal, social, cultural and religious identity.
1. Childhood (1800 1808) in his home in Jäckvik and his youth (1808 1816) in the parsonage of his stepbrother Carl Erik Laestadius at Kvikkjokk until the latter's death.
2. His student days (1816 1824) with his brother Petrus (Laestadius, Petrus) at Härnosand Gymnasium and then at Uppsala University. Petrus, who later became a journalist and a Lappologist, shared the ecological hobbies of Lars Levi.
3. His ordination in 1824, his work as a minister in Arjeplog, his appointment as Rector of Karesuando in 1826 which involved making visitations to inspect the northern parishes of Sweden (1824 1844). This was the period of his active work as a botanist, zoologist, ethnographer, theologian and philosopher.
4. His personal conversion in 1844 and, when the revivalist movement got under way in 1845, his work until 1849 as leader of a popular religious revival, proselytising, teaching, promoting temperance and practicing journalism in Karesuando, the majority of whose population were Sámi, and subsequently in the Finnish-speaking district of Pajala on the Swedish side of the border between Sweden and Finland in the Torne (Tornio) River Valley (1844 1861).
As a scholar, Laestadius was active in different fields and functions which merge into a unique whole. His scientific career can be divided into four parts:
1. His work as an ecologist and botanist; he had a considerable knowledge of the flora of the north. He was an assistant of Prof. J. Wahlenberg on the latter s botanical expeditions to the Skåne region in southern Sweden and to Swedish and Norwegian Lapland. Laestadius botanical collection from Lapland is unique in its number of specimens and species. The herbivarium, which contained 6700 plants, was sold to J. P. Gaimard, the leader of the French La Recherche expedition to Scandinavia, the Spitzbergen Islands and Greenland (1838 1840). The plant specimens, drawings and notes of the Laestadiana Collection in the Stockholm Natural History Museum bear witness to a lifelong scientific hobby which began when Laestadius was a schoolboy in Kvikkjokk and continued until the last summer of his life in Pajala in 1860.
2. His work as a theologian and religious philosopher. He used his considerable knowledge of Enlightenment psychology, philosophy and theology in his pastoral thesis Crapula mundi Hangover of the World (1843), in his three-volume work Dårhushjonet The Madhouse Inmate (written before 1851), as well as in other religious writings and his sermons in Finnish, Swedish and Sámi. Laestadius represented a protest against the dead centres of the Swedish church: Uppsala, Stockhom and Härnosand. He expressed a low-church protest, sharply criticizing the dead doctrinalism that he found in the teachings of the bishops and other church leaders:
3. His work as a Lappologist; Laestadius was a philologist of some stature, who in addition to his mother s language, Pite Sámi, also spoke Lule and North Sámi. He developed an orthography based on Pite and Lule Sámi known as the Lodge Lappish Orthography . 4. His achievements as a mythologist and ethnographer; his major work Fragmenter i lappska mythologien (translated in English 2002) was written between 1840 and 1845, but it was not published in extenso in Swedish until 1997. In his research work on Lapland, Laestadius was an ecologist and an ethnographer, mythologist and mythographer of the Sámi people. As an ethnographer, he made notes about the ancient Sámis; as a mythologist he collected folk legends into a system he called a mythology to the Lapps; and as a mythographer he used the material of this mythology in an attempt to write their own history for the Sámi people. He had projected the compilation of this history as early as 1833. Laestadius was a fieldwork researcher who lived in the in the heart of his area of research as the Rector of Karesuando and inspector of all the parishes of the Lapp areas of Sweden. In the latter function, he had been to every corner and lodge in Swedish Lapland , as he states in his foreword to Fragments. Both Fragments and his thesis Crapula mundi were written during the time that he was undergoing his own religious conversion, which ultimately led him to become the leader of the northern revivalist movement. Typically, he lived wholeheartedly inside the interior household of the Sámi, as he called their view of the world, or perhaps more properly their religion. His letter to Jacob Fellman, the Rector of Utsjoki, in 1845 offers convincing evidence of a change that had begun within him, and in Karesuando, at the turn of the year 1844 1845. I wish to state that I can no longer undertake any further actions with regard to this worthy manuscript because my attention has become directed elsewhere and been overwhelmed by matters belonging to the sphere of religion, which seem to me to be considerably more important than mythology.
Laestadius cultural idiom was Sámi, the heritage of his Sámi identity. He was born into a family in which two languages were spoken. His father came from a family of clergymen long established in Swedish Lapland. His mother was a South Sámi, and his wife, Brita Kajsa Alstadius, whom he married in 1827, was of Sámi descent. His desire to defend the Sámi identity is also apparent in his pastoral thesis, Crapula mundi, the first ten of whose twelve theses were written in Latin and directed against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Thesis XI, dealing with temperance, was in Finnish, because the liquor trade was in the hands of Finnish-speaking merchants and settlers. Thesis XII was written in Sámi; it states: A Lapp is a person of better quality than one who lives a settled life or a non-Lapp. The struggle against the dragon of liquor was for Laestadius more than an attempt to defend the purity of the Sámi identity against the corrupting foreign influence on an original people of nature than the religiously motivated temperance movement that it later hardened into. His criticism was directed against the Finnish traders who imported into Lapland products that were foreign to the authentic Sámi way of life, and corrupted the genuinely innocent and impoverished Sámi by selling them hard spirits in return for their natural products.
There is in Laestadius Fragments of Lappish Mythology much of the folk tradition that the writer had learned from Sámi families. More important than the spoken language is the fact that as a child Laestadius was exposed to profound influences connected with the Sámi view of the world, way of life and mentality. He expressed his religious and cultural identity programmatically in Crapula mundi:
But I Laestadius, if there be in me something of godliness, if some trust in God, if some steadfastness in adversity, have certainly not learned these virtues in schools; rather in my father s home and at my mother s skirts have I acquired whatever there is in me of religion and faith. For it is to the examples, tears and nocturnal sighs of that happy time that I owe adebt of gratitude for the teaching that I have received in religion and faith.
Laestadius thus compares religion to a mother tongue learnt in his mother s lap. He was himself a deeply religious man who believed in the existence of a supernatural world and experienced it in the Sámi way. In his role as a revivalist leader, Laestadius wove his knowledge of the ethnic beliefs of the Sámi into his sermons, which contain concepts of Sámi mythology endowed with new Christian significances. For example, the earth spirits, underground anthropomorphic creatures, were no longer benevolent helpers of the Sámi, appearing in the guise of beautiful, seductive women, but malevolent spirits, the hidden children of Adam and Eve, who among other things stole babies and left their own in their stead. However, his listeners, who were told they were unconverted earth spirits or bastards (eahrapas*), do not seem to have realized this change in status nor to have been interested in it. An appeal to Laestadius sermons on supernatural beings in his Postillor Sermons lends strength to the truth value of the Sámi tradition of beliefs: It must be true if Laestadius has spoken about it. His whole oeuvre is an expression of experiences and metaphors arising out of the Sámi cosmology, in which the border between life and death is a vague one, and in which experiences of the presence of the dead and dreams are a central part of existence. The life and death of Laestadius were canonized into a sacred legend among the Laestadians, and his memory was kept alive in sermons and the letters sent by the Elders wherever the movement spread, in Scandinavia and even across the Atlantic.
Laestadius writings in Latin, Swedish, Finnish and Sámi are very extensive. His Sámi-language works, which include Hålaitattem Ristagase ja Satte almatja kaskan (1839), a conversation between a Christian and an ordinary man, and Tåluts Suptsahah, Jubmela pirra ja Almatji pirra (1844), an ancient tale about God and man, make him one of the first Sámi writers.
Source courtesy of: The Saami. A Cultural Encyclopaedia. Ed. Kulonen, Seurujärvi & Pulkkinen (2005)
