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Three “Lapland Songs”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frank Edgar Farley
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Extract

The second antistrophe of The Progress of Poesy opens, it will be recalled, with a rather striking allusion to the beneficent visitations of the Muse in the far North:

      In climes beyond the solar road,
      Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam,
      The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom
      To chear the shiv'ring Native's dull abode.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , 1906 , pp. 1 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1906

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References

page 1 note 1 Phelps, Selections from the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Gray, Boston, 1894, p. 29.

page 2 note 1 See Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement, by F. E. Farley (Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, vol. xx, Boston, 1903, pp. 66 f., n. 2).

page 2 note 2 A copy of this edition is owned by the Boston Public Library. The title page reads: The History of Lapland wherein are shewed the Original, Manners, Habits, Marriages, Conjurations, c, of that People. Written by John Scheffer, Professor of Law and Rhetoric at Upsal in Sweden. At the Theatre in Oxford, mdclxxiv. The preface explains that this version is abridged from the Latin.

Another English version, a copy of which is owned by the Harvard College Library, was published in London in 1704. It purports to be “done from the last Edition in the original Latin, and collated with a French translation Printed at Paris, which contains several Addenda that the Translator had from the Author, all which are here taken in.” To the Translation of Lapponia are added in this edition,” The Travels of the King of Sweden's Mathematicians into Lapland: The History of Livonia, and the Wars there: Also a Journey into Lapland, Finland, c. Written by Dr. Olof Rudbeck in the Year 1701.”

The Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Museum records a third translation into English, abridged, published in London, 1751. Throughout the eighteenth century, allusions to Scheffer are very common in the works of English writers on Scandinavian subjects.

page 3 note 1 Pp. 111 ff.

page 4 note 1 Scheffer's Latin version of this song (Lapponia, ed. 1673, p. 283) is as follows: Kulnasatz, rangifer meus parvus properandum nobis iterque porro faciendum, loca uliginosa vasta sunt, & cantiones nos deficiunt. Nec tamen tædiosus mihi palus kaige es, tibi palus kailvva dico vale. Multæ cogitationes animum meum subeunt, dum per paludem kaige vehor. Rangifer meus simus agiles levesque, sic citius absolvemus laborem, eoque veniemus, quo destinamus, ubi videbo amicam meam ambulantem. Kulnasatz rangifer meus prospice ac vide, utru non cernas earn se lavantem.

page 6 note 1 Scheffer's Latin runs as follows: “Sol, clarissimum emitte lumen in paludem Orra. Si enisus in summa picearum cacumina, scirem me visurum Orra paludem, in ea eniterer, ut viderem, inter quos arnica mea esset flores, omnes sucscinderem frutices recens ibi enatos, omnes ramos præsecarem, hos virentes ramos. Cursum nubium essem secutus, quæ iter suum instituunt versus paludem Orra, si ad te volare possem alis, cornicum alis. Sed mihi desunt alæ, alæ querquedulæ, pedesque, anserum pedes plan[tæ]ve bonæ, quæ deferre me valeant ad te. Satis expectasti diu, per tot dies, tot dies tuos optimos, oculis tuis jucundissimis, corde tuo amicissimo. Quod si longissime velles effugere, cito tamen te consequerer. Quid firmius validiusve esse potest, quam contorti nervi catenæve ferreæ, quæ durissime ligant? Sic amor contorquet caput nostrum, mutat cogitationes & sententias. Puerorum voluntas, voluntas venti, juvenum cogitationes, longæ cogitationes. Quos si audirem omnes, omnes, a via, a via justa declinarem. Vnum est consilium, quod capiam, ita scio viam rectiorem me reperturum.”

Revisions of the Lappish text which seem to establish the authenticity of Scheffer's two songs, are printed in Otto Donner's Lieder der Lappen, Helsingfors, 1876, and in Richard Bergstrom's monograph, Spring, min Snälla ren! (Nyare Bidrag till kannedom om de Svenska Landsmålen ock svenskt Folklif, v, 4 [Stockholm, 1885]). Of Scheffer's Lappish version of the Orra Moor song Donner writes (p. 115): “Die ortografie ist sehr inkorrekt, wodurch einige wörter gar nicht zur ermitteln sind, besonders da bei dem mündlichen vortrage gewisse silben, wie es scheint, wiederholt wurden.” Scheffer's Latin version, he adds, though “überhaupt treue …. leidet doch an einigen fehlern.” See below, p. 9, n. 2.

page 7 note 1 I quote from Aitken's edition, London, 1898, v, 249 ff. In Aitken's Life of Richard Steele, London, 1889, ii, 385 f., may be found a musical rendering of this song “set for the German Flute” by C. Smith, Jr., cir. 1750.

A note in modern editions of The Spectator, which may be traced back at least as far as the edition of 1797 (v, 281), ascribes this paraphrase to Ambrose Philips, though I cannot find that Philips ever acknowledged it. Philips contributed to No. 12 of The Tatler (May 7, 1709) the well known lines written from Copenhagen, beginning:—

From frozen climes, and endless tracts of snow,
From streams that northern winds forbid to flow;
What present shall the muse to Dorset bring;
Or how, so near the pole, attempt to sing?

page 9 note 1 Quoted from Aitken's edition, vi, 52 f. This version, signed “T,” is usually attributed to Steele.

page 9 note 2 I, 92 f. Theodor Vetter, author of a eulogistic biography of Mrs. Rowe entitled Die Göttliche Rowe, Zürich, 1894, makes special mention (pp. 13 f.) of this translation and calls attention to the other versions in the Oxford edition of Scheffer and in The Spectator. Vetter adds, “Das kleine Liedchen hat übrigens in der deutschen Literatur seine Geschichte” and goes on to cite the very free paraphrase of Mrs. Rowe's version made by Kleist in 1757 (cf. Kleist's Werke, ed. Sauer, Berlin, 1880–81, i, 107 f.), upon which Lessing commented in Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (No. 33—cf. Lessing's Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Lachmann-Muncker, viii, 75, Stuttgart, 1892), together with Herder's more literal rendering (1771). Herder also translated the reindeer song (cf. Herder's Volkslieder, Leipzig, 1778–79, i, 264; ii, 106). Herder's translations are printed in Donner's Lieder der Lappen, Helsingfors, 1876, together with another German version of the Orra Moor song. Donner also mentions the Finnish poet Franzén's Swedish version of the reindeer song, “Spring, min snälla ren,” which Richard Bergström has made the subject of a monograph (Spring, min snälla ren! [Stockholm, 1885]). Bergström prints the English versions published in the Oxford edition of 1674 and in The Spectator, together with Franzén's Swedish and Kleist's German versions. See above, p. 6, n.

page 11 note 1 See Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement; also Schnabel's Ossian in der schönen litteratur England's bis 1832 (Engliche Studien, xxiii, 31 ff., 366 ff.). I do not know that any special study has been made of English imitations of “Welsh” poetry, but one has only to turn over the leaves of any considerable number of eighteenth century magazines and collections of fugitive verse to realize that here lies a fruitful field for investigation.

page 12 note 1 Comedy of Errors, IV, 3, 11.

page 12 note 2 Faustus, sc. i, l. 127, ed. Gollancz.

page 12 note 3 Paradise Lost, ii, 665.

Scheffer has a chapter on the magic arts practiced by the Laplanders which begins, “There is scarce a Country under the Sun, whither the Name of Lapland has reach'd by Fame or otherwise, which does not always look upon this Nation as greatly addicted to Magick” (Lapponia, translation of 1704, p. 119). The authorities cited by Scheffer in this particular, run back well toward the beginning of the sixteenth century; among them are Olaus Magnus, whose Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus appeared at Rome in 1555 (see Lib. iii, Cap. 16), his friend the Portuguese historian Damiano de Goes, and Jacob Ziegler, a German mathematician and theologian who died in 1549. An English translation of a tract by Ziegler with the picturesque title “Of the Northeast frostie sea” is included in Eden and Willes’The History of Trauayle in the West and East Indies, London, 1577: I quote from fol. 280 (recto) where Ziegler writes of “Gronelande”; the inhabitants of this country, he says, are “geuen to magicall artes. For it is sayd that they (as also the people of Laponia) do rayse tempestes on the sea with magicall inchauntmentes, and bryng such shyps into daunger as they entend to spoyle.” Ziegler touches here upon a specific branch of magic in which about all the northern races were held to be more or less proficient,—the power to control winds and bad weather. Saxo Grammaticus, whose Historia Danica was finished very early in the thirteenth century, attributes this power to Danes, Norwegians and Permlanders (cf. ed. Holder, pp. 32, 128; Elton and Powell, pp. 39, 156). Trevisa's translation of Bartholomew's De Proprietatibus Rerum, made in 1397, charges the inhabitants of “Wynlandia” with selling winds to mariners. “Wynlandia,” he explains, “is a countree besydes ye mountayns of Norwey towarde the eest. and stretchyth vppon the clyf of Occean … The men of that countree ben strauge and somwhat wylde and fyers. And occupyen themselfe wyth wytchecrafte. And so to men that saylle by theyr costes: and also to men that abyde wyth theym for defawte of wynde they proffre wynde to sayllynge. and so sell wynde. And thei vse to make a clewe of threde and make dyuers knottes to be Joyned therin. And holdeth to drawe ont [sic] of the clewe thre knottes other moo: other lesse as he woll haue ye wynde more soft or strange. And for theyr mysbyleue fendes moue the ayre and areyse stronge tempeste other softe as he draweth of ye clewe more or lesse knottes. And somtyme they meue the wynde soo strongly: that wretches that byleue in suche doing are drowned by ryghtfull dome of god” (Wynkyn De Worde's ed., Westminster, cir. 1495, Lib. xv, Cap. clxxi). This information is repeated in Batman uppon Bartholome, London, 1582 (fol. 248, recto). See also Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ed. Shilleto, i, 161, 218, and Scheffer, ed. 1673, pp. 144 ff. Pierre Martin de la Martinière, author of a very popular volume called Voyage des Pais Septentrionaux which appeared first at Paris in 1671 and was later reprinted and translated into English, relates that the captain of the vessel in which he was sailing actually purchased three winds in a Lapland port at which they touched. The price paid was the equivalent of twenty French livres in money, with the addition of a pound of tobacco. The winds were confined in three knots tied into a woolen rag which was nailed to the masthead. De la Martinière disclaims belief in magic, but the experiment, he says, proved only too successful; for when the third knot was loosed, such a terrible tempest arose that the vessel nearly foundered, and the superstitious crew, who looked upon the storm as a judgment from Heaven, were beside themselves with fear. See the first edition, Paris, 1671, pp. 28 ff., and the English translation, A New Voyage to the North, London, 1706, pp. 22 ff. This business of selling winds came after a while to be regarded as rather a specialty of the Laplanders.

I am indebted to Dr. Alfred Cope Garrett for a part of the above information.

page 13 note 1 P. 13, n.

page 14 note 1 Pp. 1 ff.

page 14 note 2 Seconded., Edinburgh, 1778, i, 487 ff. Anna Seward wrote to Court Dewes, March 9, 1788 (Letters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh, 1811, ii, 65 ff.): “You remember the beautiful translation in the Spectator of the Lapland odes! I was once shewn a close translation of them, and copied it. There was much richer matter to work upon in the Lapland poems; yet the author of the Spectator-paraphrases found it advantageous, if not necessary, to strengthen into visibility those ideas which, in a version nearly literal, are seen but as through a glass darkly; and also to add some thoughts and images, of which no trace can be found in the originals, however exquisitely in keeping with the Lapland character, soil, and climate, as they appear to us in the ruder and faithful translations, which you will find enclosed.” The editor of Miss Seward's correspondence explains that “The translations here mentioned are printed in Lord Kames's [Henry Home's] Sketches on Man.”

page 15 note 1 P. 402.

page 15 note 2 ii, 31.

page 15 note 3 Chesterfield?

page 16 note 1 Sic.

page 17 note 1 I am indebted to Lewis Edwards Gates, Esq., for this information.

page 17 note 2 I, 11 f., 302.

page 17 note 3 Pp. 24, 134. This collection of songs seems to have been compiled early in the nineteenth century.

page 17 note 4 i, 216, 223. Cf. xxxix, n.

page 17 note 5 ii, 919.

page 17 note 6 P. 94.

page 17 note 7 Pt. 2, p. 5. The book appears to have been printed early in the last century. See, further, below, p. 21.

page 19 note 1 Lewis Edwards Gates, Esq., had the kindness to transcribe this letter and the accompanying verses for me from the British Museum copy of Poetry Fugitive and Original by the late Thomas Bedingfeld, Esq. and Mr. George Pickering, Newcastle, 1815. I also owe to Mr. Gates several other items of information with regard to this song.

page 21 note 1 P. 58.

page 21 note 2 P. 939.

page 21 note 3 P. 92.

page 21 note 4 The date is supplied in the British Museum Catalogue.

page 21 note 5 Pp. 63 f.

page 21 note 6 See below, p. 29. Facing p. 148 Consett has a picture of “Sighre and Aniea,” the two Lapland women brought to England by Liddell; the Appendix to the book describes them at length. Arthur de Capell Brooke, author of A Winter in Lapland and Sweden, London, 1826, declared that these women were not Lapps, but Finns. The Scheffer songs “which have been admired, and not without reason, in the shape in which they have appeared in the Spectator,” he thinks “cannot be mistaken for anything but the production of a Finlander,” and the song printed by Consett he would “here give if my limits allowed me to present any specimens of Finland poetry.” But he concludes, rather shrewdly, “It signifies indeed little if the words be but pretty and the air agreeable, Whether the numerous Lapland compositions which now make their appearance, were the production of some tender Lap, breathing out his soul in amorous sighs and passionate love-strains beyond the Polar Circle, or have owed their birth to some ingenious wight, whose travels northward have not extended beyond his own country” (pp. 377 f.). Brooke probably did not know the history of the verses reproduced by Consett, but he may have guessed it. Liddell's Lapland women are also mentioned by Ch. Gottlob Küttner, whose Travels Through Denmark, Sweden, [etc.] …. in 1798–99, Translated from the German, are published in the first volume of a Collection of Modern and Contemporary Voyages and Travels, London, 1805, i, 35 ff. (second numbering). Boswell alludes to Liddell (Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, New York, 1891, ii, 193, n.).

page 22 note 1 iv, 175.

page 22 note 2 The Scots Musical Museum, by James Johnsons vol. IV, Edinburgh, 1792, p. 388. Burns, it will be remembered, had furnished a good deal of material for this work.

page 22 note 3 For October, 1800, p. 208.

page 23 note 1 A foot-note refers to Currie, loc. cit.

page 23 note 2 Poems by T. B—g—d, Esq. of the Inner Temple [London, 1800].

page 23 note 3 Pp. 141 f.

page 23 note 4 Cf. the letter of “T. S.” to the Courant quoted above, p. 18.

page 25 note 1 He has not been deemed worthy an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, though he is mentioned in connection with Bedingfeld and Ellis, who are entered there. Ellis's Poetry, Fugitive and Original …. Newcastle, 1815, contains an unsatisfactory memoir of Pickering, which seems to have furnished the basis for later biographical notices in M. A. Richardson's The Borderer's Table Book, Newcastle, 1846 (iii, 331 f.) and in R. Welford's Men of Mark Twixt Tyne and Tweed, London, 1895 (in, 267 ff.). My information is derived from all three of these sources.

page 25 note 2 Welford, iii, 268.

page 26 note 1 See above, p. 23.

page 26 note 2 From Poetry, Fugitive and Original, p. 55.

page 27 note 1 For a long time there was a good deal of uncertainty with regard to the author's name. Burns could not give it in 1794, neither could Currie in 1800. In October, 1800, a correspondent of the Monthly Magazine, ascribed the poem to George Pickering. In vol. iv, p. 186, of the folio edition of George Thomson's A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs [1805] the author is said to be “Mr. Pickering.” In 1815 appeared Ellis's Poetry, Fugitive and Original, which contained a reprint of Donocht Head and an introductory note in which the editor explains that Walter Scott assures him “it is now attributed by the literati of Scotland to Pickering.” The editor adds that “this is stated as a positive fact by a correspondent of the Monthly Magazine,” an assertion which would seem to indicate—though it may be designedly misleading—that Ellis himself was not the author of either of the communications to the Monthly Magazine which we have already quoted. Ellis adds that Scott recited the piece to him from memory.

In 1838 David Laing published an annotated edition of Johnson's Museum which embodied a number of notes compiled by William Stenhouse before 1820. One of these notes (Laing, ed. of 1853, iv, 348) ascribes Donocht Head to “Thomas Pickering,” and in this connection Stenhouse presents the reader with the text of “another specimen of Mr. Pickering's poetical talents, A Lapland Song.” Stenhouse adds that “this song [i. e., the Lapland song] was arranged as a glee for three voices by Dr. Horsley.” This explains the “Thomas,” for on the title-page of Horsley's glee (London, 1803, see below, p. 28), the author appears as “Thos. Pickering, Esq.”

R. A. Smith printed the song in The Scotish Minstrel, Edinburgh, 1821–24, iii, 96, and ascribed it to “Pickering.”

In The Scottish Songs Collected and Illustrated by Robert Chambers, Edinburgh, 1829, the author is said to be “William Pickering” (ii, 507), and is further described as “a poor North of England poet, who never wrote anything else of the least merit.” Chambers ekes out Pickering's fragment with an additional stanza and a half composed by Captain Charles Gray.

In the edition of Burns's works published by Hogg and Motherwell in 1834–36 the poem is printed in connection with Burns's letter to Thomson, with the information, “It was written, we believe, by a gentleman of Newcastle named Pickering, now deceased” (ed. of 1850, iii, 172, n.). Chambers's edition of Burns, published in 1838, likewise reprints the poem and substantially repeats Motherwell's information (see ed. of 1852, iv, 99, n.). Wallace adds nothing in his edition (1896) of Chambers.

George F. Graham printed the poem, with Captain Gray's addition, in his Songs of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1848–49, ii, 140, and assigned it to “George Pickering” on the strength of the information contained in Ellis's Poetry, Fugitive and Original.

John D. Ross also includes Pickering's piece, with Captain Gray's addition, in Celebrated Songs of Scotland, New York, 1887, p. 120. He gives the author's name correctly and adds approximate dates of his birth and death.

There seems to be no good reason for questioning the assertion with regard to Pickering's authorship of Donocht Head, made by the anonymous correspondents of the Monthly Magazine. It may be worth noting that the letter quoted above which accompanied the poem upon its first appearance in print was signed “P. Q.,” and that, though the resemblance may of course be accidental, the communications sent to the Newcastle Courant by Pickering and Bedingfeld bore the signatures “T. S.” and “U. V.,” respectively.

page 28 note 1 The date is supplied in the British Museum Music Catalogue, where a note explains that “The words of this song have been erroneously attributed to Sir M. W. Ridley.”

page 28 note 2 See the edition of 1853, iv, 348. See also above, p. 27, n.

page 28 note 3 ii, 100.

page 29 note 1 See above, p. 27, n.

page 29 note 2 Ellis was tolerably well acquainted with Scott. In 1850 a tract of thirty-one pages was published at Newcastle, Letters between James Ellis, Esq. and Walter Scott, Esq., containing one letter from Ellis to Scott, dated 22 February, 1812, and two from Scott to Ellis, dated respectively 27 February, 1812, and 3 April, 1813, with some introductory matter and notes. The letters relate to the site of the Battle of Otterburn and other matters of local historical interest; Pickering is not mentioned. It appears from the editor's introduction (p. 10) that “Mr. Ellis practiced as an attorney for several years in Newcastle, maintaining an unblemished respectability of character, and afterwards retired to his estate of Otterburn Castle, where he cultivated his literary and antiquarian taste, and closed his honourable career on the 25th March, 1830 [æt. 67].”

In September, 1812, Scott spent a night with Ellis at Otterburne castle while on his way to Rokeby to visit J. B. S. Morritt, to whom the poem “Rokeby,” upon which Scott was then engaged, was dedicated. The next morning Ellis showed Scott some objects of antiquarian interest in the neighborhood and gave him other information which Scott later incorporated into his poem.

page 30 note 1 See the Poetical Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson and Cornwall, Paris, 1829, p. 148.

page 30 note 2 See the obituary notices in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1813, vol. 83, pp. 397, 671, and the Monthly Magazine, vol. 35, p. 459; Richardson's Borderer's Table Book, vol. iii, passim; Welford's Men of Mark Twixt Tyne and Tweed, iii, 322 f.

page 31 note 1 Poetry, Fugitive and Original, p. 128.

page 32 note 1 Poetry, Fugitive and Original, p. xvi.

page 32 note 2 Except Sir Henry George Liddell who, obviously, need not be considered.

page 32 note 3 Brooke's phrase in 1826. See above, p. 22, n.

page 33 note 1 Scheffer's Lapponia (p. 105, Latin ed.) contains a picture of the idol Thor, as it was worshiped by the Laplanders, which was copied in various English books.

page 33 note 2 3d ed., 1696, p. 6.

page 36 note 1 Sic.