‘Braves Step out of the Night of the Barrows’: Regenerating the Heritage of Early Medieval Finland

Abstract

This study is a rather sweeping examination of how the distant national past was conceived, constructed and even utilized in Finland from the mid-sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. During this long period, the emerging national consciousness went through several phases, as it came to require a public, distant, yet obligating, past: a time of true, untainted and spiritual nationhood. In the end, the main task of the national enlightenment [Fin. Kansanvalistus] was to convince the Finnish people of their presumed lost unity and slumbering potential. The Finns were to recomprehend their heritage and to remember the sacrifices generations of inhabitants had been forced to make in defence of their national survival.

The epoch, which has gone to its grave and on the barrows of which new life is already flowering, has given us a cultural foundation, a produce of itself and a heritage of previous eras — as generations supersede each other the cultural heritage continues, and without this continuity no national life can endure. The roots of the nation’s civilization are in the distant past, and these roots may even today provide the life of the nation with fresh juice, while we have no need to hold in contempt what is found above the roots, where the branches, where the leaves, where the flowers, and where the fruits are.¹

E. N. Setälä (1933)