Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/188

 SOME MYTHICAL TALES OF THE LAPPS.

BY C. J. BILLSON.

(Read before the Society, 15th May, 1918.)

proportion of the Lappish songs and tales which have come down to us have been gathered by different scholars from the lips of A. Fjellner, a former pastor of Sorsele in Lappmark. Fjellner was the son of mountain Lapps, and was born “sub Jove frigido,” high up on the snow-clad mountains of the Herjedal, near the borders of Norway, on 18th September, 1795. His father dying when he was nine years old, the boy was sent to school by a distant relative. After passing through school and the gymnasium at Hernösand, he entered in 1818 the University of Upsala. All his holidays and University vacations were spent with his own relatives, amongst whom he led the nomad life of a mountain Lapp, tending reindeer on the hills, and often, in the long winter evenings, listening to the stories and poems that were sometimes recited and sometimes sung by old people. The name of Fjellner was adopted, after a custom not unusual with educated Lapps, from the circumstance of his birth on the mountain. (Cf. Fjell-ström, Fjell-man.) In the year 1820 he left the University, and, after spending some years as a missionary among the Lapps, lived as a pastor’s assistant in Jukkas-järvi from 1831 to 1842. In the latter year he set out, in true Lapp fashion, with his wife, two children and eleven reindeer, and made his way across the mountains to Sorsele, where he remained as pastor for the rest of his life.

Fjellner’s unique knowledge of Lappish songs and stories