The Kvens and the Voynich Manuscript

A brief history of the Kvens

Over a thousand years ago, the word Kvens (quain, qwaen, quen, cwen, fin, finn) meant to most western people the Finno-Ugric family of peoples who lived in the British Isles, Denmark and northern Germany until they merged with invading Celts and Goths from the east. The Kvens of Western and Central Europe are the people who disappeared from the map, but their name still lives in various forms between Scotland and Kainuu, Finland.

According to Scandinavian legend, in ancient times, the Finnish tribe called the Quen lived in the whole of Finland south of Sapmi. Kvens committed predatory raids on Sami territory and as a result on the Saami areas Kven villages formed up to the northern outskirts of the Gulf of Bothnia. The Gulf of Bothnia's coast was named Kainuu from these Kven villages. At first meant Kainuu meant the coast on both the Swedish and Finnish sides of the bay.
Comprehensive Historical Timeline

The Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 55-117) writes in his Germanica of the enigmatic Sithoni. Tacitus and Adam of Bremen (1070s) describe a country ruled by women: Terra Feminarum. Modern research identifies these as the Kvener. English King Alfred and his Norwegian columnist Ohthere (Ottar, about 890) gives a good description of their kingdom and its history. The value of Icelandic sagas as source material has varied, but their geographical value still holds even in terms of the country's historical location. Snorri Sturluson gave a different interpretation of Norway's founding in the saga Fundinn Noregr. He replaced the Odin myth royal fairy tale with the story about the fabulous kings of Kvenland, which in fact were the giants mentioned in Icelandic mythology. References in Finnish folk poetry to Pohja or Pohjola also mean Kainuu/Kvenland. (This is the land of Louhi, the Witch of the North, mistress of Pohjola, who features prominently in Finland's national epic, The Kalevala and is discussed in a blog post titled The Baba Yaga and dappled others.)

The former Kvenland was thus a unit in the early Baltic history and lay around the Bothnia bay. Kvenland belonged neither to Sweden or Finland, for back then there was no Sweden or Finland. The first threat to its existence came from Karelians and Novgorod from about the year 1100, and it seems that most of the former Kvenland came under Karelian supremacy during that time. There are several sources that account for Kvener cooperating with the Northmen against the Karelians, and others tell of Kvener in cooperation with the Karelians against the Northmen. Birger Jarl's genocide in Tavastland in the middle of the 13th century, known as the second crusade, was directed at the pavilions, which have been said to have been war against Karelians / Russians and sometimes allied themselves to the Swedish invasion, which was basically aimed at Novgorod. Birger Jarl's ravages of Häme was the preparation of the so-called Third Crusade against the already Christian Karelians, who enjoyed patronage in Novgorod. (The above introduction to the Kvens was excerpted from United by Water.)

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Who knows? Doggerland may turn out to have been an important ancient seat of Kvenland, and maybe that's why the people themselves seem to have vanished. I would not be surprised if most of the Danish bog mummies were Kven pilgrims on the way to Lejre from Norway. I believe, also, the Kvens' instrument, the jouhikko, gave the Welsh their crwth and the Scots their gue, and the Kven skin boats gave the Celts their curachs and coracles. That is, I think the Kvens voyaged west and brought innovation with them.

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Danish/Norwegian tax records from the 16th century already list some Kvens living in North Norway. Also, the famous map of Scandinavia by Olaus Magnus from 1539 shows a possible Kven settlement roughly in between today's Tromsø and Lofoten named "Berkara Qvenar". Kvens of this time are often connected to the birkarl organization in northern Sweden. In some early documents Kvens are also grouped together with the Sami people, who are the indigenous people of Central and Northern Norway. Wiki

Once the later migrations transpire, discerning early from late Kvens becomes impossible. Nevertheless, there is this report of Kven that may be from the Berkara Qvenar. Olaus Magnus knows sequences and thus they are in his Carta Marina (1539). Bureus mention in their atlases (1611, 1626) Cajania province, which coincides with the Finnish Ostrobothnia. Central European cartographic tradition (Tschudi, Herbenstein, about 1550) felt that Kayenskaja Zemlya, and Cayeni (kajaanit, kvener, kainuulaiset) has been under Russian rule, but conquered by Swedish kings. Cayeni lived according to him, both in northern Sweden and Ostrobothnia, ie Finnish Ostrobothnia. Tschudi also identifies Norrbotten Ostrobothnias north of the border and went under the peace treaty in Nöteborg (1323) just south of Pyhäjoki (in Petäoja). Several later European cartographers confuse fields and their positions here in the periphery of Europe, and Mercator (late 1500s) and others place Kayenskaja Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean. United by Water

Olaus Magnus - http://www.npm.ac.uk/rsdas/projects/carta_marina/ "Carta Marina satellite images"

Carta marina, a wallmap of w:Scandinavia, by Olaus Magnus. The caption reads : Marine map and Description of the Northern Lands and of their Marvels, most carefully drawn up at Venice in the year 1539 through the generous assistance of the Most Honourable Lord Hieronymo Quirino.

A - Tromso

B - Maelstrom

C - Lofoten

D - Possible Kven settlement - Berkara Qvenar

E - Some devilish little dude sweeping the floor. What does he stand for?

F - An island with mound houses similar to those found in Greenland and nowhere else on this map. Why are they also here?

G - A couple on skis practicing archery. This is a remarkably egalitarian depiction of a woman in the 16th century.

By contrast, Francesco Primaticcio painted this in roughly the same year. It's Helen again, getting raped.

While speaking along the lines of gender specifically, Kvens appear to have been by necessity extraordinarily egalitarian as opposed to their southern counterparts, giving rise to tales of northern amazon tribes, yet along ethnographic lines they appear not to have been egalitarian at all, for as noted elsewhere, they enslaved and taxed the Sami people as egregiously as did any later Norseman. Gunnloth from Snorri's account, who guarded the mead of the Scalds (poetry), may originally have been a Kven from Kven myth, and her uncle, Baugi, a birkarl owning nine Sami, the slaves who killed each other for the whetstone. In the tale, Odin himself Bolverk. Compare this to words such as Boiorix ("king of the Boii", one of the chieftains of the Cimbri) and Boiodurum ("gate/fort of the Boii", modern Passau) in Germany and the modern regional names of Bohemia (Boiohaemum), a mixed-language form from boio- and Proto-Germanic *haimaz, "home": "home of the Boii," and 'Bayern', Bavaria, which is derived from the Germanic Baiovarii tribe (Germ. *baio-warioz: the first component is most plausibly explained as a Germanic version of Boii; the second part is a common formational morpheme of Germanic tribal names, meaning 'dwellers', as in Anglo-Saxon -ware); this combination "Boii-dwellers" may have meant "those who dwell where the Boii formerly dwelt". 

According to Strabo, writing two centuries after the Gallic invasion of north Italy in around 350 BC, rather than being destroyed by the Romans like their Celtic neighbours,

"the Boii were merely driven out of the regions they occupied; and after migrating to the regions round about the Ister, lived with the Taurisci, and carried on war against the Daci until they perished, tribe and all — and thus they left their country, which was a part of Illyria, to their neighbours as a pasture-ground for sheep."

Thus we may have in this myth an ancient tale of cultural appropriation not first by a conqueror but by a wanderer of a lost tribe, himself abducted by the Kvens and set to labor among the Sami, who either escapes later or is released and eventually makes himself the hero of a tale about how he acquired (stole) from the Kvens the art of poetry. Many tales within Norse and Finnish mythology bear marks of an earlier origin and different telling, a thing that scholars of these texts have been repeatedly faced with and forced to explain, one egregious example being the lifting of the sea deity Nerthus from a north German tribe and making her Njorth.

The Birkarls

Birkarls (birkarlar in Swedish, unhistorical pirkkamiehet or pirkkalaiset in Finnish; bircharlaboa, bergcharl etc. in historical sources) were a small, unofficially organized Finnish group that controlled taxing and commerce in central Lappmarken in Sweden during the 13th to 17th centuries.

The most probable assumption is that Birkarls were originally Finnish traders mainly from historical Tavastia. King Magnus III Birgersson is traditionally claimed to have granted their privileges to control the trade and taxes in the north in the later half of the 13th century, possibly just legalizing an already existing situation. Birkarls (bircharlaboa) are first mentioned in 1328, when they are listed as one of the settler groups in northern Hälsingland that covered the western coast of Gulf of Bothnia all the way up and around the gulf to Oulu River.

The main purpose of the birkarl organization was to control the trade with Sami people and tax them. Sami people were traditionally taxed by Norwegians already in the Viking Age or even earlier. Later Russians started to tax them as well. After having southern Finland under control around 1250, Sweden became interested in the situation in the north. Eventually, some Sami people paid taxes to all three states. Birkarls were just one element in the colonial system taking benefit of the Sami area.

It seems that birkarls' privileges were more de facto, than de jure. No document has survived granting them official right to the tax and trade monopoly in the north, even though the state first supported and later tolerated the situation for centuries.

In practise, a birkarl owned the Sami people on his area, and they were treated as if they were property. Privileges to own Sami people usually went in the family. Later, birkarl privileges became merchandise as well.

Birkarls were active on Tornio, Luleå and Piteå River valleys, Tornio being their main area. Each of the valleys formed a separate "lappmark" with its own birkarls. 

It is often speculated in Finland that ancient Kvens which are mentioned in some Norwegian and Icelandic sources in the early Middle Ages, were an organization similar to birkarls. According to this theory, "Kvenland" would have then been the same area where birkarls later operated. The very small number of birkarls makes this connection unlikely. Swedish sources also mention birkarls to be settlers in their area of operation still in the early 14th century whereas Kvenland is mentioned to be a land comparable to Sweden and Norway already in the Viking Age.

It is however likely, that northern Norwegians generally called birkarl traders as "Kvens" in the Middle Ages and later. Olaus Magnus mentions both of the terms in his publication Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus ("A Description of the Northern Peoples") from 1555 CE. Those Finnish traders that went from Tornio to Norway, are told to have been called "Kvens".

Whatever the case, most of the Kven minority in present-day northern Norway has immigrated from the same area on which birkarls were active. Wiki

The author of the wiki article does not take into account that Kven society was made up of two widely disparate occupations: the far-ranging traders who by and large were men and the women who by and large were the rulers and administrators of the land (Kvens as seafaring traders first and foremost and women as rulers on land come from insights shared with me by researcher Andres Paabo, who has conducted a mountain of work on prehistoric seafaring traders all over the world. I recommend his website: Uirala http://www.paabo.ca/uirala/uiralamenu.html).

This helps to explain some things:

1. How Kvens could be so influential as to rule isles in Scotland and yet later appear to have so few land holdings in Scandinavia
2. How Kvens appeared to vanish suddenly, with no evidence of calamity. We read in the legends of very powerful wily queens or their beautiful daughters being wooed. We hear nothing of what happened to their men. Plague? Storms? War? Conversion? Famine? Slavery? Or simply the lure of other lands? Perhaps all of these to some extent.
3. How an entire people may be given a title according to an outsider's perspective and reality be more complex than first glance. 

At any rate, the tax collection and other administrative duties of the birkarls most likely often fell on the shoulders of the women as well. A later post in this blog will shed light on a host of Nordic women of mixed ancestry who owned and managed sometimes vast tracts of land during the 15th century, proving that to some extent the Kven birkarls in fact did not die out at all but rather when it came into vogue to cancel out, wholesale, any significance women may hold--past, present, or future in the annals of history, be it medical, legal, political, or religious, any remnant trace of the Kvens fell into oblivion with their story. Hence, her story of where she came from mattered far less than his of how she was won.

The word "Kven" and its etymological connection to the female sex

cwen  - a noun for woman

Old English From Proto-Germanic *kwēniz ‎(“woman, wife”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʷḗn. Cognate with Old Saxon quān, Old Norse kvæn, Gothic qens. The Indo-European root is also the source of Ancient Greek γυνή ‎(gunḗ), (Greek γυναίκα ‎(gynaíka)), Proto-Slavic *žena (Old Church Slavonic жена ‎(žena), Russian жена ‎(žena)), Old Irish ben (Welsh benyw), and Albanian zonjë.

Seo clæneste cwen ofer eorþan: the purest woman on earth.

wife

queen

Aðelwulf cyng Carles dohtor hæfde to cwene: King Athelwulf took Charles's daughter as his queen.

nominative      cwēn    cwēne, cwēna

accusative        cwēn, cwēne   cwēne, cwēna

genitive           cwēne  cwēna

dative  cwēne  cwēnum

cwene (woman, wife, prostitute)

Middle English quene

Modern English queen

English: quean

Danish: kvinde

Norwegian: kvinne

Swedish: kvinna

The Kven Language (Kainun Kieli)

The Kven language is a Finnic language spoken in northern Norway by the Kven people. For political and historical reasons, it received the status of a minority language in 2005 within the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Linguistically, however, it is seen as a mutually intelligible dialect of the Finnish language, and grouped together with the Peräpohjola dialects such as Meänkieli, spoken in Torne Valley in Sweden.

Kven dialects include: Lyngen, Nordreisa, Kvænangen, Alta, Porsanger, Tana, Nord-Varanger, Sør-Varanger.

Contrary to popular belief, the dialects spoken by the Kvens and Kainuu peoples are not closely related. The Kainuu dialect is one of the Savonian dialects that was formed from the 16th century onwards, when immigrants from Savonia started to settle in the northern wastelands.

The Kven language has come to incorporate many Norwegian loanwords, such as tyskäläinen (from the Norwegian word tysk, meaning German) instead of standard Finnish saksalainen. The Kven language also uses some old Finnish words that are no longer used in Finland.

Like the old Kven tongue, Voynichese is FENNO-NORSE.

The Voynich manuscript may in fact be written in the old Kven tongue. It is looking very, very likely. Interestingly, numerous early Germanic words have survived largely unchanged as borrowings in Finnic languages. Some of these may be of Proto-Germanic origin or older still, while others reflect developments specific to Norse. Some examples (with the reconstructed Proto-Norse form):

• Estonian/Finnish kuningas < *kuningaz "king" (Old Norse kunungr, konungr)
• Finnish ruhtinas "prince" < *druhtinaz "lord" (Old Norse dróttinn)
• Finnish sairas "sick" < *sairaz "sore" (Old Norse sárr)
• Estonian juust, Finnish juusto "cheese" < *justaz (Old Norse ostr)
• Estonian/Finnish lammas "sheep" < *lambaz "lamb" (Old Norse lamb)
• Finnish hurskas "pious" < *hurskaz "prudent, wise, quick-minded" (Old Norse horskr)
• Finnish runo "poem, rune" < *rūno "secret, mystery, rune" (Old Norse rún)
• Finnish vaate "garment" < *wādiz (Old Norse váð)
• Finnish viisas "wise" < *wīsaz (Old Norse víss)

The old Kven language in its original form has in part vanished and in part it has greatly contributed to and has assimilated with other Fennoscandian languages.

And what happened to Old Norse?

Around 1350 the Black Death ravaged Norway which weakened the country and the population was greatly reduced. The upper class were those who were literate in the country. They became extinct, as did much of the art of writing forvant and resources of cultural life were gone. Swedish, Danish and northern German nobles intermarried into the remains of the Norwegian share which made ​​it foreigners who took over much of the power in Norway. Original literature regarding the Norwegians was no longer written, only literature regarding administration and trade. When Norway came under Danish rule, the language disappeared altogether.

Well...yes and no. Its roots survive everywhere in Norwegian and other Nordic languages.

Introduction

Voynich Rosette Map Records An Ancient Pilgrimage

The Context for the Voynich Manuscript

The Rites of the Hidden

Spinning, Hulda, and the Voynich

The Huldra/Hiisi and the Voynich Manuscript

Terra Feminarum and the Venusbergs

The Baba Yaga and dappled others

The Beauties of Bad Press

Chýnov Cave and the Adamites

Introduction

I think the imagery throughout the Voynich manuscript is entirely too pagan to come from any sect rooted in Judeo-Christian belief. However, the theory explored in this post is worth considering for several reasons.

First, one woman does hold up a cross.

Second, the Adamites may have blended their doctrine with the native folk traditions of the area, picking up reflections of Frau Holle. It looks to me like just the opposite may have been the case. Some Adamites or Hussites may have joined in on the pagan ritual depicted in the Voynich. Hence, the cross.
Third, the cave depicted in the Voynich could as easily be Chynov as Ruskeala, for it has the same sort of reticulated roofs and green water, and Chynov would have been a prime candidate as refuge for the Adamites when the Hussites swept through Tabor to clean house.
Fourth, many of the women are nude, which is in keeping with what we know about the Adamites.
Fifth, the Uralic undertone in Voynichese could be explained as a dialect of Hungarian. This is the thinnest point, for while certainly Finnic, Voynichese bears little resemblance to Hungarian constructions but rather reveals a very strong vein of Old Norse along with the Finnic.
Sixth, the rosette map depicts the castles leading up to Prague. That's nearly a no-brainer for anyone taking the time to study it. More about this is on the post titled

Castles and the Rosette Map 

If nothing else, it is worth noting that the stage in northeastern Europe during the 15th century had far more players than the Holy Roman Empire or major sects such as the Hussites.

The Adamites

The Adamites resurfaced in Bohemia in the 15th century, during the time when the Voynich manuscript was written.

Let's set the stage with an intro to the Hussites. The Hussites were the Rebel Alliance in the early 1400s against their enemy, The Holy Roman Empire. The Hussite revolt against the Roman Catholic Church in 1418 attracted heretics from far and wide. Among the most interesting by far were the Adamites.

The Adamites were a well known North African cult in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Centuries, devoted to regaining the innocence of pre-Fall Adam.  Their main expression of (or motivation behind) this rediscovered ‘liberty’ was to practice ‘holy nudism’- both in every day life, and in public worship.  They tended to meet underground, and referred to their services as ‘Paradise’.  Their favourite Bible moment was, unsurprisingly, David’s undignified dancing in his pants at the return of the ark in 2 Samuel 6.

Despite being condemned as heretics by the likes of Augustine, the Adamites saw something of a revival in 15th Century Bohemia with a sect of Taborites who ‘indulged in predatory forays upon the neighborhood, and… committed wild excesses in nocturnal dances.’

The main teaching of this sect was that God is all that exists. Private property is blasphemy, on the other hand all that is common property is sacred. Therefore women should be common too. The mass consisted of stripping naked, dancing around a fire and concluding in an all-out orgy. They themselves were the sons of God, Jesus a misguided distant relative (for he died, unlike what they expected of themselves). They began their prayers: “Oh Lord who art in us…”.

The pious Hussites couldn’t tolerate such wickedry in their new (Biblically inspired) town of Tabor in Southern Bohemia. After a few months of the founding of the city, the Adamites were expelled. The sect set up shop only a few hours away. They began to raid villages in their vicinity, murdering peasants who were but lesser beings in their eyes as was everybody else. So the Tabor Hussites send a field army to destroy each of their new camps. Finally, they are cornered into a river island where they fight to the last. Against the armoured soldiers of Tabor stand by now only a small group (cca 40) of naked men, women and children. They fight so fiercely that the enemy general is killed, but in the end the Adamites stand no chance. Those who are not killed in the fighting are burnt at stake.

Or that is at least how the story goes according to the chroniclers of the time. History is written by the victors (or in this case those who were defeated later) and so all our sources come from moderate Taborite Hussites, who detested a sect that disregarded church hierarchy of any kind (be their Papal or Hussite); was flirting with communal ownership and instead empowered the disenfranchised proletariat to not only interpret the religious teachings themselves, but also to abolish taxation of any kind.

But we no longer speak of Adamites, but of Chilialists who were relatively wide-spread in Southern Bohemia in the earlier years and expected the world to end and in its stead Jesus’ thousand year reign to be imminent. So it is quite possible that there never were any proper “Adamites” (as a group) per se. Instead we have a proto-anarcho syndicalist, extremely pious and to a great extent anachronistic religious sect only labeled “Adamites” by their enemies.

The Adamites - Sex Crazed Medieval Maniacs In Southern Bohemia?

CHÝNOV CAVE

The Chýnov Cave is located 3 km north-east of the small town Chýnov (10 km east of the town Tábor). It is one of the biggest caves and the first declassified one in the Czech Republic.

Chýnov Cave - dragon
The limestone cave was discovered in 1863. It arose by the power of the water in the southern hillside of Pacova Hora (Pacov's Mount).

There is an underground system of small lakes in the cave with different depths - maximal is 37 m. The small stream runs through the lowest part. In the 1980's the big cave, about 100 m long and 30 m high, was found below the water level. The depth of discovered spaces grew up to 81 m. The length of discovered tunnels is about 1200 m, but just 220 m is accessible to the public.

A lot of interesting formations were created by water and various colours of marble, such as white, yellow and brown can be found on the walls of the cave. The typical stalactite and stalagmite formations for these kinds of caves are not found here.

Divergence of Finnish and Hungarian

The diaspora of the Uralic language family has led to geographic isolation between members. In fact, there is a clear pattern in this language family between distance and language divergence. One of the most obvious examples of this drastic divergence is the relationship between Finnish and Hungarian. These two major branches split approximately 4,500 years ago, compared with Germanic languages, whose divergence commenced an estimated 2,000 years ago.

Dr. Gyula Weöres, a lecturer at the University of Helsinki in the early twentieth century, published several books about Uralic linguistics. In Finland-Hungary Album (Suomi-Unkari Albumi), Dr. Weöres explains that there are nine independent Uralic languages that form a "language chain" from the Danube valley to the coast of Finland. Hungarian and Finnish exist on the polar opposite ends of this language chain. Hungarian is even more isolated due to its people's history of conquering while traveling across Europe toward Hungary. Excluding Hungarian, the Uralic languages form two geographically continuous language chains along major waterways.

Coupling this vast geographic distance with several thousand years of independent development and vastly differing history, the extent of the language diversion between Finnish and Hungarian is not surprising.

http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/Hungarian-And-Finnish.htm

Conclusion

For one blaring indication that this is not at all a tight fit as a theory, one need only look again at the star charts with the women in the center. To my knowledge, nothing in the Adamites' beliefs would make for placing the faces of women in the centers of the star charts. As per the theory that this is a pagan text from a Norse/Germanic tradition that predates Odin/Thor, etc., those women are the disir, female ancestors of various nordic clans. Really, nothing else explains them. Nor does this Adamite theory explain why all the women and very few men depicted. So I still believe that the origin is more Kven than Bohemian, despite the fact that the castles correlate to those closer to Prague. Best guess is that this is a map for a pilgrimage down to Bohemia led by a woman or women from the north. The cult of Hulda resided throughout the countryside from the Alps all the way up to northern Norway, and from the Black Sea all the way west to the British Isles. The headdresses these women wear tell us plainly that they gathered from different areas in Europe. It's quite possible that we are looking at precisely what the Church endeavored to wipe from the face of the earth throughout the 11th to the 18th century.

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