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,
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:
- How Kvens could be so influential as to rule isles in Scotland and yet later appear to have so few land holdings in Scandinavia
- 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.
- 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.
Esaikkaisa, a word found on f23r could be an old spelling of the Sami word Isogaisa meaning superb.
