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Finland

Gallen-Kallela at the National Gallery

From November 15 until February of next year, the National Gallery here in London will mark the centenary of Finnish independence with a showing of the works of Akseli Gallen-Kallela. The Finnish painter is best known for his depictions of the Kalevala, the national epic compiled by Lönnrot and an influence on Tolkien.

The National Gallery, however, has focused on bringing together all four versions of Gallen-Kallela’s painting of Lake Keitele (alongside similar works by the artist). As a Swedish-speaking Finn, he signed the painting with his original Swedish name, Axel Waldemar Gallén, which he later Finnicised in 1907.

During Finland’s Civil War, Gallen-Kallela and his son Jorma both took up arms on the side of the Whites, who defended the country from the Soviet-backed Reds. The artist (below) served as adjutant to the regent of the kingdom, Gen Mannerheim, who asked him to design the flag, uniforms, and decorations of the new state. His student Eric O. Ehrström designed a crown for the kingdom, but eventually a republican form of government was decided upon and it wasn’t til the 1980s that a mock-up of the crown was actually crafted.

Having lived in Berlin and Kenya as well as having toured the United States, Gallen-Kallela’s influences were varied but he found the story and scenery of his homeland the most compelling of all. A fitting tribute to Finland in her hundredth year of statehood.

October 19, 2017 1:40 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

Tuesday 12 January

– Imagine you find out your mother has been killed. Then imagine her killer not only goes unpunished but that he’s subject to a continual stream of awards and honours. At school your son is handed a leaflet promoting the man who ended his grandmother’s life. The only objectors (Catholics and Holocaust survivors) are easily brushed aside.

This isn’t an alternate universe: this is Belgium today, as the New Yorker reports. (via M.B.D.)

– Fr Edmund Waldstein relates a stimulating dialogue upon Star Wars between Over-Bearing, Past-Bearing, and Baring (with a cameo appearance from Duff Cooper).

– I’ve mentioned Tolkein and his love of Finnish before. More recently, the BBC inquired about Finland’s influence on the writer.

– “It’s the most nauseating display in American public life,” says Kevin D Williamson in his splendid jeremiad, “and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.”

– Fredrik de Boer puts his head above the parapet and gives us a little insight into how things work.

– And finally, some good news: a study claims French is set to overtake Chinese as the world’s most widely spoken language by 2050. (But, as P.E.G. noted in 2014, the methodology is a bit dodgy.)

Let’s hope they’re reading Bossuet rather than Voltaire.

January 12, 2016 10:25 am | Link | No Comments »

Some Finnish Words

We’ve been rather too neglectful of Finnish, the language so beloved of Tolkien. The South-African-born philologist and mythmaker described his introduction to the Finnish tongue as being “like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.” Aside from Tolkein’s love of the Finnish language, Elias Lönrott’s Kalevala epic was a central influence on the creation of The Lord of the Rings, as numerous scholars have written about.

I mentioned kaupunkilaissuomenruotsalaiset on Facebook the other day, and Sara piped up with the remainder of the following list of Finnish words. (more…)

September 8, 2011 8:18 pm | Link | 3 Comments »

Interesting Things Elsewhere

Benedict and Britain

The papal visit began in Scotland, and the smaller setting (Scotland has just five million people, fewer than London alone) proved a wiser starting point of the pontiff’s trip to Great Britain. “Would the first day have been the success it was if it had taken place in England?” asked William Oddie. “Would the papal chemistry have worked so soon in London, that vast and engulfing megalopolis, if the reception by Her Majesty had taken place in the impersonal splendours of Buckingham palace rather than in that ancient architectural wonder Holyrood house (whose very stones are a testimony to its Catholic origins) and if the Popemobile ride through the streets afterwards had been down the Mall?”

Damian Thompson has argued that the papal visit has proved a triumph for Benedict and a humiliation for the secular-humanist crowd. The Daily Telegraph blogs editor and Catholic Herald editor-in-chief says that the Pope’s natural shyness has worked to his advantage, while the former Spectator editor Dominic Lawson argued in the Independent that Benedict’s unpolitical nature gives him a popular appeal.

The volume and biliousness of the media’s campaign against Benedict XVI has actually backfired and turned the lukewarm into pope-welcomers (like Kate Hoey MP, reports Christina Odone). Another blogger reported the influence a television programme produced by the gay activist and sometime paedophilia sympathiser Peter Tatchell that was broadcast just before the Pope’s arrival:

‘Are you going tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘Yes, I am,’ she replied. ‘I wasn’t going to at first, because it’s a long day, but when I saw that rubbish last night on the telly, I changed my mind. I’m don’t care if I die there; I’m going.’

Meanwhile Mark Dowd, another homosexual, was determined to be even-handed in his documentary “Benedict: Trials of a Pope”, and his broadcast was well-received. The filmmaker wrote in the Catholic Herald “when you have to make a one-hour programme on one of the most clever and gifted people on the planet you have to look behind the headlines and the angry rants on the blogosphere. In short, you have to do justice to the man as best as you can.”

Hilary White had a chat with barrister and Catholic Union chairman Jamie Bogle, who argued that the visit has taken the wind out of the sails of Benedict’s enemies.

“Jamie also pointed out that the protesters were having a bit of fun with the numbers,” Hilary writes. “A friend in Vancouver said that 25,000 turned out for the demonstration. The National Secular Society said it was ‘between 10 and 12,000’. But Jamie told me he had spoken with some of the cops present, and they said it was no more than 2,000.”

It was like a scene from 1984

BRENDAN O’NEILL | SPIKED

Atheist Brendan O’Neill reported being disturbed by the anti-papal demonstrators, reporting that there is “a sharp authoritarian edge” to the radical pope-haters. “Things turned ugly outside Downing Street when Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society branded the pope an ‘enemy of the state’, giving rise to the cacophonous chant: ‘GO HOME POPE, GO HOME POPE.’ It was like a scene from 1984. I have been on many a radical demo that has challenged the branding of some group or individual as ‘enemies of the state’; but this is the first radical demo I’ve been on where the protesters themselves demanded the silencing and even expulsion from Britain of someone they decreed to be an ‘enemy of the state’. Even one-time ‘enemies of the state’ – the so-called queers and the old left – were using that criminalising phrase, that piece of political demonology, to chastise the pope. It was the world turned utterly upside down.”read more

Also: The campaigners against the pope’s visit have more in common with the fanatical Inquisitors of old than with Enlightened liberal humanists, says Frank Furedi.

The conservative case for rail

THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE

File this one under “things we always knew and are glad someone agrees”: the dissident conservative fortnightly The American Conservative presents a symposium of articles about getting the USA back on the rails. William Lind attempts to destroy the myth of public-transport-hating conservatives while attacking the rampant subsidisation of federal highways. Former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist says the Right shouldn’t surrender the cities to the Left. Glen Bottoms does the numbers on the return to rail and tries to figure out how much it will cost. Finally, John Robert Smith argues that there’s still some life in America’s Main Streets. Christopher Leinberger discusses how private development can fund public infrastructure. read more

The Thomist constitution

AELIANUS | EX LAODICEA

St. Thomas Aquinas, the “Dumb Ox”, stated that “all should take some share in the government: for this form of constitution ensures peace among the people, commends itself to all, and is most enduring”. Aelianus muses on a Thomistic view of government, explores the pros and cons of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and ponders the political position of the family in society. read more

Swedish under threat in Finland

THELOCAL.SE

Swedish was historically the language of Finland’s nobility and intelligentsia, as well as of the country’s ethnic Swedish minority — Finland’s first president and greatest hero, Field Marshal Mannerheim, could barely even speak Finnish. But while the Scandinavian land is still officially bilingual in education and government, the 5.5% of the population who are Swedish-Finns is increasingly viewed as “the world’s most pampered minority”. read more

The Südtirol success story

WALTER MAYR | DER SPIEGEL

Amid the warnings of doom and gloom ahead for the Italian economy, one province has almost full employment and a healthy economy, not to mention a governor who has ruled for over twenty years. “We are living in the promised land,” — Südtirol. read more

September 22, 2010 2:10 pm | Link | No Comments »

Come to Finland

Travel Advertising from the Golden Age of Poster Design

FINLAND IS HIGH on my list of places to visit once I am re-situated across the pond, mainly because of the exceptional warmth and charm of the Finns I am blessed enough to call my friends. If the Finns themselves weren’t reason enough to visit the Land of the Midnight Sun, journalist & travel historian Magnus Londen has teamed up with copywriter Joakim Enegren and web operative Ant Simons to compile Come to Finland: Posters & Travel Tales 1851-1965. The art of poster design is one sadly neglected today, when advertising has developed into myriad other more pervasive yet less impressive forms. The book’s closing date, 1965, roughly marks the end of the golden years of poster design. Visitors to the book’s website can order postcards of the posters featured in the book, or copies of the posters themselves, more of which the dedicated poster-hunting authors are continually discovering. (more…)

August 1, 2010 7:10 pm | Link | 8 Comments »

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