Jokkmokk

After much exertion I arrived at JOKKMOKK, which is also the mother church of Kvikkjokk. The pastor lives here.

If I am not mistaken, the Lapps put dried sedge in their boots with the ears still attached to it. They comb it with iron or horn combs and twist it in their hands so that it becomes soft. Then they dry it and put it in their shoes where it protects them against the most extreme cold even if they go without stockings.

30th. The two clerics – Messrs. Maiming the schoolmaster and Högling the parson – pestered me with their stubborn clerical fancies. I was astonished that such great arrogance and ambition, such great foolishness and vulgarity, such great stubbornness and base argumentation should be found in men of the cloth, who are after all supposed to be educated men. Indeed, any student of the age of 12 ought to have read his books better. I could understand only too well why these ruffians had been kept well away from decent people.

The parson began to discuss the clouds in Lappmark and told me how they touch the mountains, picking up rocks, trees and animals which they then carry off. I ascribed this, as seemed most likely, to the strength of the wind and said that clouds do not pick things up. He smiled at me and said that I had never seen such a cloud (since I had not even been in the mountains). “Yes I have,” I answered, “and when it is misty there, I am actually walking in cloud, and when the mist is falling straight down, then it is raining below me”. He smiled a sardonic smile at such intellectual embroidery. Even less to his liking was my discourse on globules of water being taken up into the atmosphere and he informed me that the clouds were solid. When I rejected this, he supported his case with a passage of Scripture, smiled at my simplicity and said that he would, moreover, like to inform me that there is a kind of slime that, after there has been rain, permanently covers the mountains in the places where the clouds have touched. When I said that this was called Nostoc and that it was vegetable matter, I was judged to be crazy like St Paul, and he said that too much learning had made me mad.1 He even sneered at those natural philosophers who try to understand everything through reason, as Sturmius did in the case of flight with hollow spheres.2 He advised me rather to put my trust in people who understood such things and not to write a thesis full of all such lunacy as soon as I got home.

The other (the Pedagogue) admonished me, saying that people spend too much time on worldly vanity and thus, unfortunately, neglect spiritual matters. Many a man, he added, is ruined by an excessive hankering after learning. Both of them expressed surprise that the Royal Society should have called on a mere student to do this job, as if the Society had thought it impossible to find a competent man in the north to undertake it. Either of them would have been glad to take on the task. But, in my judgment, they were certainly “asses at the lyre” – a saying that has never been more apt than here.3

They had 4 pupils, and the church was small.

Some people, when they have a headache from drink or any other cause, hold their heads in front of the fire until they really hurt, and this helps. Other people put pulverised spruce needles on their heads.

3 1/2 miles from the church I found ‘Cirsium minus’ [Alpine Saw-wort], ‘Cacalia’ [butterbur]4 without flowers, as well as what the Lapps call ‘botsko” and the Västerbotten people call “björnstut” ie. ‘Magistrantia’ [Angelica]. It was similar to ‘Angelica, umbella universalis, nuda’ [Garden Angelica]. The Lapp picked it immediately and, peeling the stalk which had not yet come into flower, ate it like a turnip as though it were a great delicacy. It really was tasty, the upper and softer part being particularly good, and the Lapps search avidly for it.

I arrived eventually at PURKIJAUR, a small island with a spruce wood on its northern side and birch woods to east and west with the result that no harm can come to the com. There was a settler living there and he said that the com was never damaged by the cold because, in addition to the woods, the water also counteracts the cold. The situation in which it lay was excellent. In among the bushes I found ‘Sceptrum Carol.’ [Moor-king] and ‘Pedicularis teuchrii folio, coma purpurea’ [Marsh Lousewortl. The river Karats, where there is a pearl fishery, runs not far from here. Both plants were also found at KARATSVALLEN, where there were boats, and from there on they became common.

After 6 3/4 miles we reached RANDIJAUR lake and in front of us we could see nothing but high, broad, rounded mountains peeping one over the other. The most distant of them still held some snow, like the snow in spring when it has half disappeared.

1st July. PARKIJAUR, the first lake beyond our night quarters, was about 6 miles long. Over on the opposite shore rises a high pointed hill called ATJEKKOIVI or TOWER HILL. In times past the Lapps used to make sacrifices up there for good luck with their reindeer. The hill has now been burnt bare by lightning.

There is a Lapp living at the western end of the lake and when I walked on beyond there for about 1 1/2 a miles to a second lake – called Skalka – I found ‘Barbarea’ [Small-flowered Wintercress], both ‘Pediculares’ [louseworts] already mentioned, the ‘Asphodelum’ [Scottish Asphodel] described earlier as well as ‘Astragalus parvus’ [Alpine Milk-vetch].

While we were at Skalka and about 7 miles from Tjåmotis, a gap between the mountains showed up to the north-west and through it the mountains between 70 and 150 miles away shone white with snow as if they were no more than 7 miles away. Just as when white wisps of cloud rise above the horizon, their peaks rose towards the sky exactly as depicted in form and colour on the frontispiece of Rudbeck’s ‘Lapponia Illustrata’. There was nothing but hill upon hill. In short, I beheld the mountains.

I reached TJÅMOTIS in the evening. Here, above a high mountain called Harrevarto which lay right opposite the parish clerk’s house, I saw the midnight sun and, to my mind, it is far from being the least of nature’s miracles. What traveller from afar would not want to see it? O Lord, how unfathomable are thy works!

2nd. Tjåmotis. I spent Sunday resting here. I saw how splendid the beautiful shoots of barley looked among the snowy mountains. The stalks were so tall that they were leaning over. This barley was sown on the 25th or 26th May, just as in Umeå.