Northern Husbandry

‘Tanacetum’ [Tansy] and ‘Artemisia’ [Wormwood] are boiled up and they help the foetus to pass easily through the vagina; this is extraordinarily appreciated by women in childbirth. I saw ‘Tanacetum’ being dried at all the farms but there was no one who would tell me what it was used for.

16th. Departed from Tomea.

There are 6 ferries between Kemi and Torneå; the river at KAAKAMO ferry, which is closest to Kemi (3 1/4 miles), is the boundary between Österbotten and Västerbotten.

There was limestone everywhere along the road in Norrbotten; it was yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

17th. I left the inn at Kemi and travelled all day in the rain, arriving at the inn at IJO in the evening. The land is very low-lying, with many bogs, few hills, numerous small streams. There is plenty of grass but it is badly cultivated. The forest is mainly birch with some conifers mixed in. Juniper grows bigger here and is very common, though the bush form also occurs. Birch, willow, poplar were turning yellow; rowans, on the other hand, were turning red; many mosses.

The farmers had so much smoke in their eyes in their cabins that their eyes ran, but they were more worried about losing heat than about their eyes. The same plough was used here as in Kemi.

The sea was visible the whole way through the forest on the left hand side. Wherever the waves had thrown sand up on the shore, ‘Pisum caule 3 angulo’, ‘radice alba’, ‘repente’, ‘perenne’, ‘folia crassa’, ‘alternatim pinnata’ [sea pea] was growing.2 This was the far north of Norrbotten, between RUIKKALA and KUTVANIEMI.

At Ijo I saw a pit-trap for wolves. It was dug down into a little hill a short distance from the farm and they had lined it all round with unsplit fence-posts, upright and joined together. There was a pole in the centre and, like those around it, its top came to ground level. On the pole was a wheel and on the wheel were boards that covered it completely but did not project at all. If the wolf jumps up to the wheel, it is unable to move in any direction.

The farmers of Upper Österbotten are just as much children of darkness outside the house as inside; unkempt; great trousers down to their ankles, all white; a fur garment stitched together at the front; quarrelsome. Inside the houses there was a vile smell of rotten powan, just like rotten herring; the houses were dirty inside; cannot speak anything at all but Finnish.

‘Gr.marit.triticeum’ [Lyme-grass] was growing here and there along the road.

18th. Travelled from Ijo to the town of ULEÅ.

There was corn growing in the fields all along the road.

The sheaves of cut rye were stooked in 10s or thereabouts. The ears were all pulled in close together at the top and one sheaf was placed upside down on top of them so that its ears covered the ears of those below.

Barley was not placed upright but stacked on its side in a circle with the ears pointing inwards; the ends point outwards in all directions whereas the ears slope up a little in the middle and are covered with an upside-down sheaf as roof.

There were smoke-houses at every farm.

Stone was collected near HAUKIPUDAS ferry. There were conglomerates of sand and small stones on the shore and they were so firm that they were used as oven-bricks. At one spot in the sand, where the river had eroded it away, I observed that the fixative for such rocks was nothing more than an iron rust that bonded the sand together.