Suomalaisten symbolit
[The Finns' symbols]
Toim. [Ed. by] Tero Halonen & Laura Aro
Jyväskylä: Atena, 2005. 224 p., ill.
ISBN 951-796-394-7
€ 38, hardback

What is it you think about when you think of Finland? Whatever else is on your personal checklist, I'd be willing to bet that some, perhaps even all, of these items would feature (in no particular order): sauna, sisu, the music of Jean Sibelius, the architecture of Alvar Aalto, the thousands of lakes, alcohol (and alcoholism), Nokia's mobile phones, tango-dancing, Aki Kaurismäki's films, the maverick jazzman Jimi Tenor, the Linux operating system — not to forget, since this is a literary magazine, the Kalevala national epic, Tove Jansson's classic Moomin children's stories and perhaps, if you are really keeping up with your new translations, Kjell Westö's noir Helsinki-based thriller, Lang.
     Many of the Finns' symbols, as Suomalaisten symbolit points out, are conscious inventions, deliberate constructions in a premeditated nationalism that must surely be unparalleled elsewhere. When, in the early 19th century, Finland moved from Swedish to Russian rule and the nationalist project that was to lead, in 1917, to independence, began, its prime artefact was the Finnish language, transformed by a group of Swedish-speaking intellectuals from a collection of agrarian dialects into a unified instrument for governance, law, finance, education and, finally, literature.
     In a series of essays and articles by writers ranging from professors to students, Suomalaisten symbolit charts the rallying points that brought together the disparate peoples of the country — from the rune-singing, kantele-playing Finns of the east to the folk-dancing fiddlers of the west — into a nation that, barely a century later, was able to argue its convincing and ultimately successful case for independence, and subsequently, alone among the new European states founded after the First World War, to create and maintain a democratic consensus.
     With the exception of the Finnish language itself (which the editors may well have considered too abstruse, or perhaps just too obvious), all the familiar elements of the story are there. How, with the help of the Brothers Grimm, themselves busily transforming folk tales into suitable reading material for the new nation-building middle-classes of the German-speaking peoples, the Kalevala (whose canonical version was published in 1849) became a calling-card for Finnish-speaking Finland, demonstrating that it too deserved a place among the literary nations. How Zacharias Topelius's Boken om vårt land ('A book about our country', 1875) crystallised conceptions of the nature of the Finns as well as their regional differences. How the artists of the 'golden age' of Finnish art — Axel Gallén-Kallela, Albert Edelfelt, Eero Järnefelt, Pekka Halonen and Venny Soldan-Brofelt as well as, arguably, Jean Sibelius, celebrated and mythologised the beauty of the natural landscape, giving it an unbreakable association with nobility and freedom. How the designers and architects of a second 'golden age' — Alvar Aalto, Tapio Wirkkala, Timo Sarpaneva, Kaj Franck — intervened in the dark discourses of the Cold War with everyday artefacts and buildings that demonstrated eloquently that, far from being a miserable command economy like its neighbours to the east and south, Finland was a fully paid-up democracy with a life-style, and a culture of getting and spending, to go with it.
     Fascinating as this big story and its material culture are, however, it is where Suomalaisten symbolit strays away from the usual suspects that it really comes alive. The sense of taste is generally evocative in inverse proportion to its describability, and the book does particularly well on comestibles. Salmiakki, or sal ammoniac, enjoyed as sweets in the form of small black tablets, is elsewhere considered a medicine. In Finland its devotees regard it with a passion that is almost addictive in character — although the editors omit to mention its delicious and more dangerous combination with another national symbol, Koskenkorva vodka (let alone perform the useful service of giving a recipe). Pulla, the bland coffee bread luxuriously made from wheat flour at latitudes where only oats, rye and barley really flourish, remains from childhood the symbol of all things good and sweet, representing for expatriate Finns a focus of nostalgia probably only rivalled by Marmite on toast for Brits.
     Before the introduction of combine harvesters, the suomenhevonen, or Finnish horse, a native breed, a stocky figure with a bay coat and golden mane used to be seen everywhere that hay was made; it bears a fortuitous resemblance — gold, furry — to the Finnish spitz, now prized outside Finland by dog-fanciers. Like the Finnish horse, the dish-drying cupboard is now superseded by technological advance, but remembered fondly: a post-war Finnish invention, it made the unhygienic and time-consuming practice of drying with a tea-towel all but unnecessary. Another anachronism, the carpet-washing jetty, remains a feature of life in central Helsinki, where every August people bring their mats to wash them by hand, an energetic process carried out with a stiff brush and plenty of elbow-grease, in the rapidly cooling Baltic.
     The story of Nokia and the mobile phone — whose success, in a country that still regards taciturnity as a virtue, remains an anomaly — is well-known; but what about Nordic walking, the habit of walking with ski-poles but dispensing with skis? At first its practitioners seemed as crazy as the hands-free mobile-phone owners who appeared to be talking to themselves, but now its cardio-vascular and muscular benefits are widely recognised, and today it is even possible to combine the poles themselves with yet another national symbol, Maija Isola's Unikko print, designed for Marimekko in 1964 (see page 62).
     In a globalising, internationalising world, Suomalaisten symbolit argues, national symbols appear in a new light. Where national characteristics appear to be disappearing and we readily encounter new cultures, we ponder our own identity. Local and national phenomena, and our own roots and past, become important — not as a form of nationalism, but as part of the zeitgeist. In such shifting territory, it seems a missed opportunity that this is such a top-down kind of a book — the symbols were chosen not by a straw poll of ordinary Finns, but by an editorial board of the great and the good, consisting of three professors, a government minister and a well-known academic author. For Finns, however, the book does an able job of charting and explaining the shared symbols they use to navigate the new; foreigners might require a little more by way of elucidation and explanation.
     For myself, Suomalaisten symbolit made me realise just what a little Finland I have gathered around me here in faraway north London. Excuse me for a moment as I sit at my Alvar Aalto -designed kitchen table to drink my morning coffee from a Moomin mug, perhaps pausing for a salmiakki as I make a call on my Nokia phone before taking up my Nordic walking poles for a tour of the park…