DSL’s Morning Threesome has inspired me to join in the next Olympic sport of blog leapfrog, in which a reference to an earlier comment in one post leads to the commenter posting anew, in reference to the reference. Finns are my topic–for when life hands you lemons, you must make Lemminkainen. First, the lemon drop to sweeten the brew: folding puukko knives! We had two of those red-handled beauties back in the day, and before the TSA era, I used to carry one everywhere. Alas, they disappeared–probably purloined by ne’er-do-well friends of our teenagers. Though who wouldn’t want to snitch one of these . . . . Oh well, we still have the belt knife version, and it’s swell.
folding puukkos
See it at Ragweed Forge.
And then, you really should read more about Finland via Uncyclopedia.
All Finns carry a knife. Every single one of them. Even that little 5-year-old girl behind you.
The Finnish knife, puukko, is a simple but an extremely nasty edged weapon forged from fine carbon steel. It has been designed to slide ergonomically between the bones of the human ribcage. There has been a disturbing development which has seen lesser quality Swedish-made Mora knives becoming popular among heavy users because of their economical price. Victims invariably frown at being stabbed with a Mora knife, which can be clearly observed from their facial expressions as they lie dying in a growing pool of blood. Finnish children get their first puukko at the age they learn to walk. Also here those spoil-sport Swedes have made inroads with their Libero Up&Go knives, which are available in various sizes fitting children from 10 to 26kg. Puukko is the only civilian item (besides eyeglasses) which can be worn by conscripts while in uniform. Puukko is also the object in the traditional teenagers’ sports, puukkohippa. Realizing that carrying knives has no place in modern society, the Finnish authorities have resolved to eradicate the archaic custom by educating school-goers. That these efforts are bearing fruit is corroborated by two separate incidents, in 2007 and 2008, in which a student shot at fellow students and school staff with a handgun, with scores of killed and wounded.
It is probably a sign of my essential juvenility that I found this entry in its entirety to be hysterically funny.
Finns are well known for their complete misunderstanding of irony. As they are aware of their intellectual deficit, they may overcompensate by taking any statement as some form of sarcasm. This has had some unintended consequences, such as when the Swedes said: “Hey Finns, we are going to rule you for a couple of centuries” to which the Finns replied: “Don’t forget to build a couple of castles while you’re at it.”
Finns are easy to read when it comes to situations where you need to know whether or not they got a joke: they usually have a serious, even depressed look, but if they think you might have said something funny they laugh loudly which lasts about 10 minutes and after that they hug and kiss you for making them happy (but don’t start to feel any better about yourself, since they’re contemplating suicide again in another 10 minutes). When they themselves tell a “joke” they laugh so hard you cannot hear what they are actually trying to say. These awkward situations are so unnatural (yet very common) that it scares both you and the Finns themselves.
Finns, please don’t hate me, as based on this, plus the love of knives, I think it is possible I may be part Finnish myself.
Finis. . . .
I’m (almost) speechless. You’ve outdone me and my fo’-pas proud, and I’m glad to have inspired this most exquisite of Alexandrian daisy chains (as opposed to chaisey Danes, which a residual one-eighth or so of me is ancestrally, so say the family treetrackers, when seated atop my Dubliner pal Paddy O’Furniture)
The link alone to Ragnar and his knives, not least the pricelessly named “traditional Ahti” series”, had me doing cybersaults. I need never ask of you, What have you done for me bladely?
From my originating trinitarian post, you’ve even folded in the first item about compulsive hoarding via your betraying an obvious lifetime’s storehouse of flypaper encounters with far-flung Finnic folk both in the flesh and on the page. On which latter, I hope to supply in a further comment a pungent vignette supplied by the late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the paleocons’ International Man of History of the most awesome powers, of whose 1979 work The Intelligent American’s Guide to Europe I own two of the very few copies in all of, well-named as it is here, Christendom, thanks to a juicy plug given it back in 2003 by young Mr. Jonah Goldbrick of The Couch Files blog, in his star turn in that son-of-a-Lubitsch charmer The Little Shoptalk Around ‘The Corner’:
“For literally more than two decades my dad has been trying to get me to read The Intelligent American’s Guide to Europe by Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (a former NR-nik). I just never got around to it. Last Thanksgiving he brought it down and pressed it into my hands. I finally started skimming through it a couple of weeks ago and now I have to say it is one of the most interesting, wide-ranging, thoroughly engaging history books I’ve ever read. It reminds me of when I first read Modern Times by Paul Johnson. But it’s even more encyclopedic. Almost every sentence — never mind every page — has an “I didn’t know that” or “I never thought of it like that” kicker. He makes statements in parentheses it would take me a year of reading to feel confident enough to make. Alas, I see from Amazon that it’s out of print. But if you spot one in a used book store — and you’re a history buff — you must pick up a copy.”
From which latter, I hope tomorrow, a wince-making passage on the Finns to fold back into the sigalirical bits about knives above, if memory both of the passage anf my copies of
…and of my copies of Mr. Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s treasure-tome serves.
Beautiful knives. I currently alternate between 3 knives. A marble cased Damascus bladed, a tension bar bird’s beak Kershaw and a CRKT black tanto. The Ahti’s have a bit of the tanto about them IMHO. I have one heavy duty, hand made non-folder I use. One of those might be nice unless I have a friend make one. Better assurance on steel qualit that way.
Steve
As threatened above, from Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Intelligent American’s Guide to Europe (1979), p. 214; keep in mind the distinction between the indigenous Finns, and the “Finlanders”, the Swedish-speaking remnant descended from the like conquerors:
“The landscape is a mixture of granite rocks, dense forests, and lakes – “the land of sixty thousand lakes,” though nobody ever counted them. Of granite, too, is the character of the Finns, who in some ways are like the Hungarians, but rather like Hungarians put on ice. An irate Hungarian might knife you immediately in a rage; a Finn might wait ten years.
“As far as their looks go, the Finns are a blend of East and West; eastern features tend to predominate. The Swedes are mostly Nordic types, yet it would be a mistake to believe that one can distinguish a Finn from a Finlander at sight, apart from extreme cases, all the more so because a great deal of intermarriage has taken place. The Swedish conquest must have been quite brutal. It interfered radically with the ancient Finnish way of life. The Finns had, for instance, no highly developed sense of private property, so that if one of them stole something, his hand was chopped off. A second theft, and off went the other hand. Today the honesty of Finns is most impressive. Railway stations in the country usually do not have baggage rooms and the transient traveler can simply leave his suitcase in any corner, where he is sure to find it upon his return later in the day.
What the Swedes found was a politically unorganized, primitive people speaking a strange, highly involved language with a few Slavic words woven in, a country without cities, with only a very few villages and many widely scattered, isolated wooden shacks. It was not difficult to conquer the Finns, though they offered some resistance and also opposed the introduction of Christianity. They had a polytheistic religion of their own; they had sorcerers and believed in spirits. But in spite of their low material culture, they were artistically gifted. Cruel, courageous, and ebulliently sexual, they were a tough and talented nation. Peasants in Ostrobothnia still practice a terrifying sport that, of course, is rapidly disappearing: two men, sitting opposite each other, stick sharp, stiletto-like knives into each other’s chests, advancing millimeter by millimeter until one gives up and declares himself beaten. As to sheer cruelty, the Finnish Civil War (War of Liberation: Vapaussota</em) holds a ghastly record. "General" Antikainen of the Red army had a special dislike for students, and those he caught were (allegedly) boiled alive in big kettles. [585] The Reds (Punaiset) had entire regiments of women who, in the battle of Tammerfors against the White Finns and Germans, fought with incredible savagery and committed outrages on captured German troops. It was precisely the memory of that terrible war, which bears a distinct resemblance to the Spanish Civil War, that strengthened the Finns’ determination to withstand the Russian onslaughts in World War II at all costs.
[585] This tendency toward wanton cruelty the Finns share with the Baltic peoples. Literacy has nothing to do with humaneness. Compare to Note 760.
[760] From accounts of the earlier period of the Napoleonic Wars, one gets the impression that the mostly illiterate Russian soldiers were the most humane of all. Cf. for instance Ludwig von Pastor, Leben des Freiherrn Max von Gagern 1810-1889 (Kempten: Kösel, 1912), pp. 8-9. Compare this with the description of the Red Army atrocities in Germany by Lev Kopelev in his Khranit’ vyetchno (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975).
As I neared completing the comment above, my laptop overheated (as did the notebook PC on which I typed) and shut down, though browser restoration, once things cooled down, found my draft in progress undisturbed here at WordPress, thank heavens. I have, below, amplified my page reference and, I hope, lasso’d my runaway italics tags:
As threatened above, from Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Intelligent American’s Guide to Europe (1979), pp. 213-214; keep in mind the distinction between the indigenous Finns, and the “Finlanders”, the Swedish-speaking remnant descended from the like conquerors:
“The landscape is a mixture of granite rocks, dense forests, and lakes – ‘the land of sixty thousand lakes,’ though nobody ever counted them. Of granite, too, is the character of the Finns, who in some ways are like the Hungarians, but rather like Hungarians put on ice. An irate Hungarian might knife you immediately in a rage; a Finn might wait ten years.
“As far as their looks go, the Finns are a blend of East and West; eastern features tend to predominate. The Swedes are mostly Nordic types, yet it would be a mistake to believe that one can distinguish a Finn from a Finlander at sight, apart from extreme cases, all the more so because a great deal of intermarriage has taken place. The Swedish conquest must have been quite brutal. It interfered radically with the ancient Finnish way of life. The Finns had, for instance, no highly developed sense of private property, so that if one of them stole something, his hand was chopped off. A second theft, and off went the other hand. Today the honesty of Finns is most impressive. Railway stations in the country usually do not have baggage rooms and the transient traveler can simply leave his suitcase in any corner, where he is sure to find it upon his return later in the day.
“What the Swedes found was a politically unorganized, primitive people speaking a strange, highly involved language with a few Slavic words woven in, a country without cities, with only a very few villages and many widely scattered, isolated wooden shacks. It was not difficult to conquer the Finns, though they offered some resistance and also opposed the introduction of Christianity. They had a polytheistic religion of their own; they had sorcerers and believed in spirits. But in spite of their low material culture, they were artistically gifted. Cruel, courageous, and ebulliently sexual, they were a tough and talented nation. Peasants in Ostrobothnia still practice a terrifying sport that, of course, is rapidly disappearing: two men, sitting opposite each other, stick sharp, stiletto-like knives into each other’s chests, advancing millimeter by millimeter until one gives up and declares himself beaten. As to sheer cruelty, the Finnish Civil War (War of Liberation: Vapaussota) holds a ghastly record. ‘General’ Antikainen of the Red army had a special dislike for students, and those he caught were (allegedly) boiled alive in big kettles. [585] The Reds (Punaiset) had entire regiments of women who, in the battle of Tammerfors against the White Finns and Germans, fought with incredible savagery and committed outrages on captured German troops. It was precisely the memory of that terrible war, which bears a distinct resemblance to the Spanish Civil War, that strengthened the Finns’ determination to withstand the Russian onslaughts in World War II at all costs.
“[585] This tendency toward wanton cruelty the Finns share with the Baltic peoples. Literacy has nothing to do with humaneness. Compare to Note 760.
“[760] From accounts of the earlier period of the Napoleonic Wars, one gets the impression that the mostly illiterate Russian soldiers were the most humane of all. Cf. for instance Ludwig von Pastor, Leben des Freiherrn Max von Gagern 1810-1889 (Kempten: Kösel, 1912), pp. 8-9. Compare this with the description of the Red Army atrocities in Germany by Lev Kopelev in his Khranit’ vyetchno (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975).”
Interesting. In the sci-fi/fantasy literature, there seems to be recent interest in the use of Finns as protagonists. There stoic toughness makes for a certain kind of hero authors find appealing. I think Finland is also one of those places where you can leave your baby outside a restaurant in a stroller sleeping while Mom and Dad go into eat. That gets you in trouble here. I do not understand why it is so necessary for Americans of a certain political ilk to denigrate Europeans all the time. There is much to be admired. A lot of it would not work here, and they have their faults, but are they worse than our own? (Ok, in the case of the Italians, yes.)
Steve
“I do not understand why it is so necessary for Americans of a certain political ilk to denigrate Europeans all the time. There is much to be admired.”
That denigration has its obvious political uses depending on the shifting partisan winds, but on the more enduring level, it’s the flip side of haughty Yankophobia among snot-nosed Euros and the sort of self-loathing Americans whose cultural-cringe cowardice took the form most recently of trying to pass as Canadian when in touchy milieux abroad, rather than risk being verbally spat on by the sort of Eurotrash whose unsolicited insults ought to be taken as a badge of honor. But in neither the chest-beating US case nor in the Eurosnot case is either representative of the general lay of the land. We tend sometimes, as highly engaged blogfolk, to assume everyone everywhere is as spoiling for a partisan scrap as are those of the wagons circled 360 degrees round our loins, but taint so, McGee…when hot blood’s a-spillin’, a little chillin’ is more than thrillin’…
I’m still hot to explore the prospects of a permanent move someday to Denmark, Finland or Norway, preferably, money willing, prior to my 100th birthday in 2062…