Finland and the Finns: A woefully shallow assessment

I’d like to preface this essay with the greatest example of subtle Finnish humour, direct from their own language.

Suomalainen: A Finnish person.

Suomaalainen: Inhabitant of a swampy land.

And now let’s begin, as they say, at the beginning...


During the last ice age, the best of the Finnish landmass was eroded away by glaciers and scattered throughout eastern Europe, leaving behind a mildly undulating landscape where every slight depression became a freezing cold lake of sub-noteworthy dimensions. Once-grand mountains were demolished, and cross-country skiing, arduous and pointless, became the sport du jour. And owing to the uniform climate and topography, conifers (and only conifers) thrived, growing just tall and thick enough to block one’s view but never so high as to earn one’s admiration.

I have to tell you these central facts because any half-arsed commentary on the Finnish people – or any people for that matter – must begin with a description of the environment in which they live. And I must say my initial observation was that Finland is flat, its trees are straight, and its people are flat and straight. Do I still think that? No.

I am looking out on a typical Finnish scene right now, from the lounge room of my third floor flat in Sodankylä, a small town in the northern state of Lapland. The apartment block is low and rectangular, all grey and white, with heavy double doors at the entry, faux-granite stairs, linoleum levels, and a dirty big boiler in the basement. The stairwell smells of stale cigarettes in the mornings and a mixture of fresh and stale cigarettes in the evenings, and when I trudge up it after work I always feel like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, on a social mission to smash in the skull of some lecherous old pawnbroker woman on level six. Luckily there’s only three levels. I think this literary flashback is induced by the Russian sounding names on each beige apartment door: A1 - Tolvanen, A2 - Kosola, A3 - Vaara, A4 - Tervo, A5 - Oravala, A6 - Tolvanen, A7 - Liikala, A8 - Salmela. After Salmela, and last of all, comes A9 – (Unnamed Mining Company), and the apartment I share with Jon, my boss.

But for the occasional person or car passing over the bridge below, the scene through our window could be painted on. A gently snaking kind of river, a hundred metres wide, slithers away from me, southwards, between the conifers that go right to its banks, though there is one cleared spot on the far side, occupied by a red wooden house with white window frames and a dark green roof – the kind that I imagine might be home to a quietly methodical deer hunter with a woollen hat and a modest fire burning. If I lean back a little bit even the bridge drops below my eyeline, and then nothing is moving. Sodankylä is about a hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, so at this time of year the sun’s sub-horizontal shimmy means there is little change even in light conditions. The apartment’s double windows and doors keep out the cold but also any noise, only adding further to my feeling that nothing at all is happening.

In our first few days though, big slabs of ice were still coming down the river and we stood out on the balcony wondering aloud what it would be like to surf one, or cheering them on as they headed for, but never once hit, the bridge pylons. Back then I was still thinking very much like an Australian. Five kilometres downstream, the same river, having merged with another, passes the building where we are working, and it was down there on the bank that I first thought like a Finn.

See, as far as I can tell, when a Finn sees a chunk of ice going by, he thinks of nothing at all. He just watches the chunk of ice go by. He doesn’t think about riding it or smashing it or altering its course. He just contemplates it, like some cave-ridden Buddha contemplates the passing of days and nights. And so it went that lunchtime around a week ago, when I moseyed out along the river and saw a lone piece of ice – one of the last stragglers - and was happy just to watch it cruise. In fact I became so entranced that, if I enjoyed smoking tobacco and had some Rizlas and Port Royal handy, I’d have crouched down and rolled up a dart, and smoked it real slow and methodical-like, savouring the different flavour of each individual puff. Yeah, I felt properly Finnish then.

Now, two things happen to people who watch ice drift by (if I may use that as a proxy for The Finnish Condition). One: they become thoughtful, modest and dry-humoured. Two: they embrace guns, binge drinking and death metal music. Anyone who knows a few Finns will rattle off these characteristics. In fact, a Norwegian lady working for Cathay Pacific in Perth openly tried to talk me out of going to Finland, warning that the people were “very wierd”. And my brother Andrew, who spent a few years in neighbouring Sweden, told me that Finns were quiet and strange, but added that “I think you’ll like them”, which I thought an odd thing to say.

That Andrew – he knows me too well. Like their landscapes, the beauty of the Finnish people is slowly resolved. If you stare at Finland long enough you realise that their country gently sways and twists, their sun is just a happy drunk, and every third conifer splits in two halfway up. If you observe the natives for long enough you see the smirks, hear the intonation, and detect the humour in the eyes that you long thought barren. So subtle are they, that in a room full of Finns I feel like an American; like everything I say or do is coarse and clumsy, and my jokes are painfully overwrought. I’ve got new perspective on those poor Yanks actually, though I’ve still never felt the need to tell these “crazy Finns” that they “crack me up”.

Unless something better happens between now and the 28th May, my enduring memory of Finland – and my best personal example of Finnish humour – will be of when I burst in on the senior geologist, Markku, with a question that had arisen during the morning drive to work. Who, we Australians had been wondering, was the most famous Finnish person, rally and Formula One drivers aside? As is customary in Finland, or Lapland at least, Markku looked at me for a full five seconds before saying “Well...”, then leaning back in his swivel chair and clasping his hands. To my increasingly blank face, he then reeled off three architects, two classical composers and the conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra.

“Yeah, righty-o”, I said. “Anyone else?”

“Well,” he said, reclining back a smidgen further as the smallest of smiles appeared, “For you, I think maybe it will be Santa Claus.”

Burned, humbled, but also deeply amused.