Longfellow's “Lapland Song”

Abstract

It is known that the “Lapland song,” quoted at the end of each stanza in Longfellow's poem, My Lost Youth, was first taken down from a native Laplander, Olaus Matthiae Sirma, and printed in the original, together with a Latin prose version, by Professor Johannes Scheffer of Upsala in his exhaustive Latin work Lapponia (Frankfort 1673). The enormous currency of this book, as well as its various translations, and the wide literary interest aroused in different countries by the two primitive Lapland songs which it contained, have been discussed by F. E. Farley and H. Wright. The English translation of Scheffer's work (Oxford, 1674) was so successful as to lead to a second edition in London in 1704. The latter edition was timely for nourishing the flame of enthusiasm for folk-poetry first kindled by Addison's epoch-making essay from the text, Interdum vulgus rectum videt, published in the Spectator of May 21, 1711. On April 30, 1712, there appeared in the Spectator a new rhymed translation of the song under consideration, by an anonymous author, who professed to derive his version from the “original history,” though it is luminously evident that he looked no deeper than into the metrical version given in the English “History of Lapland.” The song printed in the Spectator was widely popular in England during the entire eighteenth century, and led to a number of other English versions, not one of which, however, contained the lines quoted by Longfellow, or went back to the Latin source.