Voicing the Subaltern? The Sámi Child Enters Zacharias Topelius's Mid-nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales

Abstract

Voicing the Subaltern?The Sámi Child Enters Zacharias Topelius's Mid-nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales Olle Widhe (bio) Tales of Lapland The Sámi have constituted an important motif in Nordic children's literature since Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "Snedronningen" ("The Snow Queen," 1845). Andersen's fairy tale unfolds in Lapland, and recently won renewed fame in the Walt Disney Pictures film Frozen (2013). This article, however, is not about Andersen's famous fairy tale. Instead I want to focus on fairy tales portraying the Sámi written and published by the Fenno-Swedish author Zacharias Topelius in the mid-nineteenth century. Besides Andersen, Topelius is the most important writer for children in the Nordic countries during the romantic period. Even though he is seldom read by young people today, his importance to the history of Nordic children's literature is nonetheless comparable to that of Astrid Lindgren's in the second half of the twentieth century (Svensson 76). Topelius is considerably less known internationally than Andersen; however, he is often said to be the creator of Swedish-language children's literature, and his first collection of stories was published in 1847 (Westin; Zipes; Kümmerling-Meibauer). Topelius belonged to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland and thus contributed to the genre in both Sweden and Finland. In addition to a variety of texts for adults that feature the Sámi, he published a wide range of Sámi stories for children (Widhe, "Trollkarlar och små barn"; Conrad). Portrayals of the Sámi are already present in "Skeppet Rephanut" ("The Ship Rephanut," 1847), which was included in Topelius's first book for children. A Sámi wizard has a crucial function, helping a greedy rich merchant become even richer, before his luck [End Page 302] runs out and he ends up a poor beggar. Another of Topelius's fairy tales for children in which the Sámi play a significant role is "Prinsessan Lindagull" (1848), which recalls the One Thousand and One Nights. These two early fairy tales are followed by a range of others, among which "Sampo Lappelill: En saga från Lappland" ("Sampo Lappelill: A fairy tale from Lapland," 1860) and "Stjernöga" ("Stareye,"1873) are the most distinguished. In both tales, probably for the first time in the history of children's literature, the hero of the story is a Sámi child. The Sámi are one of the largest indigenous groups in Europe, and their ancestral land, Sápmi, or Lapland, spans an area the size of Sweden in the Nordic countries. The Sámi were up till recently known as "Lapps" or "Fenni." In nineteenth-century Finland, the Sámi were largely a repressed people who occupied a silenced, marginalized, and subaltern subject position (Junka-Aikio). The term "subaltern" was promoted by Gayatri Spivak (1988) in her seminal article, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in which she maintained that the subaltern cannot speak if there is no opportunity for authentic exchange between speaker and listener. The term subaltern is not just another word for the oppressed or the discriminated. The subalterns are refused a space where they can express themselves, and they are silenced through a discursive and structural exclusion from communication. In the case of children's literature, however, it seems like Topelius's romantic appraisal and elevation of the child during the mid-nineteenth century involves, at least to some degree, a countering of the inferior status ascribed to the Sámi. Elaborating on the role of the Sámi in Topelius's thinking and writing, Jens Grandell convincingly argues that he upholds a Eurocentric discourse that regards them as a cultural other. According to this view the Sámi people were important to Topelius only because they helped him to define the Finns, in contrast, as superior, and thus Sámi were vital for his efforts to build a Finnish identity and establish Finland as a nation. In this essay, however, I want to point to a certain ambivalence in the attitude toward the Sámi people in Topelius's writing for children that has yet to be properly discussed. In his fairy tale about the Sámi boy...