Levänluhta

Fimbulwinter is the Norse term for that apocalyptic three-year winter. For their side, here is the consensus as of the last Christmas Eve. I don’t believe the consensus has changed much [on a personal note, I approve the term “year without the Sun”, which I’ve been using since reading David Keys in 2000]. The Norse identify an ensuing “century of silence”. This reminds me of how Iranian nationalists describe the fall of the Sasanians. Except that where Iran went dark 600-800 AD the Norse suffered 540-640.

We can now talk of Finland. We're not told about Finnish (or Sami, or Eësti) mythology or folklore, as we are for Norse. We're hearing instead about the Sami population as their buried remains report to us, from before the Finns pushed them north.

The University of Helsinki sketches out human bones at Late Antique Levänluhta, at the bend of the Bothnia coast. Turtle Island has a map, from the original. Finland has (famously) many lakes, but fewer at the western edge.

Levänluhta’s inhabitants as of 535 AD, before it all went wrong, were genetic Sami – “Lapp”, to the Norse. The study aims to reconstruct their diet. The study finds fragmentation: some in life ate food from the mainland, others seafood from Bothnia. The lake-district to the east emptied out nearly entirely. But those left behind still came to the local lake … to bury their dead.

One question is whether this lake is what modern Sami call sáiva, likely *sāvjë in those earlier days. The Sami believed these were portals to the next world.

The Finns proper, meanwhile, hail from Estonia. Estonia also collapsed at this time; just like Gene and Högom in (Germannic) Sweden across the bay. If anything the Sami position grew stronger in the late 500s; archeologists call this heyday the "Merovingian" era, maybe because of Frankish imports.

The first Finns in Finland crossed Liekovesi / Kokemäenjoki after 700 AD. These lacked the Sami connexion to Levänluhta’s lake so did not bury their dead here.