As I'm preparing for my great adventure down under, I thought it would be time to say something about my homeland. This is more of an effort to shine a brighter light on this wonderful country known as Finland, because this IS a wonderful country! We got great history, heroes, language, music and by god, we got sisu! What is sisu? It's what we are, who we are. Its guts! Our pride! Perkele!
Yes... Finland is in my heart.
Finland as all of you know is situated far up north in the frozen wastes of the Scandinavian outback. Crammed between Sweden and the great bear known as Russia, we constantly stay vigilant as we fight off the hordes of polar bears thrown our way. But this is of course the least of our worries as we still struggle to survive in near absolute zero temperatures that freeze trams to their tracks, blow up water pipes and collapse buildings.
But this didn't stop our first ancestors coming over and settling down in the forests. I mean you got to have huge set of balls to up and go from sunnier climates and come up here to live. Its like living in the south was to easy and they came here for a challenge. Finns were built for extreme temperatures! The weather outside reaches minus 40 degrees celsius and what do we do? Hell, we jump in the sauna with scorching heat up to 90 degrees celsius, THEN we jump out into the cold and roll in the snow. Or we jump into the frozen sea. One extreme the next. That's how Finnish people relax.
They say it is healthy for you. Until you die from it of course...
Our history is also pretty coloured. Mostly filled with war. Suffice it to say that before the Swedes invaded, we were a happy forest people. Like trolls. Then when the pristine and effeminate Swedish conquest party first landed on our shores we as a people were rather astonished. The nobles Swedish kings of 1249 were nodding their heads approvingly at the vast lumber at their disposal, picking up small pebbles and muttering "Ja, mycket bra!". This was the land for them. Only to suddenly find hordes of unwieldly naked men screaming at the top of their lungs profanities that would make even Satan blush. Not to mention toting really large weapons. The Swedes would of course beat a hasty retreat and later declare Finland a part of their empire from the safety of their own shores.
"Perkele!!!"
Later when the Swedes decided to go on a war binge down in Europe during the thirty years war (1618-1648), they suddenly remembered "Hey, those crazy bastards in that foresty country... We could use them!" "Yeah!" the other would say, "And stick them on horses!" Thus the Hakkapeliitta calvalry was born, the baddest bunch of sons of bitches in the northern hemisphere. Why were they called the Hakkapeliitta? Well, as they did with the Swedes minus the nakedness, they shouted profanities in Finnish. One of them being a more motivating "Hakkaa päälle Suomen Poika!" which translates roughly to "Cut them down Finnish boy!" But as you can assume, the French who saw the horse riding lunatics screaming gibberish didn't really understand what they said. So the closest thing to call them was Hakkapeliitta.
The Hakkapeliitta. We put the "laugh" in Slaughter!
But time went on and the ownership of Finland went to Russia after another brief war. I often wonder what the first thing to run through the Tzar's mind was when he saw the rabid hordes of uneducated brutes. Whatever it was, he quickly forced education upon them and soon we could read and write, thus adding rather rude graffiti to our repertoire of dastardly antics. However we soon grew tired of Russia and decided to go solo in 1917. There was a rather morbid civil war that really has nothing remotely funny to write about and then came world war 2. And we rocked world war 2. Sure, we were "defeated" or we "capitulated" but historians to this day say that the Finnish defence against Russia in ww2 is only equaled by the brave defence of the spartans against Persia at the battle of Thermopylae back in 480 b.c.
We bloody stood our ground! 200,000, brave beyond lunacy, Finns stood against ten zillion Russians and duked it out for the better part of the war. Stories are abound of how Finnish men would be shot down, only to get up angrier and lay waste to entire divisions of troopers! Think of an army of Bruce Willises... Such heroes like Rokka are pure legend, then there are the real dudes. Simo Häyhä, sniper. Took down over 500 russians. With open sights. And he was a modest fellow too. So tallies could be higher. The Russians aptly called him the White Death. Then there's Lauri Törni. Americans call him Larry Thorne. Why? Well, this psycho was so into war that he promptly escaped Finland for a crime he didn't commit (in a friggin submanrine no less) to the American Military. He was a one man A-Team. For real. He is the founding father of the Green Beret special forces branch! I could write a whole article on this guy! But trust me, he was a walking war machine. He dissapered during the Vietnam War and was then labled a war hero and has a memorial in the States. They even made a movie with John fucking Wayne as Larry Thorne!
We bloody stood our ground! 200,000, brave beyond lunacy, Finns stood against ten zillion Russians and duked it out for the better part of the war. Stories are abound of how Finnish men would be shot down, only to get up angrier and lay waste to entire divisions of troopers! Think of an army of Bruce Willises... Such heroes like Rokka are pure legend, then there are the real dudes. Simo Häyhä, sniper. Took down over 500 russians. With open sights. And he was a modest fellow too. So tallies could be higher. The Russians aptly called him the White Death. Then there's Lauri Törni. Americans call him Larry Thorne. Why? Well, this psycho was so into war that he promptly escaped Finland for a crime he didn't commit (in a friggin submanrine no less) to the American Military. He was a one man A-Team. For real. He is the founding father of the Green Beret special forces branch! I could write a whole article on this guy! But trust me, he was a walking war machine. He dissapered during the Vietnam War and was then labled a war hero and has a memorial in the States. They even made a movie with John fucking Wayne as Larry Thorne!
""Missä ne on? Mä tapan ne!"
But enough about war, I could go on for days about our pure awesomeness in that field of expertise. Lets talk about something even more exiting! The Finnish language! The 5th hardest language in the world to learn and probably the single most incoherent yet wonderfully straightforward language in the world. The structure of Finnish is a marvel to behold, with rules and tangents that would put quantum physics to shame. Here, check this out;
"The morphosyntactic alignment is nominative-accusative; but there are two object cases: accusative and partitive. The contrast between the two is telic, where the accusative case denotes actions completed as intended (Ammuin hirven "I shot (killed) the elk"), and the partitive case denotes incomplete actions (Ammuin hirveä "I shot (at) the elk"). Often this is confused with perfectivity, but the only element of perfectivity that exists in Finnish is that there are some perfective verbs. Transitivity is distinguished by different verbs for transitive and intransitive, e.g. ratkaista "to solve something" vs. ratketa "to solve by itself". There are several frequentative and momentane verb categories." etc...
"I don't understand! bllluuurghh..."
That ain't all folks! Did you know that Finnish has magical properties too? Tolkien knew this and based the Elven Language on it. Though Orcish is more akin to it. But seriously, Finnish touts the longest palindrome in the world! Saippuakivikauppias (Soap stone seller). Yes, we are the proud owners of the longest word you can say backwards being the same word!! but wait theres more! We also can have entire conversations with the use of only 2 letters! BEHOLD!
"Kokoo koko kokko." "Construct the whole bonfire."
"Koko kokkoko?" "The whole bonifre?"
"koko kokko." "The whole bonfire."
YET! The Finnish language is one of the most, if not the most beautifully discriptive languages in the world. I can't really describe it to foreigners, but I love to read in Finnish. I've heard many foreigners say that Finnish sounds like two cavemen trying to communicate or that we just seem to swear alot since the letter R is rather predominant in the language. Yeah sure, Finnish is monotonous, but its all about the words we use. Depending on the words we use, we convey how we feel. Thats why reading it is so great. The Finnish written language is a whole different beast all together! Think of it like Shakesperean English and you have an idea. And its an honest language. We say what we mean and don't really have many shallow words. Most likely due to the fact that if you're trying to be crafty with your words while it's minus 40 outside, you might freeze to death before you get your point across.
Most of Finnish communication out in the cold consists of stares and intent...
That leads us to our culture. Boy... Where to start... Well how about our cultural heritage, an opus known as the Kalevala. It basically reads like someting out of the Lord of the Rings (point in fact Tolkien took alot of influence off of it). You got this old decrepit wizard dude named Väinämöinen, something like Gandalf, but who is pritty much an douchebag. He goes around being an asshole, even getting into a fight with Joukahainen who he promptly begins to drown in a bog. Pleeing for his life, Joukahainen offers his sister to Väinämöinen. Väinämöinen, who takes a liking to young girls, accepts. When the poor girl finds out, she drowns herself.
Gandalf also liked Hobbits. Hmmm, connection?
Not really peturbed by this, he goes off to many a merry adventure full of deceit, monsters and evil witch ladies of the north that turn into harpies and finally rowing off into the sunset as Jesus is born. Cool stuff. They even made a rather lousy kung-fu movie about it if you feel like watching the rape of the very foundation of Finnish epics.
Apart from the utter lack of taste we have in this country, we are in fact a country of champions! We tend to dominiate some of the most excentric sports known to man. Fastest gun in the west? Arvo Ojala. He makes his living teaching actors how its done in the old west. Where are the Air guitar world championships held? World Wife Carrying championships? All Finland. We even won the Eurovision with a frikkin monster band!
The apex of Finnish musical might!
That leaves us with the final question. What gives us all these magical powers? Sisu! Thats what! As I mentioned before, it is the sheer tenacity of our force of will that keeps us going. The power to turn our soldiers into living zombies of hate while the enemy impontently empty their guns at them (Though some theorists believe that this phenomenon in ww2 was due the shitload of heroine that was distributed amongst the ranks). With sisu, anything can be accomplished. And with this sisu I wll end this article before I decide to give up my plans to leave to Australia and stay here...
See you kids in the Slipstream.
P.S This post is NOT supposed to be historically correct. so don't use it in your homework or you'll go blind.
P.S This post is NOT supposed to be historically correct. so don't use it in your homework or you'll go blind.
