دانلود کتاب The Lapps

Each year, during the brief northern summer, tourists arrive in Lapland to witness the phenomenon of the "Midnight Sun." Near the little railway stations at Kiruna or Rovaniemi they are met by men and women wearing many-colored coats and caps with big red tassles; small people, friendly and smiling, who sell skins and reindeer-horn. These are the few Lapps who have left the herds to live a hand-to-mouth existence on the edge of our civilization. The true Lapps, however, who are people who can trace their ancestry back to the times when the greater part of Europe was ice-covered, live in the tundra, perpetually shifting from one patch of ground to another. They are the forest- or mountain-Lapps, who depend for their survival on the sustenance provided by their reindeer. They are extremely difficult to contact, for they remain shy of men from the south. In the summer, they live in the mountains opposite Finnmark, in the northernmost regions of Norway, on the uplands between Norway and Sweden, or on the bare hills around Lake Inari. During the long winter, they retreat into the dense forests to shelter themselves from the blizzards, living in fragile tents or huts built of earth and logs. The origins of the Lapps — and a great part of their history — are unknown to us. The only documents remaining from their past are some prehistoric skins found by archaeologists in the frozen swamps of the far north, a few rock drawings, particularly from the White Sea area, and the drums used by the Shamans for their magic cults, which depict scenes from everyday life and personages, both divine and legendary, on the skins.
Signor Bosi here records the absorbing story of this "ancient" people which, by virtue of its habitat, customs, and nomadic life, has passed virtually unchanged into the twentieth century.

This is a revised version of "I Lapponi" translated by James Cadell.
29 photographs, 52 line drawings and 3 maps.