 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Lars Levi Laestadius" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(March 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Lars Levi Laestadius | |
|---|---|
 Laestadius in 1839 | |
| Born | (1800-01-10)10 January 1800 |
| Died | 21 February 1861(1861-02-21) (aged 61) Pajala,Norrbotten, Sweden |
| Occupations |
|
| Part ofa series on |
| Laestadianism |
|---|
Events |
Lars Levi Laestadius (Swedish pronunciation:[ˈlɑːʂˈlěːvɪlɛˈstɑ̌ːdɪɵs]; 10 January 1800 – 21 February 1861) was a SwedishSami writer, ecologist, mythologist, and ethnographer as well as a pastor and administrator of theSwedish state Lutheran church inLapland who founded theLaestadianpietistrevival movement to help his largely Sami congregations, who were being ravaged byalcoholism. Laestadius himself became ateetotaller (except for his ongoing use of wine in holyCommunion)[1] in the 1840s, when he began successfully talking his Sami parishioners out of alcoholism. Laestadius was also a notedbotanist and an author.
Laestadius was born inSwedish Lapland atJäckvik[2] nearArjeplog in a western mountainous part ofNorrbotten County, the northernmost county in Sweden, to Carl Laestadius (1746-1832) - a Swedish hunter, fisherman, tar-maker, and one-time silver mine bailiff, who lost his job due to alcoholism - and Anna Magdalena (née Johansdotter) (1759-1824), who was the elder Laestadius's second wife. Both were of distant Sami descent.[3][4] The family lived in poverty due to Carl Laestadius's alcoholism and extended absences. However, with help from Lars Levi's older half-brother Carl Erik Laestadius (1775-1817), a pastor atKvikkjokk, with whom Lars Levi and his younger brother Petrus (1802-1841) lived part of their childhood, the boys were able to pursue educations, first atHärnösand and starting in 1820, atUppsala University. Due to their benefactor half-brother's death in 1817, the boys were constantly short of funds from the outset of their university studies.[4][5] Nevertheless, Lars Levi proved to be a brilliant student. Because of his interest in botany, he was made assistant in thebotany department while pursuing studies intheology. Lars Levi Laestadius was ordained a Lutheran priest in 1825 by thebishop of Härnösand, Erik Abraham Almquist.
In 1827 Laestadius married Brita Katarina Alstadius, a local Sami woman who was a childhood friend of his;[3][5] and together they had twelve children, at least two of whom died in childhood.[4]
Laestadius's first parish was at Arjeplog in Lapland, where he became the regional missionary for the Pite district. From 1826 to 1849 he was thevicar inKaresuando parish in Lapland. Near the end of his tenure in Karesuando, Laestadius applied for the positions of dean inPajala parish inNorrbotten County and inspector of the Lapland parishes. After he complemented his exams inHärnösand as required, he took over these offices in 1849 and held them until his death in 1861.
At the time of Laestadius's 1826 arrival in Karesuando, the people of Lapland parish suffered from widespread misery and alcoholism.
Laestadius met a Sami woman namedMilla Clementsdotter of Föllinge (also known as Lapp Mary by the Laestadian Lutheran Church) in the municipality ofKrokom inJämtland during an 1844 inspection tour ofÅsele in Lapland. She belonged to arevival movement marked bypietistic andMoravian influences and led by pastorPehr Brandell of the parish of Nora in the municipality ofKramfors inÅngermanland.
She told Laestadius about her experiences on her journey to living faith. This was an important meeting for Laestadius because after it, he said he first understood the secret of living faith. He had a religious experience, and he wrote later that he at last saw the path that leads to eternal life. His sermons acquired, in his own words, "a new kind of colour" to which people began to respond. The movement spread from Sweden to Finland and Norway across the next 40 years.[6]
According to an account from the Sami cultural perspective,
The resistance to Laestadius's radical Christian ethics and morals and to his way of confronting the parishioners about their sins was greater in Pajala where Laestadius moved in 1849; and the bishop decided in 1853 that two separate church services should be held, one for theLaestadians and one for the others. It could be said thatLaestadianism, the religious revival named after him, became a movement in its own right at this time, although it remained within and never separated from theChurch of Sweden.
The rapid rise of Laestadianism among the Sami was due to several factors. Laestadius proudly self-identified as Southern Sami through his mother and spoke and preached in two Sami dialects. Further he chose uneducated lay preachers from the Sami reindeer herders to travel year around with them and preach to the unrepented. Additionally, in the early days of the movement, Laestadius, in order to find common ground with his parishioners, borrowed the Samis' own familiar pagan deities and concepts and adapted them to Christianity. Another factor in the rise of Laestadianism among the Sami was that the state-mandated boarding schools soon came to be populated by Laestadian personnel. Next, the strict moral code including strict temperance of Laestadianism appealed to the Sami. Whole communities that had been wrecked by alcoholism went dry virtually overnight. This had the added positive effect of improving the Samis' social standing with the outside world.
Finally, Laestadianism was a faith that the Sami could identify as originating from within insofar that Laestadius himself professed to have come to know the true living faith only upon his encounter with Milla Clementsdotter.[7]
Awards | |
|---|---|
 Medal of honor of the Legion of Honor of France after 1841. |
When Laestadius died in 1861, he was succeeded by Johan Raattamaa as the leader of the Laestadian movement.[8]
Laestadius undertook his first botanic trip as a student. Later theRoyal Swedish Academy of Sciences paid him to travel toSkåne in southern Sweden and to Lapland, to study and make drawings of plants, to be used in Swedish botany scientific work. He was as an internationally recognized botanist and a member of theEdinburgh Botanical Society as well as theRoyal Society of Sciences in Uppsala.[9]
A number of plant species have been named for Laestadius, e.g.:
Laestadius named many plant species:List of plants named by Laestadius in IPNI
While attending to his pastoral duties, Laestadius continued his interest in botany and authored a number of articles on plant life in Lapland. Because of the wide recognition for his knowledge of botany and the Sami, the French Admiralty invited Laestadius to participate in theLa Recherche Expedition to Samiland of 1838–40. As an expedition member, Laestadius served as field guide for the islands and the interior of Northern Norway and Sweden, studying both plant life and the culture of the Sami inhabitants.
During the expedition, Laestadius at the request of the organizers began his manuscript. Eventually published for the first time more than 150 years laterFragments of Lappish Mythology provides a snapshot of Sami traditional religious beliefs that by the 1830s were passing into history due to the Church of Sweden's Christianization mandate in full swing at that time.[11] However, Laestadius did not finish the manuscript until long afterward, and the completed work was lost for many years.[12] Due to these and other reasons, the manuscript was not published until 1997, over 150 years after the expedition.
For his participation in the La Recherche Expedition, Laestadius was awarded theMedal of Honor of the Legion of Honor of France after 1841. He was the first Scandinavian to receive this honor.[13]
Laestadius's mother tongues were Southern Sami from his mother and Swedish, the language of his childhood home, from his father.[3] Laestadius also spokePite Sami. After a year inKaresuando, Laestadius spoke Finnish andNorthern Sami as well. He usually held his services in Finnish since it was the most widespread language in the area, but on occasion also preached in the Northern Sami and Swedish languages.
After the death of his older half-brother and financial support, Carl Erik, when Lars Levi was only a teenager, Laestadius mourned the deaths of his mother in 1824, his father in 1832, and his younger brother Petrus in 1841. At least two of Laestadius's own sons reportedly predeceased him as well.[4][5]
Around 1833 Laestadius suffered from an ailment which the doctors first thought waspneumonia. He recovered. In the 1840s, Laestadius suffered from severetyphoid fever and latertuberculosis.[5] Towards the end of his life, Laestadius experienced "impending blindness" and contracted a cholera-like illness.[14]
