The Lutheran Church had underlined the importance of being able to read ever since the Reformation, but it did not put any emphasis on the writing skills of the common person. According to the Church Law of 1686, being able to read the catechism was necessary for attending the Eucharist, obtaining permission to marry and being suitable for the task of godparent. Therefore, the ability of the common people to read and understand the catechism was tested annually by the clergy. It was the duty of parents to teach their children to read, as there were still no schools for the children of the common people. Only those parents who themselves had poor reading skills could receive assistance from the Church in order to have their children taught. In the beginning, people ‘read’ by heart, although the ability to understand the texts as well was emphasized by the Bishop of Turku Johannes Gezelius the elder (1615–1690) in the last decades of the seventeenth century. For most peasants and other common people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this was enough, and they did not feel any need to seek out more education.¹

From the seventeenth century onwards, there were nevertheless some peasants and craftsmen who were more interested than others in writing as well. They usually had the task, alongside their real work, of acting as scribes among the common people. For instance, they helped others to write letters or compile estate-inventory deeds. Because they were literate, they may also have taught children to read. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the number of people with such ability gradually increased, although it was only during the next century that writing skills spread among the common people to any significant extent.²

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, even the common people were touched by the ideas of the Enlightenment. In many cases this happened through enlightened clergy, but it also took place directly through literature disseminated by the literate peasants and craftsmen. There were several educational projects among the clergy with the aim of establishing schools and improving the intellectual education of the common people. The best-known was the work of the society Pro Fide et Christianismo, which published religious literature and founded schools. It had several members among the Finnish clergy. The chief purpose of the society was ‘to promote the growth of real Christianity’. For the Swedish clergy, the Enlightenment meant the spreading of true Christianity and education for the common people. This stance partly originated in fear of the new international Enlightenment, which questioned the truths of Christianity.³

This chapter introduces one of the best-known Finnish self-taught men from the eighteenth century, the poet Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika, who had an active role in the writing of various texts. The chapter addresses the following questions: what kind of texts were they? For what purpose were they written? And what was their position in the public Enlightenment project outlined above?

Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika – self-taught hymn writer

Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika was the son of the peasant Ragvald Hannunpoika from Tyrvää in western Finland. He was born physically disabled, with a congenital harelip and a cleft palate. In addition, at the age of twenty-two, he suffered some misfortune which left him with a stiffened knee. These conditions made it impossible for him to work in a normal way. He was married three times and had nine children, only two of whom reached adulthood. Ragvaldinpoika and his family lived mostly on poor relief, which they received from the Church. People with disabilities were exhorted to work as far as they could; but at the end of the nineteenth century, people with disabilities were still the largest group living on poor relief.⁴

According to the church examination registers of Tyrvää, Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika was a good reader, and so were his sister and their parents. Reading was his means of escape. As a disfigured, disabled man, he was able to teach children and received permission to do so. All members of the workforce were important to the Swedish realm (which included today’s Finland) as the economy was starting to prosper, even people with disabilities. The literacy of Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika represented active reading, which was also a sign of modernity. His own family was a testimony to the social importance of literacy, his father’s reading ability having earned respect among his peers in the community. Even more than reading and teaching, Ragvaldinpoika devoted himself to literary work. He wrote and published 148 hymns in 53 publications, all occasional publications or ephemeral literature of different kinds. There were collections of hymns, poetry for funerals and marriages, congratulations and edifying texts with moral warnings.⁵

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has written about the three forms of cultural capital which people use in order to achieve success in society: embodied, objectified and institutionalized. The last-mentioned form refers to education, for example formal degrees, while objectified cultural capital refers to such things as pictures, books and musical instruments. Embodied cultural capital means physical appearance and the skills required to behave naturally in various cultural contexts. This is the most demanding form of cultural capital.⁶ Since Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika did not have any formal education, he could not compete at all in this respect. As regards physical capital, he had even less chance to compete and gain success, being a disabled man. The only way for him to win respect was by displaying his literary talents; consequently, his writing was very important to him on a personal level. He did not have much in material terms (economic capital), nor was he very successful in terms of social capital; but he possessed intangible assets, and ideas about how to use them.

Much research has been done into the multi-faceted cognitive preconditions for writing. It has been established that writing calls for skills in composing, reviewing, goal-setting, planning and organizing. A capacity for self-reflection and imagination is a significant requirement. Writing is, of course, an even more demanding skill than reading; but the possession of both skills makes a person a more independent individual in the modern sense.⁷

The writings of Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika may be roughly divided into three groups: hymns and hymn collections; autobiographical texts; and poetry for funerals, marriages and other special occasions. All the texts evince a strong, even profound, religious spirit. They also display a pietistic and Moravian dimension, although they clearly represent ecclesiasticism.⁸ The ensuing pages examine his autobiographical texts, as well as some of his warning texts and hymns and verses for funerals and weddings.⁹

Hymns as ego documents

Letters, autobiographies, diaries as well as memoirs have been called ‘ego documents’ in historical research. The term was coined by Jacques Presser and further developed by Rudolf Dekker. In an ego document, a person describes his or her own life in the first person. The question of the constructive nature of ego documents came in for special attention in 1990s Germany. Not only do such genres as letters or diaries contain autobiographical material; broadsheets and other ephemera do so as well. In Sweden, for example, plenty of broadsheets are preserved that refer to blind people, where they describe their life and destiny. Dekker does not mention hymns as ego documents but does refer to Presser’s definition of that category. Presser categorized ‘all written sources, in which we meet a man more clearly, more personally than in other sources, and who thus becomes us instead of a “nameless human” – whatever that might be – a distinctive ego’.¹⁰ Hymns where Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika described his own life in the manner defined by Presser may also be called ego documents, even though he wrote them in the form of poems or hymns, not as prose. As ego documents, these hymns also tell us about the norms and traditions of writing, or they create new ones, suitable for the enlightened world.

The first published text by Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika was a collection of three short hymns about himself written in Turku in 1759, when he was recovering at the mineral spring of Kupittaa. In those hymns, he describes his life of illness and misfortune since birth. The congenital harelip was a visible mark on his face. Because of the cleft palate, it was impossible to nurse him, so his parents were compelled to feed him cow’s milk. When he was two and a half years old, his father died. At the age of twenty-two he was further disabled in consequence of influenza, and in the next year his mother died. Ragvaldinpoika experienced many more serious illnesses and ailments. He interpreted all these health issues as the consequence of (original) sin. In the early modern era, sickness and suffering were regarded as a permanent aspect of human existence. At the end of the collection, Ragvaldinpoika mentions useful medicinal plants; but according to him, the reason for the plants’ healing power lies in God, because God created them and it was God who imparted knowledge of their properties to wise men and doctors. As an example of a good doctor, he mentioned Johan Haartman (1725–1787), the first Finnish professor of medicine and author of the first Finnish Home Doctor.¹¹ A similar emphasis can be seen in the Hyödyllinen huwitus luomisten töistä (‘Useful book on creation’), a devotional book and scientific account of nature in the same package, written by the minister of Sotkamo, Johan Frosterus. Both Haartman and Frosterus considered natural knowledge to be subordinate to religious or divine knowledge. Physico-theology, which underlined the connection between nature and religion, was a well-known and frequently followed trend at the Åbo [Turku] Royal Academy in the eighteenth century, the most profound influence coming from the British scholar William Derham (1657–1735) and the German Christian Wolff.¹²

In the Åbo [Turku] Royal Academy, modern Enlightenment science was accepted so long as it did not lead to atheism, materialism, indifferentism or deism. German Enlightenment philosophers – such as Leibniz, Wolff and Thomasius – were viewed as remarkable, and the Wolffian idea of harmony and balance between faith and reason played an important role in the first half of the eighteenth century. The idea was to lead people to happiness in both temporal and eternal life. The new tendencies of natural theology – such as physico-theology – were symbols of this harmony. However, these Wolffian ideas also encountered resistance, not least from Pietism. Later in the eighteenth century, rationalism especially gained ground in the Åbo [Turku] Royal Academy.¹³

The next ego document by Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika describes the surgery on his harelip in Turku in 1763. Surgery of this kind was still quite rare at the time. As in other countries during the Enlightenment, the role of priests as healers and doctors at the local level was highlighted in Finland, a country in which there were few properly trained medical practitioners. Harelip surgery was a highly exacting task, and in this case was performed by the city doctor of Turku, Gerhard Odenadt. The operation fixed the harelip, but it did not help with the patient’s speech. The opportunity to have his harelip remedied was very important for Ragvaldinpoika, however, as he seems to have suffered grievously – mentally as well – from his physical disabilities. In folklore, there were stories about changelings; even Martin Luther had regarded children with mental disabilities as changelings sent by Satan.¹⁴ We do not know whether Ragvaldinpoika or his parents heard similar characterizations. It is possible, however, because both his outward appearance and his speech probably made an unpleasant, even frightening, impression on those he met for the first time. His ego documents repeatedly refer to his disabilities, especially to the harelip, which was a conspicuous feature on his face.

Ragvaldinpoika was nevertheless uncertain whether it was right to change the face that God had created. His world view with regard to his disabilities seems to have resided on the border between old and new. In the broadsheets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, disabilities were usually explained as trials sent by God and as living examples of God’s power and mercy. As was pointed out above, Ragvaldinpoika saw his disabilities and suffering as a consequence of his (original) sin, a common interpretation in Lutheran orthodoxy. However, he tried to find help to improve the situation, like many others at that time who suffered from diseases that were difficult or impossible to cure. He did not think that disabilities were an eternal destiny or an example of God’s power, although God had created him with them. He did wonder if it would be proper to cure them; but in the end, and on the advice of a counsellor, he was convinced that the operation would not be a sin. According to natural theology, sin and eternal damnation were to be put aside. Instead, God wanted a man to be happy. The Enlightenment also raised the question of people’s perfectibility, and some indeed tried to cure themselves of various disabilities.¹⁵ Because of his harelip, Ragvaldinpoika was not happy or perfect; on the contrary, he felt he was to be pitied. He did not express his ideas in such straightforward terms, but it is possible that the ideas of happiness in natural theology and the general ambition to remedy his disabilities played a part when he developed the courage to undergo the operation.

Although the surgery was frightening and extremely painful, Ragvaldinpoika was very pleased to find a doctor ready to undertake it. After the successful operation, he thanked God for all the help he had received. It was God who had cured him and God had done so through the doctor, whom Tuomas called ‘the doctor of nature’.¹⁶ Here, too, the Enlightenment emphasis on nature surfaced, as in his first ego document from 1760.

The description of the operation is quite vivid, even dramatic. During the operation, Ragvaldinpoika meditated on the sufferings of Christ and compared his pains with them. When the doctor made an incision in his lip, he thought about the wounds of Christ, and during the sewing of the wound he thought about the lance that pierced the side of Christ. This helped him to withstand the pain.¹⁷ The theme of the Passion of Christ had been common and popular in devotional literature ever since the Middle Ages. The genre was a common one in Finland too. The Finnish reformer Mikael Agricola (1507–1557) issued the Passion of Christ (Se meiden Herran Jesuxen Christuxen pina, ylösnousemus ja taiwasen astumus, niste neliest evangelisterist coghottu) in 1549, which was later published in two further editions (1616 and 1620). Similar works had also appeared in several Manuale Finnonicum publications in the seventeenth century. In 1690, Matthias Salamnius (c. 1650–1690) had even written a long poem on the sufferings of Christ. According to the Church Law of 1686, the Passion was supposed to be read in churches regularly during Lent.¹⁸ It is very likely that these texts were familiar to Ragvaldinpoika. However, he further developed the synoptic account of the Passion, adding his own experiences to it as a parallel to the sufferings of Christ. The active role of the author through a comparison of this kind was something new, a special product of the Enlightenment.

The ego documents of Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika also include the funeral hymn published in 1792 about his son, who died in the 1780s war with Russia. It does not tell us as much about Tuomas himself as about the son, but it describes the feelings of a grieving father. It actually consists of five separate hymns, the fourth of which is a song of praise to God, who led the author through so many difficult trials. That section has an even more personal touch than the other four pieces in the publication. The fifth part is a fictional hymn from the perspective of the dead son, in which he comforts the family and reminds them of the importance of knowing Christ.¹⁹ Ragvaldinpoika clothed his greatest sorrows in religious ideas and sought comfort directly from God. The funeral hymn is also important as a conveyor of consolation to the surviving members of the family.

After his son’s death, Ragvaldinpoika seemed to wonder a great deal about the young man’s fate. His funeral hymn expresses his anxiety about the state of his son’s soul. He was told that before his death his son had listened to a sermon, confessed his sins and participated in the Eucharist. Ragvaldinpoika very much wished him to have turned to God at the moment of death. According to both the Church and old Finnish peasant culture, a death that took place suddenly and unexpectedly was a bad death. A good death was one which the deceased was prepared for, as well as other people. It has also been called a ‘tamed death’.²⁰ Church prayers included wishes to avoid an unexpected death; it was important to repent before death, but a sudden death made that impossible.²¹ This is why his son’s last moments were so important to Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika: it was a question of his son’s salvation. The farewell to the son describes the deepest wishes of the father as he tried to convince himself of the good life his son had in heaven.

Hymns for public occasions

Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika wrote and published nineteen funeral hymns, nine marriage hymns, five congratulatory hymns addressed to the royal family, three other congratulatory hymns addressed to different people and seven hymns for various occasions. Most of the funeral hymns were written for dead clergymen.²² All the hymns have a very strong religious emphasis, with the religiosity somewhere between Lutheran orthodoxy and Pietism. Although there are many hymns for specific people, they provide very little personal information about them. The hymns are mostly reminders about the importance of Christian life, penitence, the meaning of grace and ways to obtain it. Conversion features in several of them. There are no Enlightenment features in these texts, rather folk beliefs. As noted above with the compositions for his own son, some of the funeral hymns contain fictional texts from the perspective of the deceased in which they bid farewell to their family and relatives, often mentioning them one by one. The first hymn of this kind was published in 1764, a hymn to Maria Azell, widow of the merchant Mikko Nordström.²³ These are exhortations to stay with Christ, but are also intended to comfort for those still on earth.

Funeral poems in the early modern period usually consisted of three separate parts. The lamentation bewailed the power of death and expressed grief for the dead person. The laudation extolled the deceased’s fame and achievements. The third part, the consolation, was supposed to comfort friends and relatives. This comfort might, as noted, be fictionally dispensed by the dead person themselves. This tripartite structure, a tradition which originated in the literature of Antiquity, was recommended in manuals of rhetoric and poetics.²⁴ Ragvaldinpoika’s funeral poems may to some extent have derived from the dream that he had after the death of his mother. In the dream he stood by his mother’s grave, looking down into it. There he saw a small boy like an angel with his mother. He asked them to come out of the grave, but his mother told him that she felt well there. At that moment, Ragvaldinpoika woke up and saw them no more.²⁵ Relationships between the living and the dead were much more complicated at that time than they are today. There were common beliefs – folk beliefs, in particular – about dead people appearing to the living in order to convey messages or warnings.²⁶ In dreaming about his dead mother, Ragvaldinpoika was linked to the beliefs of his time about dead people as messengers from beyond the grave. The small boy-like angel in the grave of his mother may evoke the angel at the tomb of Christ, a biblical parallel similar to those in the hymn Ragvaldinpoika wrote about his surgery.

Using the Bible as a source

The previous section mentioned several ways of using the Bible that Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika applied in the occasional literature he wrote. In his ego documents, he mostly used parallels between the Passion of Christ and his own personal life. In his other poems and hymns, the Bible likewise had a prominent role, with frequent references to biblical events or texts. The suffering of Christ and the wedding at Cana are perhaps the most frequently cited events in his hymns. The latter is not only used in the wedding hymns; it occurs in other hymns as well. Similarly, Ragvaldinpoika referred to the suffering of Christ in many different hymns, even in a wedding poem to Jacob Mennander and his bride Maria Catharina Sjöstedt in 1784. According to him, the two most remarkable ‘weddings’ were the wedding at Cana and the death of Christ at Golgotha, where Christ as a ‘groom’ gave himself for the salvation of the whole world.²⁷ Ragvaldinpoika did not question the miracles of the Bible in any way.

Ragvaldinpoika rarely specified the biblical passages or verses he referred to, although there are some funeral poems where biblical verses are mentioned in the footnotes. When he did provide explicit references to biblical passages, there would be a connection of some kind between the Bible and the destinies of the dead people the funeral poems were written for. For example, the funeral poem for Adrian Näppius, son of the furrier Carl Gustaf Näppius, begins with the story of the centurion whose son died and was raised from the dead by Jesus. While Adrian Näppius did not arise from the dead, the grief of a bereaved father was the same in Finland in the 1760s as during Jesus’ time. Similarly, the funeral hymn to the minister of Loimaa, Gustaf Haartman, compares Haartman to several biblical characters who died as suddenly as Haartman did. In oratory, expressions of this kind are called exempla. The exempla are based on texts that are thought to be already known to readers; in these instances, the familiar text is the Bible, and therefore brief references are sufficient.²⁸ The biblical verses or stories are not the main object, but an aid to handling the situation when someone has died, making it more comprehensible. At the same time, those parallels bring history to life, as a reminder that similar events have happened before, in the time of the Bible.

Ragvaldinpoika referred to both the Old and New Testaments. The collection of biblical verses and stories proves that he had a good knowledge of the entire Bible and was able to draw on it in quite a creative way when writing his own occasional literature. Not only the Bible but also many forms of rhetorical writing were familiar to Ragvaldinpoika. It is not known whether he learnt them from textbooks or from other authors, or solely by imitating earlier funeral poems and other occasional literature, which must have been available in the Turku region.

Broadsheets and hymns as commercial articles

We do not know what gave Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika the idea of writing and publishing his texts. Pekka Raittila has considered this question and found some external stimuli for his activity. There had been literary projects in Tyrvää even before Ragvaldinpoika, but he probably found a greater enthusiasm for writing and publishing in Turku, where he most probably moved in the 1750s. Turku offered much better opportunities for publishing, and there was a group of people with the same religious sentiments as himself. This friendly group took care of him, offering him both a religious home and material support.²⁹

Generally speaking, occasional poetry, hymns and verses for funerals and weddings were written specifically for these events at the time, and they were printed in small editions. But at least some of them had more far-reaching goals: to serve the public after the actual event in prayers and devotion. Autobiographical texts, for example Lebensläufe in the Moravian tradition, were not only used at funerals; they were read at religious meetings in order to arouse devotion and present examples of the religious life of the deceased. Most hymns and verses by Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika were written from this point of view. In this respect, these writings of his belong to the genre of broadsheets or ephemeral songs, which were usually printed cheaply on poor-quality paper and sold at markets. As well as broadsheets, these poems were written as hymns, naming a suitable tune to which they could be sung. In appearance, they resemble broadsheets more than traditional occasional literature.³⁰ There is no information about the sale of these publications, but several features invite conclusions based on the commercial nature of the publications.

All the traditional parts (lamentation, laudation and consolation) are present in the poetry of Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika. The personal parts concerning the subjects of the poems are quite restricted, even in the funeral poetry written for well-known citizens, for example local clergymen. Only the broadsheets about Ragvaldinpoika himself and his own son were written from a more personal perspective. The other texts are strikingly devotional, admonitory, moral and edifying in their nature. This feature was noted in 1862 by Julius Krohn in his dissertation on Finnish poetry during the Swedish era.³¹ Other evidence of the commercial importance of these publications is the number of editions printed, which Raittila has ascertained. He shows that from 1763 there was more than one (first) edition of several publications, mostly of broadsheets and funeral hymns and verses. The first editions were quite often printed at least one year after the deceased person’s death, which indicates that they were more apt to be used as memoirs or devotional literature than at funerals. The funeral hymns to the furrier’s son Adrian Näppius, Michel Holma and the clergyman Abraham Wanochius, Master of Arts, appeared in four editions; the hymn to the minister of Piikkiö, David Henric Deutsch, in five editions; and the hymn to Anna Rogel, who was famous for preaching in her dreams, in a total of eight editions. The new editions were mostly published in the nineteenth century, but some appeared as late as the beginning of the twentieth century. Only the funeral hymn to David Henric Deutsch states the price of the publication on the last page: ‘six öre in silver’. Besides the funeral hymns, the short collections of hymns were popular and printed in several editions. Ragvaldinpoika was not very keen on selling his own life story – there are two editions of the hymns about his own life (1760 and 1771), and the hymn about his surgery was only printed once. It is also possible that these ego documents were not as commercially appealing to other people as the funeral poems. The latter were even more devotional and exhortative, closer to the genre of devotional literature. In Sweden, autobiographical ephemera about blind people and those with other disabilities were written and sold from the late seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries as their authors sought to earn a living.³² This does not seem to have been a motive impelling Ragvaldinpoika to publish his autobiographical hymns, although he published and sold his other writings with pleasure. However, it was in his autobiographical texts that Enlightenment features appeared most clearly. The other poems and hymns are more traditional by nature.

The most widespread publication by Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika was the hymn lamenting a maid from Paimio, Helena Jacobintytär, who was convicted of infanticide and hanged. According to the title page, the condemned maid herself had asked Ragvaldinpoika to write it as a warning to worldly people. No other evidence about the role of the maid in this publication is available, so we do not know whether this statement was merely a sales trick. Nevertheless, the person concerned was a real Finnish woman from Paimio, not a fictional character. Broadsheets before the 1850s were mostly moral and exhortatory by nature, like this one as well as other broadsheets and hymns by Ragvaldinpoika. Altogether thirty editions of this broadsheet were printed between 1764 and 1903. Some years saw the publication of several editions, for example as many as five in 1764. Most editions were printed in the nineteenth century.³³ At that time, the popularity and dissemination of broadsheets was already greater than during the previous century.

Despite the large number of editions of various broadsheets and hymns, the publications were not advertised in the Turku newspapers. They were probably sold at the fair, like other broadsheets.

Conclusion

In his writings, Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika trod a fine line between the ideas of Lutheran orthodoxy and of the Enlightenment. His autobiographical texts represent a comparatively new world view; but the commercial texts written for other people’s funerals and weddings adhered to traditional lines, reflecting features of Lutheran orthodoxy, Pietism and folk belief. From the Enlightenment, Ragvaldinpoika especially adopted conceptions about medicine and doctors. Trying to heal congenital disabilities is no sin, according to him. These things were dear to his heart for personal reasons, in that he himself suffered from various disabilities. The Enlightenment ideas in medicine brought more hope and help in his circumstances than the old world view of Lutheran orthodoxy. For Ragvaldinpoika, these new ideas did not carry any theological significance. On the other hand, in respect of the more dogmatic questions he did not have any such personal need to assume a considered position in relation to enlightened ideas, highlighting the meaning of reason, for instance. Conversion is needed for salvation, and apostasy was one of the reasons for war, he said.

Although Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika wrote about himself, he was either not very interested in selling his own life story or did not have enough buyers for it. His moral, admonitory and devotional poems were printed in a larger number of editions than the stories of his own experiences. Then as now, a murder story would be a best-seller, and the tale of the hanged infanticide sold exceptionally well. Ragvaldinpoika was at least partly capable of earning his living through literary work, writing and selling his own texts. That was quite an achievement for a self-taught, disabled man in the eighteenth century, and it affords us an indication of the effect of folk Enlightenment.