We went back into the hut and sat down on the benches. The aroma of the little woman's presence clung to the place, and we could not help thinking of the endless round which had made up her life and would make up her future. Her ancestry dazzled one. Her forefathers were old at a date when the Romans laid down the first legend as a foundation for their history. They came of a fine, crusted, Ural-Altaic stock, who were accustomed to look upon the Adam-and-Eve family as vulgar parvenus. And yet they were people without observable pride or ostentation. They had no monuments, no books, no sculptured or written history. They could look back on neither a nobility nor kings. They had always been hunters and herders, and by reason of this had never acquired the gregarious idea. They were a people of camp-communities, living on their deer, and the camps were always small, because many deer cannot find pasturage in one locality. By reason of this it has never occurred to them to be patriotic, and, as a consequence, when oppression came in their way, they have always been oppressed. In a nation of warriors the small men get weeded out by the chances of battle. In a community which has never fought, the stature of the race deteriorates. The Lapps have never been warriors. They have never even been a nation.
As the world increased in the easy lands of the South, so have the Lapps through the centuries been ever squeezed at its verge towards the bleak, unknown North. It is but rarely they have consented to band together and raise objection. The Norwegians made them serfs by proclamation in the ninth century, and serfs they remained, contentedly enough, so long as the ill-usage dealt out to them was not over-brutal. When they could stand it no longer, they took refuge in the savage forest-dingles, and made expeditions for houghing their enemies' cattle and burning down their wooden homesteads. By this means they regained a wandering independence; but in the fourteenth century the Norskmen again coveted a subject race, and made systematic raids on the nomads, and again wrote them down as serfs in their census. And in the sixteenth century the Swedes followed suit. But only a few of the Lapps were caught. The great majority were still free wanderers on the fjeld and the tundras.