Lumberjacks
A lumberjack is a labourer who earns his bread and butter in logging. Depending on the Finnish speaker, jätkä—which essentially means ’lumberjack’ in Finnish—can also refer in colloquial Finnish to ‘guy’, either in a positive or negative sense.
Jätkä has no equivalent in the other languages related to Finnish, and the base word is indeed assumed to be a unique descriptive form. The word entered the literary language at the end of the 19th century, but as a dialectal term for a labourer, at least, it was already mentioned in Elias Lönnrot’s dictionary of 1874.
The lumberjack culture is linked with lumbering as well as the logging site and log-floating. What is particularly essential to this culture is lumberjack humour. The most renowned character in the humour of the northern Finnish lumberjacks is Nätti-Jussi, the “king of the lumberjacks”.
Land of the Arctic Circle
--------------------------Mountain of the
Midnight Sun
--------------------------Finland’s Klondike
--------------------------From sleigh rides to the
age of the Concorde
--------------------------The nearest real hotel
--------------------------Santa Claus Land
--------------------------A city called by many
names - and the heroes
take the spoils
--------------------------
