House Laksha
GRATITUDE
to everyone who preserved the memory of the Veps indigenous tribal people
O great Finnish scholars, Scandinavian seafarers and travelers of the Viking Age, ancient and medieval authors, archaeologists, historians, linguists, ethnographers, philologists, geographers, translators, editors, archivists, librarians, museum custodians, and contemporary researchers of Europe, North and South America, and other territories! In different centuries, you saw, heard, recorded, compared, translated, published, preserved, and passed on information about the Veps, their language, land, roads, trade connections, culture, memory, and historical destiny. Some left a few lines in a chronicle, some traveled a long road to Veps villages and recorded living speech, some preserved an ancient manuscript, a museum object, or a newspaper page, while others, already in our time, digitized all of this and opened it for new reading. Accept our heartfelt gratitude!
Thanks to your labor, the memory of the Veps has been preserved not only in the ancestral memory of our Veps indigenous tribal people of the Laksha clan, but also in written testimonies, archaeological findings, field records, dictionaries, grammars, school books, archival catalogs, museum collections, scholarly articles, and digital repositories. We thank everyone who did not allow these testimonies to disappear; everyone who carefully passed them down from generation to generation; everyone who made the primary source accessible in its authentic form. From such works, great and small, renowned and unnamed, there emerges today the possibility of seeing once again the historical continuity of our people.
The Circle of Our Gratitude
In this message, we intentionally gather our gratitude into one clear circle. We thank the people of the North and Scandinavian seafarers, merchants, and travelers; ancient and medieval authors, scribes, copyists, and translators; archaeologists, researchers of runic monuments, museum workers, and custodians of Staraya Ladoga; Finnish and Finland-based scholars of the 19th–21st centuries; contemporary research teams of Europe and America; national libraries, universities, archives, language institutes, publishing houses, and digital platforms; American researchers and cultural communities; government and public services of the United States; churches, charitable organizations, volunteers, and wonderful people who helped us in our new life. We offer special gratitude to those whose names are found in the Registry of Sources: even if a man’s name appears only in a bibliographic record, his labor is also part of the common chain of preserving knowledge.
By name, our gratitude is extended to Jordanes, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, Adam of Bremen, Saxo Grammaticus, Ohthere, Sigismund von Herberstein, Nicolaes Witsen, and generations of editors of ancient texts, including Theodor Mommsen; to Anders Johan Sjögren, Elias Lönnrot, August Ahlqvist, David Emanuel Daniel Europaeus, Arvid Genetz, Charles-Eugène Ujfalvy de Mezőkövesd, and Hjalmar Basilier; to Elena Aleksandrovna Melnikova, Michael Branch, Marje Joalaid, Tuomo Pekkanen, Mervi Koskela Vasaru, Johanna Laakso, Andrii Danylenko, Rogier Blokland, Riho Grünthal, Ott Kurs, Laura Siragusa, Nicolas Mark Jansens, Soňa Wojnarová, Viktorie Janovská, and Martin Janovský. And our gratitude does not end with this list: alongside those named stand coauthors, editors, librarians, translators, archaeologists, photographers, custodians of collections, technical specialists, and all those whose labor gave the sources a long life.
To Finland, Finnish scholarship, and those who made archival memory accessible
Special and profound gratitude to the state of Finland, the Finnish scholarly community, archives, libraries, universities, language institutions, digital collections, and research traditions. Thanks to this many years of labor, an enormous body of materials about the Veps has not merely been preserved, but has also been made accessible for new reading and independent verification. For us, this is especially important: respect for the past becomes genuine when a man can open the primary source, see it with his own eyes, compare the facsimile with a later edition, and verify the date, title, page, and context.
We thank the National Library of Finland and its digital resources for the facsimiles, catalog records, and Fenno-Ugrica collections. The Registry of this document contains the first Veps educational publication of 1932, Ezmäne vepsiden azbuk i lugendknig; Vepsan kelen grammatik of 1935; Vepsa-venähine vajehnik of 1936; and Veps-language school curricula of 1937; alongside them are a facsimile of Åbo Tidningar dated June 4, 1825, containing Sjögren’s letter, and the metadata for Vepsänman sarnad – the stories collected by Lönnrot in 1842. This is not abstract gratitude to an institution – it is gratitude for specific pages that were preserved and to which one can return decades and centuries later.
We thank the University of Helsinki and its Research Portal; the Language Bank of Finland for its independent institutional description of Veps as belonging to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Uralic language family; the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus) for its collections of materials on the Balto-Finnic languages; Finna and Helka for bibliographic records; the University of Oulu for research on Bjarmaland, the historical geography of the North, and the Balto-Finnic linguistic area; Finnish scholarly journals, publishing platforms, university repositories, and research teams for ensuring that the professional discourse on the Veps and their language continues today.
Thank you to the wonderful state of Finland and to all our brothers for making archival memory a functioning scholarly infrastructure. Preserved books, digitized newspapers, language collections, museum descriptions, university research, and open catalogs make it possible to return Veps texts to cultural circulation and not depend on a single retelling or a single point of view.
Ancient Roads of the North and Written Testimonies of Different Eras
With gratitude, we turn to the people of the North – Scandinavian seafarers, merchants, and travelers of the Viking Age, and to those who traveled the northern routes before and after them. You crossed the Baltic and Lake Ladoga, entered the river routes of northeastern Europe, connected the forest zone with the Volga, Volga Bulgaria, and distant markets, and carried goods, information, skills, and names. We offer gratitude not for conquest and not for the right of one people to speak on behalf of another, but for the very fact of centuries of contact between people and routes that left material and written traces. These routes help contemporary researchers see the North not as an empty space, but as a complex world of mutual contacts, trade, and the exchange of furs, silver, metal, and knowledge.
We thank the ancient and medieval authors, whose texts preserved the names of the peoples and lands of northeastern Europe. In our corpus, Jordanes and his Vas, the Arabic tradition of Wīsū/Īsū, the Latin Wizzi, the accounts of Ibn Fadlan, Adam of Bremen, Saxo Grammaticus, and other testimonies are considered alongside one another. We approach them with respect and scholarly caution: a similar name does not yet mean a proven identity of a people, and a medieval text cannot be read as though it were written by a modern ethnographer. This is precisely why these sources are valuable – they form a sequence of testimonies from different eras that can be compared by language, geography, trade routes, and context.
Special gratitude goes to those who copied, edited, published, translated, and preserved ancient texts in libraries and academic corpora. Without the manuscript tradition, critical editions, translations, precise bibliographic locators, and digital facsimiles, an ancient line would have remained inaccessible. Therefore, the circle of our gratitude includes not only the authors of the past, but also generations of unnamed scribes, typesetters, catalogers, restorers, editors, and librarians, thanks to whom it is possible today to return once again to the primary source.
In the Land of the Ancestors: Archaeology, Signs, and the Question of Writing
Our profound gratitude goes to archaeologists, museum staff, researchers of runic monuments, and custodians of the collections of Staraya Ladoga. A special place in our dossier is occupied by the Staraya Ladoga wooden rod, the runic amulet of the 9th–10th centuries, and other materials important to the discussion of sign practices in the Ladoga and northern environment. We thank the researchers and custodians, as well as Elena Aleksandrovna Melnikova, for her scholarly labor with the runic material, drawings, publications, and the opportunity to see the object not through a retelling, but in its official catalog record and image.
Therefore, we thank those who found objects in the lands connected with the life and memory of our ancestors; those who documented the precise archaeological context; those who carried out photography and scholarly drawings; those who created official museum and scholarly catalog records and made the images available for research use.
Staraya Ladoga wooden rod, Side A
Staraya Ladoga wooden rod, Side B
Color photograph of the rod’s surface
Scholarly drawing of the Staraya Ladoga runic amulet
To Those Who Heard and Recorded Veps Speech
We thank all those who came to the Veps not only to tell about them, but to listen to the people themselves: living speech, words, forms, songs, stories, and place names. Thanks to such people, the Veps language became audible to scholarship, and the people became visible to the scholarly world. An especially important milestone in our corpus is the year 1824 and the labor of Anders Johan Sjögren; followed by his publications of 1831–1832, the field records of Elias Lönnrot from 1842 and his dissertation of 1853, the labor of August Ahlqvist, David Emanuel Daniel Europaeus, Arvid Genetz, Charles-Eugène de Ujfalvy, Hjalmar Basilier, and their successors. From individual records, grammatical observations, dictionaries, and texts, a corpus gradually took shape that makes it possible to study the language not through conjecture, but through material.
With reverence, we thank Anders Johan Sjögren, Elias Lönnrot, August Ahlqvist, Arvid Genetz, Charles-Eugène Ujfalvy de Mezőkövesd, Hjalmar Basilier, David Emanuel Daniel Europaeus, and all their successors for ensuring that Veps speech was heard, recorded, and brought into scholarly circulation. We thank Michael Branch and Marje Joalaid for the biographical and historiographical examination of Sjögren’s legacy; Riho Grünthal and Ott Kurs for contemporary linguistic and ethnographic formulations; Laura Siragusa for research on writing, education, concealment, and language revitalization; Rogier Blokland for his labor with the Arabic tradition of Wīsū; Johanna Laakso for the analysis of ancient written monuments and the limits of dialect attribution; Nicolas Mark Jansens, Soňa Wojnarová, Viktorie Janovská, and Martin Janovský for contemporary historical-linguistic research; Tuomo Pekkanen, Mervi Koskela Vasaru, and Andrii Danylenko for their contribution to the study of northern sources, Bjarmaland, and the Arabic geographical tradition.
We also thank all the authors, editors, translators, and compilers whose names and labor are found in the complete Registry of Direct Links. Special gratitude goes to the people who not only created new research, but also brought old labor back to life: making scans, describing archival units, preparing bibliographies, marking up metadata, correcting catalogs, maintaining servers and digital collections. Scholarship rests not only on great names; it also rests on the daily precision of people who do not allow knowledge to fall apart.
To Contemporary Researchers of Europe, the United States of America, and the Entire Scholarly World
We express our deepest gratitude to contemporary researchers in Finland, the United States of America, Estonia, Scandinavia, other countries of Europe, North and South America, and throughout the world – to all those who today continue to study the Veps language, history, and culture. We thank the University of Helsinki, the University of Oulu, the University of Tartu, the Institute of the Estonian Language, the Language Bank of Finland, the Institute for the Languages of Finland, Fenno-Ugria, Oxford University Press, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Danish Library, scholarly societies, journals, museums, libraries, and repositories that preserve, verify, and publish materials.
Thank you to all the people who once recorded our name and did not let it disappear. Thank you to those who went to the Veps and listened to our speech. Thank you to those who compiled dictionaries and grammars, printed books, created school texts, described archival holdings, translated ancient sources, and discussed the accuracy of attribution. Thank you to those who today make old materials available in digital form and leave a direct path from the modern reader to the primary source.
Gratitude to the United States of America – Its Scholarship, Communities, and People
We express our gratitude to all American researchers, scholars, historians, archaeologists, philologists, translators, archivists, and all those who have devoted years of their labor to studying the past, preserving ancient sources, and restoring historical memory. We extend our profound gratitude to communities, organizations, societies, cultural centers, associations, and individual people in the United States of America who have supported and continue to support Finnish, Karelian, Veps, and the broader Balto-Finnic cultural heritage. We thank the families who preserve home archives and stories of migration; the people who support cultural events; and those who pass on to younger generations the language, songs, crafts, cuisine, customs, and respect for their origins.
From the bottom of our hearts, we thank the people, services, organizations, and local communities of the United States who have met us along our path and, through their labor, attention, and human involvement, help us feel safe, gain stability, and build a new life. With respect, we mention the employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), other government services, and all those particular people who, in the course of their duties, treated us attentively, with dignity, and with humanity, and who always ask whether everything is all right with us and whether we need any help.
We also express our sincere gratitude to local sheriff’s departments, law enforcement officers, public safety services, and emergency services – to all those whose daily labor is connected with maintaining order, protecting people, and preserving the peace of cities and communities. We thank the employees of government and community programs, schools, medical and social services for helping children, supporting families, providing opportunities to care for health, learn English, adapt to a new life, and have the most essential conditions – a safe home, help in difficult moments, and the opportunity to move forward.
With special warmth, we thank the churches, religious communities, charitable organizations, volunteers, and wonderful Americans who have always been ready to extend a helping hand: to share food and clothing, help with essential things, show the way, and offer support with a kind word. We wish all the people mentioned above and their families strong health, peace, happiness, well-being, and prosperity. May the good they do for others return to them many times over. May their children, grandchildren, and future generations be happy, and may love, abundance, and peace dwell in their homes. Thank you to the United States of America for the support, safety, opportunities, and warmth that we have found here. We will always preserve our gratitude in our memory and in the memory of our lineage.
About Our Name, Language, Memory, and the Right to Speak in Our Own Name
May this gratitude not blur what the preserved sources and our own memory tell us. Everything found and recorded by scholars is important to us because it allows us to see more clearly the continuity of the people and the language. The Veps are a distinct Balto-Finnic people with their own Veps language, culture, customs, traditions, way of life, and memory. The Veps language is not the Russian language, its dialect, or a local variant; modern linguistics places it within the Balto-Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. The language of communication that a man was compelled or accustomed to use during a particular era does not negate his origin, ancestral memory, or right to self-determination.
For us, indigenous belonging is not created by a single passport and does not cease because of a single entry made by an official. We do not regard as a voluntary renunciation of Veps belonging those passports, identity documents, census forms, questionnaires, and other documents in which the word “Russian” may have been entered without the free, informed, and expressly stated will of the man himself or his family. We cannot be rewritten into another people with a single stroke of a pen. A document is important as a historical source, but it must be read together with the circumstances in which it was created, family memory, language, place of origin, and other evidence.
We distinguish between the free study of the Russian language, natural bilingualism, and voluntary cultural exchange on the one hand, and forced assimilation on the other. Our corpus of sources and testimonies examines the closure or weakening of national institutions, the termination of education in the Veps language, the prohibition of public writing during a certain period, repressions, administrative pressure, the disappearance of villages, and the reduction of the space in which Veps speech was passed from elders to children. These different phenomena cannot be mechanically merged into a single assertion: an archival fact, a scholarly interpretation, eyewitness testimony, and ancestral memory are different in nature and require different forms of verification. But together they help us comprehend why the loss of language by some families cannot be explained solely as a “natural process.”
We remember the fear, the disruption of the intergenerational transmission of the language, and the severe consequences of modernization and assimilation. Studies of late Soviet practices of registering Veps identity describe cases in which, in the Leningrad and Vologda regions, belonging to the Veps was not officially recorded or was challenged by officials. For us, documents created under such pressure cannot, by themselves, serve as evidence that a man or a family voluntarily renounced Veps belonging.
We, the Veps indigenous tribal people of the Laksha clan, united by common roots and an unbroken spiritual connection with the land of our ancestors, preserve and develop the Veps language, protect the symbols of our lineage, and maintain our folk traditions. We have the right to speak in our own name, to interpret the course of our own history, and to articulate what we consider important for the preservation of memory. Scholarly institutions, archives, censuses, and individual researchers provide us with invaluable knowledge and testimony, for which we are grateful to them; but no external source possesses the exclusive right to erase our name, origin, and memory.
Historical-Linguistic Dossier
Below is a corpus of key dates, quotations, translations, and scholarly commentary. It is arranged from early external names and medieval testimonies to the scholarly study of the Veps language in the 19th century, the creation of a literary written form, the period of its suppression and its modern revival, and then to the independent contemporary classification of the Veps language and people. The wording concerning early ethnonyms is intentionally cautious: phonetic similarity is treated as a matter for research, not as automatic proof.
922 and Later – Arabic wīsū/īsū: a Probable External Designation.
Ibn Fadlan reported Wīsū on the authority of the Bulgar king in 922; later geographers repeated and reworked this tradition. Geography, the fur trade, and the form of the name support a connection with the Veps.
Source: Rogier Blokland, “The icy heart”: On the ethnonym wīsū in the Arabic tradition (Helsinki, 2024)
Quote: “the thousand-year-old Arabic word for (probably) the Veps; They wrote back”
The 1070s – Adam of Bremen, IV.14: Wizzi in a Northern List.
Adam places Wizzi alongside Mirri, Lami, Scuti, and Turci.
Source: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Mapping Medieval Peoples – Adam IV.14
Quote: “Supra illas Wizzi, Mirri, Lami, Scuti et Turci habitare feruntur.”
Translation: “Beyond them, it is said, live Wizzi, Mirri, Lami, Scuti, and Turci.”
Adam of Bremen, IV.19: an Internal Objection to a Simple Wizzi = Veps Equation.
In the same book, Adam explains Wizzi as the local name for Alani vel Albani.
Source: Adam of Bremen, Gesta IV.19 - Baltic Sea Library
Quote: “Alani vel Albani, qui lingua eorum Wizzi dicuntur.”
Translation: “The Alans, or Albans, who in their language are called Wizzi.”
1200 – Saxo Grammaticus: Wisinnus.
Source: Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, Book VI – Latin Text
Quote: “gladiator, nomine Wisinnus, apud Rusciam rupem”
Translation: “a fighter named Wisinnus by a cliff in Rus’.”
1824 – Sjögren: the First Scholarly Identification in the Filtered Corpus.
The Institute of the Estonian Language dates the discovery of the Veps for academic scholarship to 1824.
Source: Institute of the Estonian Language, The Veps
Quote: “The Veps were discovered for academia by A. J. Sjögren in 1824.”
1831–1832 – Publication of Sjögren’s Observations.
The Finnish-Swedish national biographical reference work links Sjögren’s classification to linguistic evidence and explicitly states that it included the Veps he had discovered. It lists his German-language works from 1831 and 1832.
Source: Michael Branch, “SJÖGREN, Anders Johan,” Biografiskt lexikon för Finland / SLS
Quote: “inkluderade vepserna, vilkas existens han hade upptäckt”
Translation: “included the Veps, whose existence he had discovered.”
1842–1853 – Lönnrot: Field Notes and the First Verifiable Connected Text.
Lönnrot states that he visited the “Northern Chudes” in the fall of 1842. In his 1853 dissertation, he prints connected language samples alongside Finnish translations. In the filtered corpus, this is the earliest directly verifiable connected Veps text. It provides the name of the language, the date of the fieldwork, and the beginning of a connected narrative. This is a scholarly transcription, not evidence of a community writing tradition among the speakers themselves.
Source: Elias Lönnrot, Om det nord-tschudiska språket (Helsinki, 1853)
Quote: “vepsän eller vöpsän-kieli; besökte jag om hösten 1842; Kaks veljet i vilu”
Translation: “the Veps, or Vöps, language”; “I visited [them] in the fall of 1842”; “Two Brothers and the Frost.”
1859–1861 – Ahlqvist: an Expanded Grammatical and Textual Corpus.
Ahlqvist’s paper was read on February 7, 1859; a modern bibliographic record places the article in the 1861 Acta volume, pages 49–113. The work explicitly identifies its subject as Wepserna and includes a description, texts, and a vocabulary.
Source: August Ahlqvist, Anteckningar i Nord-Tschudiskan – Primary Scan of Acta VI
Quote: “Nord-Wschuderna eller Wepserna; Föredragna den 7 Febr. 1859”
Translation: “the Northern Chudes, or the Veps”; “read on February 7, 1859.”
1931 – Creation of a Written Standard.
A Western academic monograph distinguishes standardization from 19th-century scholarly transcriptions: a written form was created in 1931, after which the organization of instruction began.
Source: Laura Siragusa, Promoting Heritage Language in Northwest Russia (Routledge, 2017), p. 164
Quote: “Once they had created a Vepsian written form in 1931, a group of academics began organizing Vepsian teaching.”
1932 – Beginning of Educational Publishing.
An Estonian institutional overview identifies the 1932 primer as the first publication.
Source: Institute of the Estonian Language, The Veps – Section on Writing
Quote: “The first book was a primer (1932).”
1937 and 1987 – Suppression and the Beginning of Public Revival.
A peer-reviewed Canadian article dates the ban on public writing in Veps to 1937 and the official beginning of the revival movement to the 1987 Elon pu festival.
Quote: “Vepsian writing … was banned … in 1937; officially began in 1987 with a festival called Elon pu”
The Veps are a Baltic-Finnic people. This is not a conclusion based on the similarity of medieval names, but a modern linguistic and ethnographic classification.
Source: Riho Grünthal, “Finnic languages and Baltic Sea language area,” University of Helsinki
Quote: “Finnic languages (henceforth used as a synonym for Balto-Finnic and Baltic Finnic etc.).”
Veps Within Finnic.
A current Oxford University Press chapter explicitly places Veps among the Finnic minority languages and identifies it as geographically the easternmost.
Source: Riho Grünthal, “Veps,” The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages (2022)
Quote: “Veps is geographically the easternmost of the Finnic minority languages.”
The Veps as a People.
The linguistic classification of a language and the ethnographic classification of a people are related but not identical claims. A Finnish geographical journal explicitly makes the latter claim.
Source: Ott Kurs, “Vepsians: the easternmost Baltic-Finnic people,” Terra 107/3 (1995)
Quote: “Vepsians: the easternmost Baltic-Finnic people.”
Independent Institutional Confirmation of the Classification of Veps.
The Language Bank of Finland independently assigns Veps to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Uralic language family.
Source: Language Bank of Finland, Veps
Quote: “Veps belongs to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Uralic language family.”
Early History and Primary Sources
Jansens, Nicolas Mark; Wojnarová, Soňa; Janovská, Viktorie; Janovský, Martin. The Ves′ in historical and linguistic perspective: documentary evidence and linguistic analysis. Acta onomastica 65/1 (2024), 77-119.
Jansens et al. 2024: publisher’s full-text PDF (CEEOL).
https://www.ceeol.com/content-files/document-1295127.pdf
Jordanes, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths § 116: Latin text and translation, ToposText.
https://topostext.org/work/744
Jordanes, The Roman and Gothic Histories: Mommsen edition, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, scan.
https://archive.org/details/gri_33125006532622
Austrian Academy of Sciences: Adam of Bremen IV.14, Wizzi – exact locator, Latin text, and translation.
https://mmp.acdh-dev.oeaw.ac.at/archiv/stelle/detail/4936
Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen.
https://archive.org/details/gestahammaburgen00adamuoft
Pekkanen, Tuomo. Adam of Bremen 4,14: Wizzi, Mirri, etc. (Arctos).
https://journal.fi/arctos/article/view/88312
Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Books I-IX: English translation, Project Gutenberg.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1150/1150-h/1150-h.htm
Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin: Saxo Grammaticus, critical bibliography and information on the manuscript tradition.
https://medieval.wiki.uib.no/Saxo_Grammaticus
Royal Danish Library: Angers Fragment, NKS 869 g 4º, official catalog and facsimile.
https://permalink.kb.dk/permalink/2006/manus/525/eng/
Koskela Vasaru, Mervi. Bjarmaland (University of Oulu, 2016), dissertation, full text.
https://oulurepo.oulu.fi/bitstream/10024/34924/1/isbn978-952-62-1396-5.pdf
Ohthere’s Voyages: Old English text and teaching edition.
https://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/ohthere.php
Blokland, Rogier. “The icy heart”: On the ethnonym wīsū in the Arabic tradition (2024).
https://edition.fi/suomalaisugrilainenseura/catalog/book/965/chapter/1325
Blokland 2024: Uppsala University repository record.
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1860355
Ibn Fadlan, Mission to the Volga: English translation and notes.
https://dokumen.pub/mission-to-the-volga-1479899895-9781479899890-9781479826698-9781479829750.html
Danylenko, Andrii. What Can the Arab Geographers Deliver on Slavic Historical Phonology? (Slavonic and East European Review 98/1, 2020).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.98.1.0001
Sjögren, Anders Johan. Dr. Sjögren’s Journey to Study the Peoples of Finnic Stock Living in Russia, digital edition of the 1829 text.
https://www.booksite.ru/fulltext/puteshes/index.html
Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies: Herberstein, Notes on Muscovite Affairs, synoptic critical edition.
https://leibniz-ios.de/en/ios-publications/discussion-papers-and-online-publications/herberstein
Huygens ING: Nicolaas Witsen, North and East Tartary (1705), bilingual digital edition.
https://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/witsen
Language, Field Notes, and Writing
Lönnrot, Elias. On the North Chudic Language (1853): full text.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60352
Atlas of the Languages and Cultures of the Indigenous Minorities of the North: Veps, history of research.
https://atlaskmns.ru/page/en/lang_vepsy_all.html
Ahlqvist, August. Notes on the North Chudic Language, Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae VI (1861).
https://archive.org/download/actasocietatissc06suom/actasocietatissc06suom.pdf
Genetz, Arvid. The Northern Vanguards of the Veps, Part I (Kieletär 4, 1872).
https://opastajat.net/opastajat.net/dkpdf/genetzetu.pdf
Ujfalvy, Charles-Eugène de. An Essay on the Grammar of Veps, or Northern Chud, Based on Materials by Messrs. Ahlqvist and Lönnrot (1875), HathiTrust catalog.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008675400
Basilier, Hjalmar. The Vepsians in Isayeva Volost (1890): bibliographic and research reference.
https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/10024/67918/1/978-951-44-8998-3.pdf
The First Veps Alphabet and Reading Book (1932): first Veps educational publication, National Library of Finland.
https://fennougrica.kansalliskirjasto.fi/handle/10024/61465
Fenno-Ugrica: collection of Veps-language publications, 1932-1937.
Project Gutenberg: On the North Chudic Language – plain-text transcription.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60352/pg60352.txt
National Library of Finland metadata: Veps Tales, tales collected by Elias Lönnrot in 1842.
https://data.nationallibrary.fi/bib/me/I00481553000
Basilier 1890 and early Finnish research bibliography, article record and page references.
Joalaid, Marje. Anders Johan Sjögren as the Discoverer of the Veps and His Successors in the Nineteenth Century. Linguistica Uralica 31/3 (1995), 203-206.
https://doi.org/10.3176/lu.1995.3.07
Sjögren, Anders Johan. On the Earlier Dwelling Places of the Yems (1832): Finna/HELKA bibliographic record.
https://www.finna.fi/Record/helka.9911672083506253
Sjögren, Anders Johan. Collected Writings, Volume I (1861): reprint of the 1832 article, Wepsä/Wepsäläiset on pp. 471-472.
https://books.google.com/books?id=OFxNAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA471
Äbo Tidningar, June 4, 1825, no. 44: Sjögren’s letter, facsimile.
https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/sanomalehti/binding/495803
Europaeus, David Emanuel Daniel. Comparative Veps Forms in Suometar no. 20 (1847), digital text.
https://agricolaverkko.fi/vintti/julkaisut/julkaisusarja/kktk/suometar/SMTR1847-20.html
Laakso, Johanna. The First Finnic Text Revisited. Virittäjä 103/4 (1999), 531-555: document no. 292 and the limits of dialect attribution.
https://journal.fi/virittaja/article/view/39204
Fenno-Ugrica: Veps Language Textbook for Primary School (Grades 3-4) (1935), scan of the original edition.
https://fennougrica.kansalliskirjasto.fi/handle/10024/61460
Fenno-Ugrica: Veps–Russian Dictionary (1936), scan of the original edition.
https://fennougrica.kansalliskirjasto.fi/handle/10024/61452
Fenno-Ugrica: Curricula for the Veps Primary School: Veps Language: Penmanship (1937).
https://fennougrica.kansalliskirjasto.fi/handle/10024/61453
Grünthal, Riho. Veps Grammar (2015): peer-reviewed grammar, University of Helsinki.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/veps%C3%A4n-kielioppi/
Grünthal, Riho. Finnic languages and Baltic Sea language area (2007): Finnic/Balto-Finnic and the composition of the branch.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/finnic-languages-and-baltic-sea-language-area/
University of Helsinki: research on the “Baltic-Finnic Vepsian language.”
Language Bank of Finland: Veps belongs to the Balto-Finnic branch of Uralic.
https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/veps/
Fenno-Ugria: Vepsians – a Finnic people, general reference page.
https://fennougria.ee/en/peoples/baltic-finnic-peoples/vepsians/
University of Tartu, Department of Estonian and General Linguistics: Finnic languages, including Veps.
https://keel.ut.ee/en/content/finnic-languages
Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus): Veps materials in the Finnic languages collections.
https://kotus.fi/kotus/kieliaineistot/suomen-kielen-nauhoitearkisto/sukukielten-vahalieriokokoelmat/
Institute of the Estonian Language: Veps belongs to the Baltic-Finnic group.
https://arhiiv.eki.ee/books/redbook/veps.shtml
Kurs, Ott. Vepsians: the easternmost Baltic-Finnic people. Terra 107/3 (1995), 127-135.
https://terra.journal.fi/article/view/105888
Oxford University Press: Riho Grünthal, Veps, in The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages (2022), 291-307.
https://academic.oup.com/book/43672/chapter/366303982
A Blessing to All Who Preserved and Passed On Knowledge
May good be returned to all those people who, at any time, through their labor, participation, care, generosity, courage, or a kind word, helped scholars and researchers, the people of the North, Scandinavian seafarers, chroniclers, scribes, and medieval authors; to all those who preserved their labor, supported the path of knowledge, passed on information about the Veps, and safeguarded manuscripts, museum objects, language, memory, and the heritage of past centuries.
May all the good that you have done be blessed – seen and unnamed, great and small, recorded in books and preserved only in human hearts. May you be granted all that is best: strong health, long years of life, peace in your souls, honor, well-being, abundance, and prosperity. May your homes be filled with warmth and harmony, may your roads be good, your labor fruitful, your hopes bright, and your destiny merciful.
And may our blessing extend not only to you yourselves, but also to your children and grandchildren, to your great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, to all future generations of your lineages. May your descendants grow healthy and happy, live in peace and dignity, achieve success in good deeds, and never know severe hardship, loneliness, or oblivion. May health and strength, wisdom and nobility, love and faithfulness, well-being and good renown be passed down from generation to generation.
May there always be peaceful skies over your families, bread and abundance in your homes, and faithful and kind people beside you. May your path from the past to the future, from the memory of your ancestors to the good destinies of all your descendants, be blessed. May there be good for good. May there be light for light.
THANK YOU!
