Traces of Multivocal Botany: Lars Montin’s Travels in Sápmi in 1749 and the Case of Angelica archangelica

On the 15^th and 16^th of July 1749 the small village Kvikkjokk (Huhttán in Lule Sápmi) in northern Sweden became the scene of a heated debate on epistemology and botany between a Linnaean field naturalist, local clergy and Indigenous Sámi people. At the forefront were local botanical names and uses of Angelica archangelica, also known simply as the angelica, wild celery, or Norwegian angelica (or “kvanne” in Swedish). Sámi people, temporarily present at the location in order to attend two compulsory church gatherings were called in not once but twice to settle issues relating to nomenclature and identity. The first time they responded, they sided with the travelling naturalist Lars Montin (1723-1785), and, by extension, his teacher Linnaeus’s descriptions published in Flora Lapponica (1737).^[1]Lars Montin, ’Beskrifning öfver en resa, på Kongl: Wetenskaps Societetens uti Uppsala, men i synnerhet Wälb. Herr Arch. Linnæi anmodan år 1749 om sommaren förrättad til Lapska Fiællarne Åfvan Luleå Stad’, MSS BANKS COLL MON, Botanical Collections, The Natural History Museum, London, 416, see also below discussion of the Angelica archangelica The second time, they dismissed the information detailed by Linnaeus in the same flora. Nor did they agree with the views of the local vicar Olof Olofsson Modéen (1696-1754), who translated the exchanges for Montin, that the plant in question was lethally poisonous.^[2]Montin, ’Beskrifning öfver en resa’, 421–422. The plant in question here was Angelica sylvestri, which Modéen seems to have confused with Hyoscyamus niger.   

These interactions are described in the unpublished manuscript of the eighteenth-century natural historian Lars Montin.^[3]The manuscript is kept by the Natural History Museum in London and has only been consulted sparsely. For a history and brief introduction see Kenneth Awebro’s two articles ‘Linnélärjungen Lars Montins dagbok från Lapplandsresan 1749’, 1990, Tre Kulturer (5), 48–51, and ‘Linnélärjungen Lars Montin och hans resa i svenska fjällvärlden år 1749’, 1993, Tre kulturer, (6), 145–160. For recent and ongoing research see BA-thesis by Hanne Beck Johansson, ‘“För Natural-Wetenskapen ock Hushåldningen mm i Lappland”: Materiell kunskapscirkulation utifrån Lars Montins resa genom Lule lappmark 1749’, Department of the History of Ideas and Science, Uppsala University, 2023, and Linda Andersson Burnett and Hanna Hodacs, ‘Natural history and border-making in Sápmi – the case of Lars Montin’s 1749 journey to the North’, unpublished paper, presented at the Workshop ‘A State in Motion’, Uppsala University, 14-15 of September, 2023. He was a student of Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist who seventeen years earlier, in 1732, had undertaken a journey to Sápmi (often referred to as “Lapland” in English). This undertaking became the stepping-stone for Linnaeus’s career, and prototype for many of the journeys he and his students undertook domestically as well as globally. In 1749, Montin traced the footsteps of one leg of his teacher’s northern journey. It was not just the route that followed a Linnaean template; his descriptions of his encounter with the Sámi are also, in many cases, predictable. Montin typically followed a basic Enlightenment natural-history choreography; the Sámi people represented an isolated and often bewildered audience from whom he extracted and codified knowledge. 

A careful reading of Montin’s travel account, however, reveals a more complex reality in which the Sámi people sometimes take center stage, as an interactive audience, and where issues are settled by drawing on specific local knowledge. Below we will discuss in more detail the role of the Sámi in Kvikkjokk in determining the name and use of the plant Angelica archangelica, a central plant to the Sámi economy, as medicine and food. Situating Montin’s account of this plant within the context of other contemporary writings on Sápmi from the 1730s and 40s and in relation to Montin’s desire to address audiences of learned society, we explore both traces of multivocal botany in scholarly debates, and how the Sámi were used to lend credibility to naturalists. We also highlight how disconnects often occurred between Sámi nomenclature and their complex use of the plant when their knowledge was condensed in standardised botanical genres such as the flora. 

The Sámi – An Object and Subject in 18th-century Natural History 

In order to understand Linnaeus’s and Montin’s northern travels, we need to place Linnaean natural history and its relation to Sápmi within a broader context of colonialism and travelling. Mary Louise Pratt, Londa Schiebinger and others have presented the overseas natural-history expeditions of Linnaean students as examples of how botanical studies facilitated colonialism.^[4]Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008); Londa Schiebinger, Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). In the Linnaean naturalists’ mercantile hunt for new botanical specimens, which they classified, universalised and exploited, they often overwrote Indigenous knowledge and paid little attention to the impact their expeditions had on local landscapes and populations. Pratt contends in the second edition of her work Imperial Eyes that Linnaean natural history not only silenced Indigenous narratives outside Europe—by re-labelling plants with Latin names, for example—but also had the same effect on local and rural narratives and repositories of knowledge in Europe.^[5]Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 12.

In the case of Sápmi, Linnaean natural historians such as Montin encountered Europe’s own Indigenous people whose land was divided and colonised by Sweden, Norway-Denmark and Russia. Swedish interest in Sápmi has a medieval pedigree that dates back to a contract between the crown and tradesmen in the far north in the thirteenth century. Through this contract, Swedish influence on trade in Sámi areas was established. The Crown’s interest increased from the sixteenth century onwards. Colonisation now took the shape of church and court building, and the collection of tax from the Sámi.^[6]Sverker Sörlin, ‘Rituals and Resources of Natural History: The North and the Arctic in Swedish Scientific Nationalism’, in Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörlin (eds.), Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices (Canton, 2002), 77-78.  Gunlög Fur, Colonialism in the Margins: Colonial Encounters in New Sweden and Lapland (Leiden: Brill, 2006). In addition to taxes, the Swedish crown was attracted to the area due its natural resources such as animal skins, fishing waters and minerals. The village of Kvikkjokk, for example, was founded around silver ore mining.^[7]Tore Abrahamsson, Drömmar av silver: silververket i Kvikkjokk 1660–1702 (Värnamo: Fälth & Hässler, 2009)

In the summer of 1732, Linnaeus had travelled in Sámi areas, including Kvikkjokk. Funded by the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala, he was there to carry out an inventory of the minerals, plants, animals, and peoples.^[8]For Linnaeus’s expedition see for example, Roger Jacobsson (ed), Så varför reser Linné: Perspektiv på Iter Lapponicum 1732 (Stockholm; Carlsson Bokförlag, 2005). Linnaeus’s local informants were clergy, and their families, stationed in the north, helped him with Sami names, lent money, and provided accommodation. There were also civil servants such as provincial governors who provided him with letters of recommendations and who ordered the Sámi to assist him. Linnaeus was, as all travellers in Sápmi in this period were, utterly dependent on the Sámi for guidance, food, and transport across fast-flowing rivers.^[9]Pär Eliasson, ‘Swedish Natural History: Travel in the Northern Space. From Lapland to the Arctic, 1800-1840’ in Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practises, ed. Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörlin (Canton: Science History Publications, 2002), 127. These people were, unlike the clergy and civil servants, hardly ever named by Linnaeus.^[10]For an exception, a ‘Constable Kock’ in Padjelanta, see Elena Isayev, and Staffan Müller-Wille. ‘Hospitality and Knowledge: Linnaeus’s Hosts on His Laplandic Journey’. Social Research: An International Quarterly 89, no. 1 (2022): 199–230.) However, their knowledge of names and uses of nature, extracted by Linnaeus, are included in the work that came out from his expedition, Flora lapponica (1737), as are provincial names and those used by the settlers. Therefore, his inscriptions are far more multivocal than Pratt’s account of Linnaean natural history, and Sámi knowledge became part of Linnaeus’s knowledge production.

In his inaugural speech as a Professor at Uppsala University in 1741, Linnaeus spoke on the importance of domestic journeys for the development of natural-historical knowledge that would benefit Sweden. Without domestic travel, he told his students, they would become “lynxes [with sharp eyes] abroad [and] mere [blind] moles at home.”^[11]Carl Linnaeus, ‘The Benefit of Travelling, &c.’ in B. Stillingfleet, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry and Physick (London, 1762), 31. It was not prudent, Linnaeus lectured, to “seek for that abroad, which may be had at home.”^[12]Ibid, ‘The Benefit of Travelling’, 11. During his speech he elevated, in particular, his own travels in Sápmi and instructed his students about the importance of being open to learning from “the vulgar,” “countrey people” and “barbarians,” and he refuted the notion that their knowledge was “not […] worthy to be communicated to the rest of mankind.”^[13] Ibid, 26-27. Yet, he also taught them that they, with their trained eyes and education, had a special role in surveying landscapes on behalf of the country. He argued that the naturalist traveller had the potential to see in the landscape “things which to this day were never discovered by any person whatever” and thereby elevating them beyond people inhabiting the landscape.^[14]Ibid,15. In Critica botanica (1737), in a discussion on how plants should be named, Linnaeus also spoke about the importance of botanists being “wise above the common herd” and not “like boors or Lapps.”^[15]Linnaeus, The Critica Botanica of Linnaeus, translated by Sir Arthur Fenton Hort (London:Ray Society, 1939),18. Having extracted and assessed local knowledge, a hierarchical regime therefore existed with the naturalists at the helm. It was their scientific writing that carried the heaviest epistemological clout and which attempted to impose a new fixture on the landscape. Montin was in his early 20s when he arrived in Uppsala in 1745, just as Linnaeus’s travelling program was taking shape.^[16]Olle Franzén, “Lars Montin”, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon. 

Another important contemporary circumstance was the renewed efforts in regulating the colonialisation of Sápmi; a proclamation from 1749 (Lappmarksreglementet) specified in more detail the conditions regulating the colonisation of the land. Two years later a commission, which negotiated the border between Norway and Sweden, produced a treaty that stipulated the right of Sámi people to move across while tending to their reindeer, fishing, or trading (Lappkodicillen).^[17] Åsa Össbo, ’Från lappmarksplakat till anläggarsamhällen: Svensk bosättarkolonialism gentemot Sápmi.’ Historisk tidskrift 140.3 (2020). It is therefore not surprising that Montin frames his own journey with references to destinations visited by other students of Linnaeus in North America, the Middle East, before moving to his discussion of the value of domestic travel, not least to Sápmi.^[18]Montin, ’Beskrifning öfver en resa’, 3–4. It was also Linnaeus’s journey to Sápmi that decided the itinerary that Montin took, although he sailed to Luleå, from where he moved northwest in Linnaeus’s footsteps, via Jokkmokk and Kvikkjokk into Norway, with Rörstad as his turn-around point. One of the guides that he employed on his more than 19-weeks-long journey was the son of Linnaeus’s Sámi guide, which indicates that there was quite a well-established infrastructure of both Indigenous and Swedish actors that university-trained naturalists utilized.^[19]Montin, ’Beskrifning öfver en resa’, 187. During the trip, Montin was heavily dependent on Sámi people in general; they carried the many live plants Linnaeus had asked him to bring back to Uppsala, hosted, fed, and guided him. But there are also silences, a refusal to obey orders, and other evidence of push back, which can be read as examples of Indigenous resistance or “countersigns,” to use Bronwen Douglas’s term, in Montin’s account.^[20]Bronwen Douglas, ‘In the Event: Indigenous Countersigns and the Ethnohistory of Voyaging’ in Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, ed. Margaret Jolly et al (Canberra: ANU Press, 2009), 175-198; Beck Johansson, “’För Natural-Wetenskapen ock Hushåldningen”’.  

Just like Linnaeus, Montin was also dependent on local clergymen who had been placed in Sámi areas since the seventeenth century in order to convert, “civilize,” and narrate the Sámi.^[21]For discussions of the role of the clergy in the colonisaton of Sápmi see for example Daniel Lindmark, ‘Colonial Encounter in Early Modern Sápmi’ in Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena, ed. Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (New York: Springer, 2013), 131-46. In this case, the Kvikkjokk vicar Modéen played a crucial role in linking Montin to a group of Sámi people (notably anonymous and nameless throughout the manuscript) who frequented the church service during Montin’s stay in Kvikkjokk in July 1749.^[22]Sten Henrysson, “Präster och skolmästare i Jokkmokks socken 1607–1850. Biografiska uppgifter” Scriptum, Rapportserie utgiven av Forskningsarkivet vid Umeå universitet, ed. Egil Johansson, nr 23, juni (1990), 5. Another clergyman who figured heavily in Montin’s account was Pehr Högström (1714-1784), who two years earlier (1747) had published the work Description of Lapland. Högström was educated at Uppsala and later worked as a missionary and vicar in Gällivare and Skellefteå, and also developed the South Sámi language into a written language.^[23]Pehr Högström, Beskrifning öfwer de til Sveriges krona lydande lapmarker (Stockholm:Cederholm, Lars Salvius, 1747). See also Olle Franzen, “Pehr Högström”, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon. While Montin did not encounter Högström he was in many respects deeply critical of his writings, a critique we can understand as part of a debate between different sections of Swedish learned society, between clergymen and naturalists, in which Linnaeus was prominent. He suggested that new ministers attended his lectures on natural history while they studied theology in Uppsala. Linnaeus did also influence the Lapland Ecclesiastical Bureau which in 1747 ordered “prospective Lapland parsons to learn how to ‘improve and cultivate the lands…next to their main task of teaching the Lapps.’”^[24]Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 78. As we shall see, this context forms an important backdrop to the botanical and epistemological debate in Kvikkjokk in July 1749, when the Sámi people, and their knowledge of the angelica became a central issue.  

Angelica archangelica – One Species, Many Names 

In scholarly literature predating Montin’s journey, the plant Angelica archangelica plays a prominent role.^[25]Ingvar Svanberg, ‘Samisk ethnobiologi’ in Samisk etnobiologi. Människor, djur och växter i norr, ed. Ingvar Svanberg and Håkan Tunon (Nora: Bokförlaget Nya Doxa, 2000), 21–25. Linnaeus devoted an extensive section of Flora Lapponica to the plant and with the nomenclature of the time, he called it Angelica foliorum impari lobato. Linnaeus starts the entry with a long list of synonyms, including four Sámi names for the plant (Urtas, Fatno, Botsk and Rasi), and a Q&A section in which he engaged with issues raised by different botanical writers concerning the species and information about habitats. He then moves on to describe Sámi usage of the plant as a preserver of health, medicine, and food. Here we also learn that the Sámi names have more specific meanings determining different parts belonging to different life cycles of the biennial plant.^[26]Carl von Linné, & T. M. Fries, Skrifter af Carl von Linné. Flora Lapponica (Uppsala: Vetenskapsakademien, 1905), 71–74 (species 101). In his travel diary, Linnaeus also registered the Sámi name Posco, and its use to refer to the plant in its second-year lifecycle. Judging by this unpublished travel account we learn that Linnaeus thought Sámi nomenclature was “more confusing” than the local Swedish name.^[27]Carl von Linné, Iter Lapponicum: Lappländska resan: 1732, vol. 1. Dagboken (Umeå: Kungl. Skytteanska samf., 2003), 146. Nonetheless, we recognize a multivocal dimension in how Linnaeus recorded and blended Sámi knowledge with his own. In Högström’s account of the plant from 1747, we register similar attention to Sámi use and names—although Högström claims the plant the Sámi called “Posco” was distinct from the angelica, indicating that he is unaware of its biennial life cycle.^[28]Högström, Beskrifning, 117. 

Montin’s critique of Högström is outlined under the subheading “Angelica Fl. Sw. 233,” which is a reference to the first edition of Linnaeus’s Flora Svecica published in 1745.^[29]Montin, ‘Beskrifning öfver en resa’, 414–418. In the section, Montin engages with two different audiences and evokes different dichotomies and types of epistemologies. His first audience is made up of the potential readers of his travel account. From how the text is organized in the manuscript, we can conclude that Montin expected to publish it. Montin makes Högström out to be the opposite of the careful botanist and educated natural historian—someone who undermines the science of botany by inventing species. Montin also attacks Högström’s status as a scholar by claiming that he is more ignorant than a “farmer’s wife” by failing to grasp the distinction between “grass,” “hay,” and “herb.” Thirdly, rather than observing the plant himself, Högström trusted a “run-away Sámi person” with a “stupid tale” which suggested that he was thus (also) not an empiricist.^[30]Ibid, 415. Montin’s version of scientific hierarchy was in many ways an elaborated version of Linnaeus’s own. 

The second audience comprises the Kvikkjokk vicar Modén, and the group of Sámi people who camped next to the church in order to attend two compulsory church gatherings. The significance of this surrounding is reinforced in the first sentences under the subheading “Angelica Fl. Sw. 233.” Montin starts by describing, as always unnamed, Sámi people bringing examples of the plant to the rectory which allowed Montin to study the plant. Montin noted that he had seen the plant the previous day by the Walli River and that it was flowering “in abundance” and partly “with newly grown leaves,” and thereby gesturing towards the biannual life-cycle of the angelica.^[31] Ibid, 414. After delivering his epistemologically-footed critique of Högström, all derived from the latter’s mistaken identity of the angelica, Montin returns to the Kvikkjokk scene to provide the final proof in relation to the identity of the angelica. The purpose was now to specifically convince Modéen that Högström, a fellow clergyman and author, had “so much had gone astray.”^[32]Ibid, 416. This is when the interactive Sámi audience re-enters the text, responding to Modén’s question when he asked:

everyone what difference there might be between Angelica and Posco, to which they replied with one voice: “It is the same, though in the first year she only has leaves above the ground, [this is] when the root is called Urtas; but stalk from the second year, is called Posco in Laplandic.”^[33]Ibid.

Although Montin contained the significance of the Sámi voice in the rhetorical structure of the argument—one which was ultimately designed to frame Högström as untrustworthy to a Swedish reading audience—we are here presented with a multivocal situation in which the Sámi guides the botanist and the clergyman by providing the reasons for the complex nomenclature by referring to different usages. In this respect the example offers a rare glimpse into what took place when a naturalist extracted Indigenous knowledge, an example that suggests the latter verified and specified the knowledge. 

As the case of the angelica shows, if we focus on a specific plant, we can study how Sámi knowledge both framed and underwrote the work of naturalists travelling in Sápmi during a time of colonial expansion. In contrast to how Montin portrays the two clergymen, it is however worth underlining that the Sámi appear as an anonymous collective, and it is worth bearing in mind that their knowledge is mediated through translation. Another important aspect is the transformation and even erasure of Sámi knowledge that took place during the transfer of botanical knowledge. Sámi epistemology became increasingly invisible as botanical knowledge from unpublished travel accounts became re-packaged in Floras which sought to cover larger geographical areas. 

In his first Swedish flora, Flora Svecica from 1745, Linnaeus only lists the Sámi names Fatno, Urtas, Rasi, Botsk.^[34]Carl von Linné, Caroli Linnaei Flora svecica, exhibens plantas per regnum sveciae crescentes, systematice cum differentiis specierum, synonymis autorum, nominibus incolarum, solo locorum, usu pharmacopaeorum(Stockholm, Laurentii Salvii, 1745), 82 (species 233). How the terms were used by the Sámi to distinguish between the parts and lifecycle of the plant is left out, leading to a disconnect between Sámi nomenclature and their complex use of the plant. It is important to stress that Montin was not invested in a mutual exchange of knowledge with the Sámi, nor did he have a deep admiration for the Sami and their knowledge—attributes that are often associated with modern ethno-science. Instead, he was primarily interested in extracting their knowledge in order to bolster his own claims. However, and with a long durée perspective, knowledge of Sámi use of the angelica survived Linnaeus and Montin. The work of Phebe Fjällström in 2000, for example, illustrates current ethno-botanical studies of the plant, which embeds Linnaeus’s observations within the much longer history of how the angelica was used and named in a Scandinavian and North Atlantic setting.^[35]Phebe Fjellström, ‘Fjällkvannen (Angelica archangelica) i samisk tradition’ in Samisk etnobiologi. Människor, djur och växter i norr, ed. Ingvar Svanberg and Håkan Tunon (Nora: Bokförlaget Nya Doxa, 2000), 241–252. Such an approach also provides insights into the many lives that observations of Linnaean naturalists have, in the long history of Swedish ethnology, stretching from the nineteenth century up until today, including our reading of the angelica in which we focused on Sámi voices and a colonial context.^[36] See e.g. Ingvar Svanberg, Människor och växter: svensk folklig botanik från ’Ag’ till ’Örtbad’, (Stockholm, Arena, 1998).