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"Lapland Sorcerers" 223
detailed, on their evil, idolatrous and improper practices.
The magical powers of the Lapps, at least those of Russia,
did not strike the Elizabethan traveller and merchant.
I know only one exception to this. In 1588 Dr Giles
Fletcher, civil servant and uncle of the dramatist ] ohn
Fletcher, went on an embassy to the Russian court. He
later wrote an account of the country and people so
unflattering as to make the Muscovy Company take steps
to suppress it, for they feared its effect on their trade. In
his 1589 edition Hakluyt mentions the existence of
Fletcher's account, but it was not published until 1591,
then suppressed on the petition of the Muscovy
Company.P to reappear in abridged form (but with the
Lapp material) in Hakluyt's 1598-1600 edition and again
(also with the Lapp passage) in Purchas his Pilgrimes in
1625. In a chapter "Of the Permians Samoites, and
Lappes", Fletcher writes, "The opinion is that they were
first termed Lappes of their briefe and short speach" To
this popular etymology, which presumably related Lapp
to the German dialectal lappe, lapp, NHG laffe, glossed by
Grimm as homo stolidus, ineptus, I shall return later.
Fletcher continues,
For practise of witchcraft and sorcery, they passe all nations
in the world. Though for the enchaunting of shippes that
saile along their coast (as I haue heard it reported) and their
giuing of winds good to their friends, and contrary to other.
by tying of certein knots vpon a rope is a very fable." 6
It is strange that the only early traveller to mention Lapp
magic should reject the belief - that they trafficked with
the winds - that was to become so popular in the next
century. Many later writers claiming first-hand knowledge
of the Lapps confirm them as sorcerers. To take two at
random. John Scheffer published his Lapponia in Frank-
2. Both Bond, op, cit., cxxii, and DNB, nnder Fletcher, describe the book as
"quickly suppressed". However, a nnmber of copies escaped, for STC lists
five, and D. Ramage, A Finding-list of English Books to I640 in Libraries in
the British Isles (1958), a sixth. On the basis of figures available for other
sixteenth-century publications D. Hamer estimates (in a letter to the author)
that "at least a hundred copies must have been sold".
26 Fletcher, op. cit., fo. 77.