The Vernacular Reformation

Chapter 6 The Vernacular Reformation

According to widespread popular and scholarly understandings, theological questions concerned Gustav Vasa only as far as they affected his ability to rule. The king was not a learned theologian and thus was ill-equipped to enter the debates concerning reform of the church’s teachings and rituals. Nonethe- less, Gustav wanted a church that practiced a simpler form of Christianity. Throughout his reign, Gustav called for the proclamation of what he and called in Västerås in 1527 “the pure Word of God.” This call, one originating from Lu- theran reformers, in exact or similar wording was used in several resolutions of various meetings concerning the future of the church during the king’s reign.1 The king eventually gravitated toward Lutheran reform because of its own aim to make Christianity simpler. In an often-factionalized theological environment, religious authorities and the king agreed in making Christianity simpler by making the Mass and scripture available to the people in its own language. Vernacularization was the common ground of reform of the church’s teachings and practices. The consensus concerning use of the vernacular bridged the church’s doctrinal and liturgical divisions for decades. Gustav Vasa’s son, King John III (1569–1592), sought to reunite his kingdom’s church with Rome in the 1570s and 1580s. The deal ultimately failed for a handful of reasons, among them Johan’s refusal to return to the Latin Mass.2 Long before the Swedish kingdom’s church became irrevocably Lutheran in the 1590s, it had become irrevocably vernacular. The process of translating the Word of God into the vernacular had a sig- nificant impact on the kingdom’s two most spoken languages. Swedish had a pre-Reformation medieval literary tradition that did not extend much into the spiritual realm. Finnish for its part had no pre-Reformation literary tradition. As a literary language, Finnish is understood to have started in the Reformation era. Its chief creator was Mikael Agricola.

1 Emil Hildebrand and Oscar Alin, eds., Svenska riksdagsakter jämte andra handlingar som höra till statsförfattningens historia under tidehvarfvet 1521–1718, vol. 1 (Stockholm: Nor- stedt & söner, 1887), 118, 390; Sven Kjöllerström, Missa Lincopensis: En liturgihistorisk studie (Stockholm: Lund, 1941); Michael Roberts, The Early Vasas: A History of Sweden 1523–1611 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 285–298. 2 Roberts, Early Vasas, 78.

Mikael Olofsson Agricola

Very little of Agricola’s considerable body of literary work is autobiographical. According to Paulus Juusten, Agricola was born in Torsby, a village in the parish of Pernå (Pernaja) in the region of Uusimaa. The exact year of Agricola’s birth is unknown, but by tracking backwards from later milestones in his life, historians estimate his birth sometime in or around 1510. Little is known about Agricola’s parents. The name of his mother is unknown. His father, Olof, was a peasant (as his son’s adopted surname suggests) who died sometime in the early 1540s, leaving behind his wife, son Mikael, and three daughters.3 One of the few scholarly debates concerning Agricola has centered over whether he spoke Finnish or Swedish as his first language. Evidence in favor of Swedish is that he grew up in Torsby, a predominantly Swedish-speaking village, but a village probably with Finnish speakers within it and certainly majority Finnish-speaking villages nearby. Agricola wrote marginal comments in Swedish and not Finnish in books that he bought. Evidence in favor of Finnish is Agricola’s obvious fluent command of Finnish, a command so masterful that he could create a literary language. In the nineteenth and into the twentieth century scholars, informed by the growth of nationalism based on the Finnish language, largely believed that Agricola’s first language had to be Finnish because of Agricola’s fluency and the assumption that no Swedish speaker would care enough to put the Word of God into Finnish. This debate over the last couple of decades has settled into the conclusion that no definitive proof exists for either position. The most recent contributions to this discussion have come from Agricola’s biographer, Simo Heininen, and linguist Kaisa Häkkinen, who both have argued that the question of Agricola’s language is secondary to his achievements. Even if Agricola’s first language were Swedish (and they both suggest it likely was), it would put him in at the beginning of a long tradition of Swedish speakers who worked to develop Finnish as a literary language.4

3 Paavali Juusten, Suomen piispainkronikka, trans. Simo Heininen (Helsinki: SKS, 1988), 59. 4 Kaisa Häkkinen, “Mikael Agricolan teokset ja kieli,” in Agricolan aika, ed. Kaisa Häkkinen and Tanja Vaittinen (Helsinki: BTJ, 2007), 84–102; Kaisa Häkkinen, Spreading the Written Word: Mikael Agricola and the Birth of Literary Finnish (Helsinki: SKS, 2015), 32–33; Simo Heininen, Nuori Mikael Agricola (Helsinki: SKS, 1976), 95–96; Simo Heininen, Mikael Agricola: Elämä ja teokset (Helsinki: Edita Prima, 2007), 26. A full survey of the debate up to Heininen’s and Häkkinen’s most recent work is found in Osmo Ikola “Agricolan äidinkieli,” in Mikael Agricolan äidinkieli, ed. Esko Koivusalo (Heksinki: SKS, 1988), 25–68. For another view of the collective memory concerning Agricola see Otfried Czaika, “Det kollektiva minnet av reformationen och Mikael Agricola i 2000-talets Finland,” Biblis 46 (2009): 15–25.