Abstract
A journey to the winter tundra of Lapland was a far more exotic experience than overseas expeditions in 17th century Europe. In 1659, it was ventured by Johan Ferdinand Körningh, a gifted Swedish youth who converted to Catholicism in the Jesuit College in Prague, studied philosophy and then theology in Rome.
Then he set out alone on his journey to the far North. From the town of Tornio in northern Finland he penetrated among the nomadic Lapps, whose life and customs he vividly described in his Relatio tentatae missionis Lappicae.
He brought a thirteen-year-old Lappish boy back to Prague to study, but he judged missionary attempts in the far North impossible from his experience. He himself joined the Jesuits in 1661, worked as a missionary in the Lutheran borderlands of Bohemia, and apparently also used the knowledge he had acquired from the Lapland shamans as a healer.
This study focuses on Körningh's personality, attempting to penetrate the thinking and strategies of a man who, with incredible commitment and will, accomplished a goal that ultimately brought him great disappointment.