LL-L: "Loanwords" LOWLANDS-L, 11.MAY.2000 (05) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Carl Johan Petersson [Carl_Johan.Petersson at Nordiska.uu.se]
Subject: LL-L: "Loanwords" LOWLANDS-L, 11.MAY.2000 (04) [E]

Ron wrote:

>it has been
>my impression that Northern Europe did not originally have a bathing culture
>in which you would find specific private or public buildings or rooms
>dedicated to bathing along the lines of Mediterranean cultures (e.g., the
>Roman _bal(i)neum_ or the larger _therma_) or the Siberian-derived sweatlodge
>cultures (e.g., the Finnish _sauna_(...)
>If the Swedish-type _bastu_ is indeed in a separate hut, hall or
>room, I strongly suspect it of being Finno-Lappic-derived.

You're probably right about this. This doesn't change the fact that this
form of bathing that was known in Northern Europe in the early Middle Ages
or even earlier, though.

I checked the articles about "bastu", and "bastubadning" in  some of the
encyclopedias in our library. They all seem to agree that "bastu" is a
bathing culture that reached Northern Europe through contacts with the
Slavs or the Finns. They also agree in pointing out that similar forms of
bathing were previously known also in Germany and other central European
countries, but have since disappeared.

Nordisk Familjebok writes (in my translation): "Badstuga (OSW. badstufva),
the oldest form of bathing in Northern Europe. It is originally a Slavic
bathing culture and presumably reached both Northern Europe as well as
Germany and France from the East. Bastu is mentioned in the Icelandic sagas
and in our old provincial laws. During the Middle Ages, this was the most
common form of bathing, practised in different ways depending on the local
conditions. (...) In Sweden, bastu-bathing appears to have been popular
until the beginning of the 18th century, but it disappeared from Germany
and southern countries much earlier. In the narratives of foreign
travellers in Finland, Sweden and Norway in the 17th century, it is
mentioned as a picturesque oddity (...). "

Apparently, bastu disappeared gradually during the 18th century, but was
then re-introduced when the building of public baths started in the late
19th century, as an effort to improve public health in the cities.

>Original North European cultures certainly were not known for their obsession
>with bathing.  Most houses consisted of one all-purpose room.  If you could
>not bathe outside, you would put a tub into the house on bath day (however
>frequently that would come around).  In many cases this continued when houses
>and apartments had more than one room, until well into the 20th century.
Real
>bathrooms probably started in the houses of wealthy people fairly recently.
>(I know that few 18th century mansions and castles had actual bathrooms.)
Well, as the above suggests, bastu is a phenomenon that has nothing to do
with bathrooms in the modern sense. Traditionally, a bastu is supposed to
be a separate building with a fireplace. This definitely puts it in your
category of "Siberian-derived huts for steam baths".

Regards

Carl Johan
__________________________________________________________
Carl Johan Petersson
Institutionen för nordiska språk
Uppsala universitet                Tel:     018-471 68 72
Box 527                            Intl: +46-18 471 68 72
SE-751 20 Uppsala                  Fax:  +46-18 471 12 72

E-post:Carl_Johan.Petersson at nordiska.uu.se
__________________________________________________________

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Loanwords

Carl Johan, your comments (above) make a lot of sense to me.

This may be one of those cases in which the origin of a cultural item may be
virtually impossible to pinpoint, because most of the history is unrecorded
and there is likely to be a confluence of sources and developments.

In the case of the Swedish _bastu_, one is at least initially tempted to
assume Finnic and/or Slavic influence, given elaborate bath cultures in Uralic
and Eastern Slavic areas as well as long-standing Swedish connections with
Finnic- and Slavic-speakers (including early Swedish trade connections and
intermarriage through what are now Russia, Ukraine and beyond all the way to
Constantinopel/Istanbul and Baghdad -- the fascinating
Ruotsa/Rootsi/Rus=Swedish > Russian thing).  However, you mentioned the
Icelandic Saga, and that puts a whole new spin on it.

So much for areas that had not been occupied by Rome or used to be in close
proximity to Roman culture (and Northern Germany is a part of that).  You are
right.

There are numerous descriptions and depictions of public baths and bath houses
(often doubling as taverns and sometimes as brothels) in medieval and
renaissance Germany (e.g., seen in Albrecht Dürer's engravings and featured in
Frankish and Bavarian literature).  We are usually led to understand that
those existed because people did not have private bathing facilities.  Since
these are mostly or always found in Southern Germany rather than in the north,
I have been assuming, perhaps naively so, that these go back to Roman
influence.  Perhaps the truth is not so simple, and we are dealing with a
complex combination of cultural loss and subsequence reintroduction through
intercultural borrowing.

Regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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