Among the discarded dialects of the Nordic hinterland was one that may even have been a language all of its own. Spoken only by young girls in two lakeside communes, it was passed on to each generation and abandoned in turn as childhood was left behind. It is claimed that this language was never heard in the home, though it is hard to believe that two sisters, for instance, huddled together in their box bed behind the stove, would not have whispered in the speech of their daylight games. And how could that language have truly been forgotten, as adolescence merged into womanhood? Did a mother, bending to kiss her daughter goodnight, never whisper something that would widen the girl’s eyes in impish conspiracy? When women gathered at the stream to wash clothes or draw water, would a snatch of song or poetry never break out and set them all laughing, or singing together, recalling their innocence? For this was the language of the curious games they’d once played, as their daughters played still, with skeins of wool, and pocket stones, and a green rope plaited from willow bark, the language of the songs they had chanted as they sat in their rings below the Dibidil Falls, or ran through the open birch woods with the boy tribe’s taunts at their backs.The memory of those games and pursuits is preserved in four wartime letters sent to the Lutheran pastor of Gruenwald, in Judenberg. His sister’s son served with a mountain brigade in the first northern strike, taking and later retaking the port city of Narvik, and pacifying the Kvener uplands; but in the tranquil second year of the occupation he found the leisure to indulge his uncle’s passion for folklore and philology.In the first letter the young oberleutnant mentions an encounter with two elderly women. He had heard them quietly singing, as if to comfort each other, and when he asked an interpreter what the song might be he was told it was all nonsense, that the women talked only gibberish when they were alone. Yet when questioned, the older one understood and responded in the common tongue. “This might have intrigued you,” he writes. “They come from a remote hill village where, who knows, a primitive form of the language may have survived.”It would seem that the pastor was indeed intrigued, for the second letter, written some three weeks later, details subsequent meetings with the women: “I have showed them small kindnesses that have earned me a measure of trust, though I am obliged to wear civilian clothes, as the sight of a uniform sends the younger crone into mute withdrawal.” The women shared two of their childhood songs, a few lines of which he transcribed by ear (they bear little resemblance, if any, to the modern Kvensk or Sami languages). They spoke of their childhoods, and the games they had played as young girls, endlessly harassed by the boys who were forbidden to join them. The boys, they said, had no secrets of their own and could not speak their mussprak as they called it (the young girls, apparently, were known as “mice,” and the boys as snamus, “snow mice”).There were stories, too, folktales, “which they recount as if they were literal fact.” A secretary was taking them down in shorthand, as the interpreter spoke, and would be typing them up for the uncle’s benefit. “You would be so amused at the interpreter’s indignations. Why are you talking to these old fools? They are ignorant peasants. You want us to seem like primitives, subhuman, and hold us up to ridicule. All the same, though his words to me verge upon insubordination, he takes more pains to be accurate here than in our usual interrogations. He treats the ‘old fools’ with respect and asks many questions. I believe he is secretly quite enchanted with their fairytales.” The only one of those stories to survive is contained in the fourth letter, which arrived in Gruenwald a few days after the writer’s death in a roadside partisan ambush. It is typed on two sheets of coarse, wartime paper:In the first letter the young oberleutnant mentions an encounter with two elderly women. He had heard them quietly singing, as if to comfort each other, and when he asked an interpreter what the song might be he was told it was all nonsense, that the women talked only gibberish when they were alone. Yet when questioned, the older one understood and responded in the common tongue. “This might have intrigued you,” he writes. “They come from a remote hill village where, who knows, a primitive form of the language may have survived.”It would seem that the pastor was indeed intrigued, for the second letter, written some three weeks later, details subsequent meetings with the women: “I have showed them small kindnesses that have earned me a measure of trust, though I am obliged to wear civilian clothes, as the sight of a uniform sends the younger crone into mute withdrawal.” The women shared two of their childhood songs, a few lines of which he transcribed by ear (they bear little resemblance, if any, to the modern Kvensk or Sami languages). They spoke of their childhoods, and the games they had played as young girls, endlessly harassed by the boys who were forbidden to join them. The boys, they said, had no secrets of their own and could not speak their mussprak as they called it (the young girls, apparently, were known as “mice,” and the boys as snamus, “snow mice”).There were stories, too, folktales, “which they recount as if they were literal fact.” A secretary was taking them down in shorthand, as the interpreter spoke, and would be typing them up for the uncle’s benefit. “You would be so amused at the interpreter’s indignations. Why are you talking to these old fools? They are ignorant peasants. You want us to seem like primitives, subhuman, and hold us up to ridicule. All the same, though his words to me verge upon insubordination, he takes more pains to be accurate here than in our usual interrogations. He treats the ‘old fools’ with respect and asks many questions. I believe he is secretly quite enchanted with their fairytales.” The only one of those stories to survive is contained in the fourth letter, which arrived in Gruenwald a few days after the writer’s death in a roadside partisan ambush. It is typed on two sheets of coarse, wartime paper: