The Terfinnas and Beormas of Ohthere

by Alan S.C. Ross

85 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1940

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the corpus of Old English literature, an account has come down to us from around the time of Alfred the Great of a Norwegian man named Ohthere, who told the English court of his journey sailing from Norway up and around to the White Sea. Ohthere mentioned interacting there with two peoples, the Terfinnas and the Beormas. This passage intrigued scholar Alan S. C. Ross so much that, in 1940, he dedicated a brief monograph to identifying these mysterious peoples. In 1981, soon after Ross’s death, the Viking Society for Northern Research reissued this monograph with some brief addenda that Ross had set down, as well as an additional note by Michael Chesnutt.

Ross sets out both the two manuscript versions of the Ohthere account and the ample Old Norse testimony on the people called Bjarmar. He reaches the conclusion that Ohthere’s Terfinnas were the Ter Saami (no surprise there), while the Beormas were Karelians somewhere around the Kandalaksha Gulf. The latter is the controversial point of the book, because the author discounts any relationship to the Permian peoples (i.e. the Komi) on the grounds that the Beormas’ pagan god Jumali is clearly the Finnic word jumala id., and the Permian peoples would not have been on the White Sea at so early a date. Michael Chesnutt’s afterword in the 1981 edition sets out a fairly convincing argument for how the ethnonym eventually spread to the Komi: it applied to anyone seasonally going up to the White Sea for trapping and other purposes.