Design for a crown of a King of Finland on display at a gemstone museum in Northern Finland:
Note the arms of the Finnish provinces on the circlet. Some would say evidence of the fact that the design came from a school-master!
BTW I am fascinated by the title of King of Finland, because so little is known about Finnish history before the Swedes arrived on their conquering crusades. That the Finnish word for king,
kuningas, just like Slavic
knyaz, is derived from Proto-Norse
kuningaR/kuningaz (modern
konung/kung/konge), suggests that it was an alien concepts to the Finns, even though the Old Norse sagas tell of various petty Finnish kings in the coastal areas.
Titles: King of Finland and Karelia
Duke of the Åland Islands
Grand Duke of Lapland
Master of Kaleva and the North.
I do wonder if the last, most poëtical part of this suggested titulatory for a Finnish king,
, was not just inspired by Kalevala and its Pohjola / Northland, but also by that part of the Emperor-Grand Duke's title which was всея Сѣверныя страны Повелитель: Lord of All Northern Territories.
For a северянин like me they are frightfully appealing, even though the times when these titles were topical were marked by pan-Finnish nationalism and expansionism also directed towards the Finnmark Province of my native Norway. (Though the Finn- element in Finnmark refers to the Sami people, not Finns, even though there has been a Finnish minority, the Kvens, in Finnmark since the 19th century.) King Haakon VII was for instance worried about Finnish designs on Finnmark, which in those days almost was like a sparsely populated Norwegian colony, his new biography revealed.
