For centuries, Lapland has allured wayfarers and dazzled them with its magical geography and intrinsic cultural topography: the social environment of the indigenous Sami people, its rich and varied fauna, its seemingly endless natural resources, and the midnight sun. Field scientists, missionaries, tourists, or those simply driven by curiosity have, each for their own reasons, found their way to what is perhaps Europe’s last wilderness. This 1904 tourist poster by the Royal Administration of the Swedish State Railways advertises an express train to Lapland that ran from Stockholm, Sweden, to Narvik, Norway, and that billed itself as the “most northern Railway of the World.”
For centuries, Lapland has allured wayfarers and dazzled them with its magical geography and intrinsic cultural topography: the social environment of the indigenous Sami people, its rich and varied fauna, its seemingly endless natural resources, and the midnight sun. Field scientists, missionaries, tourists, or those simply driven by curiosity have, each for their own reasons, found their way to what is perhaps Europe’s last wilderness. This 1904 tourist poster by the Royal Administration of the Swedish State Railways advertises an express train to Lapland that ran from Stockholm, Sweden, to Narvik, Norway, and that billed itself as the “most northern Railway of the World.”