For good reasons both historical and geographical, the US and Russia have had some interest in the nations of Europe’s deep north.
9 October is Leif Erikson Day in the US; in the words of President Biden’s proclamation for the 2021 celebration:
The voyage of Leif Erikson and his valiant crew — bold explorers from Scandinavia, believed to have been the first Europeans to reach the shores of North America — has been a source of inspiration to Nordic Americans for generations.
The reason it’s 9 October is 9 October 1825; this was the arrival in New York of the “Restauration”, a sloop containing the persons comprising the first organised immigration from Norway.
I am at one with the President; as I can tell and with one glaring qualification “Scandinavian” and “Nordic” are more or less interchangeable.
Oddly the usages stem from southern Europe.
In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder in his Natural History writes of northern islands inhabited by German tribes, quarum clarissima est Scatinavia, inconpertae magnitudinis or “the most famous of which is Scatinavia, of undiscovered greatness”.
“Nordic” is a relative latecomer and an uncomfortable one from a 20th century perspective; from the French “nordique” or of the north, Russo-French anthropologist Joseph Deniker used it to describe what he saw as a north European ethnic group.
9 October has another Nordic resonance in the Americas. The Caribbean island of St Barts was for almost a century a Swedish colony, and on 9 October 1847 a full generation before the US Civil War, it abolished slavery.
The glaring qualification is “what about Finland?” Finland is or is not part of Scandinavia and its people are or are not Nordic, depending where you want to get your opinion.
Whatever the answer, for over a century the Russian tsar was also grand duke of Finland. When the tsardom fell, Finland declared independence but fell into civil war. On 9 October 1918, the parliament offered Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse the throne of a Kingdom of Finland. It was not a propitious move; the man was Kaiser Wilhelm’s brother-in-law; it was also rather curious, given that Kaiser Wilhelm had been first cousin of the tsar. The prince’s own son would marry the future Prince Philip’s sister and aunt to King Charles III. In any event, the earlier king never sat on his throne and Finland has been a republic since.
Moving from things northern and German to things eastern and Slav, 9 October 1999 was a qualifier for the UEFA Euro 2000 football tournament. It was held in Moscow with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in attendance. The result was 1-1, the teams Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine had won an earlier qualifier, and the two matches are the only times that the countries have faced either other in official competition.
