User talk:Mzajac/Britannica on Eastern Slavs

I've recently had the opportunity to look a few things up in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. This is an out-of-copyright encyclopedia, whose content is freely distributable. The Gutenberg Project has digitized the first volume, and a lower quality OCR version of the entire encyclopedia is also available online.

I've only perused a couple of articles. There's a great deal of detailed information, but there's also some interesting insight into early 20th century English academic world-view. There's no article on Belarusian or Ukrainian language; you must look in Russian Language (apologies for errors in the verbatim  OCR text):


 * Dialects.Russian dialects fall into two main divisions Great (Velikorusskij), including White (Blorusskij) Russian, and Little Russian (Malorusskij). The latter is spoken in a belt reaching from Galicia and the Northern Carpathians (see RUTHENIANS) through Podolia and Volhyni~ and the governments of Kiev, Chernigov, Poltva, Kh~rkov and the southern part of Vornezh to the Don and the Kubfln upon which the Dnpr Cossacks were settled. To the south of this belt in New Russia the population is much mixed, but Little Russians on the whole predominate. In all there must be about 30,000,000 Little Russians.

They sound so cute.

Skim over a couple of ethnological articles, and you get the hint that Britannica seems to be comparing everyone to some sort of ideal. Height and skin colour are important, and there's a slightly creepy preoccupation with craniometry. Reading about Slavs:


 * The physical type of the Slays [Slavs] is not sufficiently clear to help in throwing light upon the past o the race. Most of the modern Slays are rather short-headed, the Balkan Slays being tall and dark, those of central Europe dark and of medium height, the Russians on the whole rather short though the White and Little Russians are of medium height; in complexion the southern Russians are dark, the northern light, but with less decided color than fair western Europeans. In spite of the prevalent brachycephaly of the modern Slays, measurements of skulls from cemeteries and ancient graves which are certainly Slavonic have shown, against all expectation, that the farther back we go the greater is the proportion of long heads, and the race appears to have been originally dolichocephalic and osteologically indistinguishable from its German, Baltic and Finnish neighbors. In its present seats it must have assimilated foreign elements, German and Celtic in central Europe, Finnish and Turkish in Great and Little Russia, all these together with Thracian and Illyrian in the Balkans; but how much the differences between the various Slavonic nations are due to admixture, how much to their new homes, has not been made clear.

Apparently some of the early Slavic tribes made advances against the Roman Empire and Germanic tribes. How could they, with their diminishing skulls?


 * A reasonable view is that the expansion of the Eastern Germans in the last centuries B.C. was made at the expense of the Slays, who, while no more peaceful than the Germans, were less capable than they of combining for successful war, so that Goths and others were dwelling among them and lording it over them; that the mutual competitions of the Germans drove some of these against the Empire, and when this had become weakened, so that it invited attack, some tribes and parts of tribes moved forward without any pressure from behind; this took away the strength of the German element, and the Slays, not improbably under German organization, regained the upper hand in their own lands and could even spread westwards at the expense of the German remnant.

Over to the article on Russia, for some more recent ethnography. Small skulls, but nice ones.


 * Like other races of mankind, the Russian race is not pure. The Russians have absorbed, and assimilated in the course of their history a variety of Finnish and Turko-Finnish elements. Still, craniological researches show that, notwithstanding this fact, the Slav type has been maintained with remarkable persistency: Slav skulls ten and thirteen centuries old exhibit the same anthropological features as those which characterize the Slays of our own day. [ . . .]'' Moreover, while a Russian man, far away from home among Siberians, readily marries a native, the Russian woman seldom does the like. All these causes, and especially the first-mentioned, have enabled the Slays to maintain their ethnical purity in a relatively high degree, whereby they have been enabled to assimilate foreign elements and make them intensify or improve the ethnical type, without giving rise to half-breed races.

How quaint. This was the epitome of English scholarship a century ago. Ukrainian national identity has come a long way with independence and the Orange Revolution, but there's still a way to go.

Updated websites:
 * Russia from pages 906 to 952 (on the navigator bar), which correspond to the numbered pages 869 to 912.
 * Russian language from pages 952 to 954 (on the navigator bar), which correspond to the numbered pages 912 to 914.
 * Slavs from pages 245 to 253 (on the navigator bar), which correspond to the numbered pages 228 to 237.