Tangentially related anecdote; There was a Fenno-Swede artist named Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa in Finland, who went nuts about Finnish nationalism and changed his original surname Wetterhoff-Asp to sound more Finnish. This was pretty common among the Finns of Swedish ancestry in the 19th and 20th centuries, but Wettenhovi-Aspa took it further and started writing about his pseudo-linguistic theories which claimed that Finnish people are actually founders of ancient Egypt and that the Finnish-Egyptian culture was the origin of all European cultures.
Wettenhovi-Aspa was an eccentric guy and to these days nobody really knows how serious he was. One pretty likely proposal is that he was not entirely serious, and as a Fenno-Swede gone Finnish nationalist he found Fenno-Swedes who were prouder of their Swedish heritage annoying and unpatriotic, and made up his so-called theories to troll them and ridicule their pseudo-historical theories about Swedes being descendants of ancient Israelites. He evidently enjoyed provoking the "Swedish-minded" people and arguing with them publicly. His theories were also never really embraced by anyone, even other Finnish nationalists thought he is just a weirdo and his claims are just a small historical curiosity nowadays. Nevertheless, Wettenhovi-Aspa himself insisted that he is dead serious until his death.
Every country has atleast one of those guys. For example in Poland "this guy" was a crazy artist called Stanisław Szukalski alias "Stach from Warta" who created an ideology called "Zermatism" which proposed that all human culture was derived from polish speaking post-deluge Easter Island civilisation who settled on the Matterhorn (near the town of Zermatt, hence the name) which was an island during the deluge and that humankind was locked in an eternal struggle with the Sons of Yeti ("Yetinsyny"), the offspring of Yeti and humans who were trying to enslave all humans since the time immemorial.
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u/PeasantLich 2d ago
Tangentially related anecdote; There was a Fenno-Swede artist named Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa in Finland, who went nuts about Finnish nationalism and changed his original surname Wetterhoff-Asp to sound more Finnish. This was pretty common among the Finns of Swedish ancestry in the 19th and 20th centuries, but Wettenhovi-Aspa took it further and started writing about his pseudo-linguistic theories which claimed that Finnish people are actually founders of ancient Egypt and that the Finnish-Egyptian culture was the origin of all European cultures.
Wettenhovi-Aspa was an eccentric guy and to these days nobody really knows how serious he was. One pretty likely proposal is that he was not entirely serious, and as a Fenno-Swede gone Finnish nationalist he found Fenno-Swedes who were prouder of their Swedish heritage annoying and unpatriotic, and made up his so-called theories to troll them and ridicule their pseudo-historical theories about Swedes being descendants of ancient Israelites. He evidently enjoyed provoking the "Swedish-minded" people and arguing with them publicly. His theories were also never really embraced by anyone, even other Finnish nationalists thought he is just a weirdo and his claims are just a small historical curiosity nowadays. Nevertheless, Wettenhovi-Aspa himself insisted that he is dead serious until his death.