Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland > Search and order
Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland > Search and order
Sea guards, 1961. Image: Rafael Olin. SLS/Rafael Olins fotosamling
Finna enables you to search our archive and library material. There you will find both digitised archival material and information about the different collections. In our reading rooms in Helsinki and Vaasa, you can access more material and detailed information about the material.
Most of our materials are freely available, but access to some materials is limited. We will help you in these cases. Contact us at arkivet@sls.fi.
Books and analogue archival material are delivered upon request to our research rooms. Some of our archival material is stored at the National Library and can be accessed in their reading room. Contact the National Library’s customer service at kk-palvelu@helsinki.fi one day in advance if you want to order material stored there. You can see the location of the material on Finna.
In spring 2024, we received the press cuttings collections of the Brage Press Archive (Brages pressarkiv) as a donation. The material will be brought to our reading room in Helsinki from autumn 2024 onwards, on the last full week of each month: weeks 39, 43, 48, 52. In 2025, material will be brought from week 5 onwards.
Here you can find information about digitized newspapers.
If you want to order copies, you can contact the staff or read our archive rules.
1918 – Jag var där (1918 – I was there) is a bilingual teaching aid based on unique archival material that highlights the impact of the Civil War on individuals and society. The book is a collaboration between the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland and the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura).
In addition to archival material, it includes source criticism guidance and information. The 1918 website consists of two entities that support each other: 1918 – I was there learning material, which can be downloaded as a PDF and more extensive archival material related to the events of 1918.
Biografiskt lexikon för Finland (BLF) is a reference book of people associated with Finland from the Crusades to the 2010s. It contains more than 1 600 articles on everything from kings and presidents to writers, craftsmen and programmers.
Daniel is a database that primarily contains drama written in Swedish by authors in Finland. In principle, it includes all kinds of stage texts and arrangements for the stage. Chronologically, the database runs from 1819 to present day.
Den okände von Wright provides new perspectives on one of the most illuminating philosophers of the 20th century, Georg Henrik von Wright. It includes texts from seven decades: including von Wright’s rediscovered critique of time, his correspondence with Eino Kaila and essays on Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The web publication contains all village names, municipality and city names, historical parish names and names of landscapes in Swedish-speaking and bilingual regions as well as a selection of Swedish names in Finnish-speaking regions. In total, almost 3,000 place names are included. For each settlement name, a description is given with the etymology of the name, descriptions of the name elements included in the word and older name forms. The database is also linked to a map function that shows the location of the town.
This site contains 19,000 Finnish-Swedish proverbs and sayings in dialect. You can search by subject or location, or by category. The more than 40 thematic categories include “Speak and be silent”, “Animals in proverbs” and “Vices, virtues, honesty and falsehood”.
Finlands svenska folkdiktning is a treasure trove of older Finland-Swedish folk traditions collected at the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century. Here you will find over 12,000 pages of tales, legends, proverbs, riddles, folk music, folk belief and games. You will also find the music volumes in edited format; over 3,000 melodies to listen to and download, as well as a lot of information about fiddlers, recorders and the Finnish-Swedish fiddling tradition.
Fodder marsh, tuberculosis dispensary, apostolinen vikaari… Whether you are a researcher, translator or interested in genealogy, Förvaltningshistorisk ordbok can help you. Words, terms and expressions in Swedish and Finnish are organised into thematic units and chronological periods, from the Middle Ages to 1950.
Herrgårdar database (The mansions database) is a catalogue that provides information on the historical archives and libraries of mansions in Finland for research purposes. The database is a tool for researchers in history and cultural history, and can also be useful for genealogists, for example.
The Finnish social anthropologist Hilma Granqvist did her lifework and most important research in the Palestinian village of Artas in 1925-1931. The Hilma Granqvist Archive contains photographs, correspondence with colleagues and friends, field notes, travel diaries, five published books and two unpublished book manuscripts.
Would you like to try recipes with lemon, broad beans or maybe garden mint? Historiska recept collects and preserves food culture from the past. Here you can search among over a thousand 18th and 19th century recipes by keyword. Manuscripts from Louhisaari castle, Turku, Nauvo, Stensböle i Porvoo, Akaa and Herttoniemi manor have been published and more are being added.
The database contains about 2,500 of Jarl Pousar’s volumes from different countries and centuries: scientific literature, including theology and humanities, travelogues, fiction, children’s books, hymnals and maps. The database also includes images of all book bindings, title pages, patterned endpapers, preserved original covers and frontispieces.
Kerstin Söderholm was an esteemed poet and literary critic. She belonged to the Finnish-Swedish modernist generation and was known for her self-disclosing diaries, which were published posthumously in 1947-1948. Söderholm’s diaries, letters and fiction manuscripts are available at soderholm.sls.fi.
The digital edition contains Albert Edelfelt’s 1,310 letters to his mother Alexandra Edelfelt, written between 1867 and 1901. The letters have been transcribed using the AI programme Transkribus. They are searchable by full text, subject, persons and places. The edition is a collaboration with the National Gallery of Finland and includes a large collection of digitised images of artworks and sketches. They have been linked to the letters in which Edelfelt writes about his works.
Zacharias Topelius’ primary school textbook Boken om Vårt Land (1875) and the Finnish translation Maamme kirja (1876) have shaped the image of Finnish history, people and culture for generations. The digital edition Maamme kirja has been published in co-operation with the Finnish Literature Society (SKS).
Here you can read about the unofficial place names in the cities of Kokkola, Loviisa, Vaasa, Turku, Maarianhamina, Tammisaari, Helsinki and Porvoo. You can also share other names you know.
The website can also be used as a starting point for discussion and work in the classroom. On the website you will find ready-made assignments for upper secondary school students.
Listen to audio samples from interviews with younger and older speakers from different locations in Swedish-speaking Finland. You can listen to recordings made from 2005 to 2008 within the project ‘Save the Finland-Swedish speech’ (Spara talet) and to some audio samples from older collections in the SLS archive.
Sägenkartan is a digital platform with thousands of legends about the creatures and beliefs in the folklore of Swedish Finland, Sweden, Norway and Estonia. The tales are searchable and linked to the place where they were collected. The legend map is produced in co-operation with the Institute for Language and Folklore and The Norwegian Folklore Archives (University of Oslo).
Talko is a spoken language corpus containing recordings and associated searchable transcripts. The transcripts have been provided with word-class tags and some morphological information, which gives versatile search possibilities in the material. Talko mainly contains recordings made from 2005 to 2008 within the project ‘Save the Finland-Swedish speech’ (Spara talet), but a small proportion of older archive recordings are also included. Users with a university email address can log in directly via CLARIN login and other users can apply for their own CLARIN user account.
Twentieth century modernist Henry Parland has gone down in history as a pioneering poet, an intellectual critic and a semiotic pioneer. At parland.sls.fi, Parland’s writings are collected in four sections: Poems, Prose, Criticism, Correspondence and his only novel, Sönder.
Our award-winning text-critical edition, Writings of Zacharias Topelius, presents Topelius’ diverse and lengthy body of work. The 23-part edition includes poetry, epic, children’s literature and drama, history and geography, publicity and religious writings, letters and diaries.