(1739–1804), Swedish-Finnish historian and folklorist. Porthan spent almost his entire life in the sphere of the Royal Turku (Swedish Åbo) University (Regia Academia Aboensis), founded by Queen Christina of Sweden in 1640 and transferred to Helsinki in 1828 by Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, grand duke of Finland. Porthan carried on the tradition of his uncles, both professors at Turku University; one of them, Daniel Juslenius, later a bishop, was well-known for his work on the first comprehensive Finnish-Latin-Swedish lexicon (1745). Porthan's first theses (1758 and 1762) dealt with religious philosophy, but, probably due to his devotion to research and teaching he was never ordained to the priesthood, even though he was twice asked to propose his candidacy for bishop.
Inspired by Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the new Winkelmannian classics, Porthan eventually turned his attention toward history and literature. He became a lecturer in rhetoric and was appointed university librarian. Even after he had attained the position of professor of eloquence and poetics in 1777, he maintained his interest in and work on behalf of the library, which was transferred with the university to Helsinki in 1828 and is now the National Library of Finland.
Porthan worked as a professor until his death in 1804. He was the most influential teacher of his time in Finland, and he greatly contributed to the general level of knowledge and understanding of many generations of priests and civil servants.
Porthan's main field of interest was the classics; he lectured on Homer, Horace, and Ovid, and was the first in the realm to lecture on classical archeology. He also taught the theory of aesthetics and literary history. The new classical studies, the tradition of textual criticism developed by Johann David Michaelis, and August Ludwig Schlözer's anthropologically oriented view of history inspired him both in his teaching and his research. Schlözer, being a specialist in Nordic history and a pioneer of Russian history, inspired Porthan to prepare critical editions from Finnish (that is, Turku) diocesan sources, for which Porthan became known as the father of Finnish history. Porthan's methods were modern and his interests and learning wide; he used linguistics and ethnography, combining his reading of manuscripts (mainly in Stockholm and Uppsala) with observations made during his many trips around Finland and collected from his students and correspondents.
Porthan had in his youth undertaken an examination of the folkloric tradition of Finnish poetry, De poësi fennica (Finnish Poetry, published in five parts from 1766–1778). Ultimately, his ideas about Finnish folklore changed, and the work was left uncompleted. Initially influenced by his uncle's traditional view, Porthan moved toward a more anthropological orientation but never developed a clear idea of the chronology of Finnish folklore. He made no distinction between archaic-mythological, protohistorical, medieval, and contemporary popular poetry, because upon formal analysis they all manifested in Porthan's view a similar metric and poetic identity. The main merit of Porthan's work was to draw attention to Finnish folklore. It was only after his death, under the influence of the Romantic movement and the political situation in Europe—especially the creation of a separate Finnish state—that Finnish folklore attracted serious interest.
Porthan also studied the Finnish language, its dialects and its relation to the other Baltic Sea–region Finnic languages. He rejected the outmoded ideas of his uncle and others who believed Finnish to be a relative of Hebraic or other remote languages, and applied the critical approach of the Göttingen philologists and anthropologists, which led him to compare the inland Finns more with the newly discovered indigenous tribes of the new world. Porthan's Finnish studies attained new significance after the creation of the Finnish state in 1809, when the movement to shape a Finnish national identity became a reality.
