Carl Axel Gottlund

Gottlund pursued the creation of an autonomous Finnish territory from the Finn Forests on both sides of the Swedish-Norwegian border, with great economic and political independence.

Carl Axel's mother Ulrika Sophia was from the upper-class family of Orraeus in the nearby town of Porvoo.

During his childhood years, Carl Axel Gottlund's interest towards the Finnish culture and language had been inspired by his father, to the most part.

The opportunity in his childhood for Carl Axel to meet with the known Finnish nationalist author Jaakko Juteini is also believed to have boosted his future career choices and patriotism.

In 1815–1816, Carl Axel collected various types of Finnish folklore material from his home county: poems, songs, spells, children's stories and plays, nursery rhymes, etc.

In 1817, Gottlund made an exploration trip to the Finnish-inhabited Dalarna area of Central Sweden, to collect Finnish folklore and other ethnographic data as well as genealogical information, the latter partly because he wanted to improve the social circumstances of the Forest Finns and to prevent Sweden from taking ownership of their land.

Soon after this, Gottlund published his first book, Pieniä runoja Suomen poijille ratoxi I ("Small Poems for the Enjoyment of Finnish Boys - Part I"), consisting of folklore which he had collected at his home county of Juva in Finland.

In the summer of 1821, Gotlund launched another expedition to a Finnish-inhabited part of Sweden, this time covering the south-central Swedish area of Värmland.

The expedition lasted until January 1822, after which Gottlund began acting as a political advocate on behalf of the Finnish population of Sweden.

Furthermore, in 1821 starting Gottlund began pursuing the creation of an autonomous Finnish county called Fennia from the Finn Forests on both sides of the Swedish-Norwegian border, north and northeast from the modern-day Norwegian area of Oslo, with great economic and political independence.

The work was considered to favor too much the Savonian dialects of Finnish language, and its mainly enlightenment-spirited contents were overshadowed by the current of romanticism which now had encaptured Finland, producing epics such as The Kalevala in 1835 and The Tales of Ensign Stål in 1848.

In 1865, he published Läsning för finnar, in which he criticizes his adversaries and discusses the injustices which he had had to experience on his academic career.

Some of the folklore poetry collected by Gottlund in the early 19th century was considered sexually too explicit to be published during his lifetime, and even until quite recently.