4

Noaidevuohta

Drífa keypti at Hulð seiðkonu, at hon skyldi siða Vanlanda til Finnlands eða deyða hann at oðrum kosti. En er seiðr var framiðr, var Vanlandi at Uppsolum. Þá gerði hann fúsan at fara til Finnlands, en vinir hans ok ráðamenn bonnuðu honum ok sogðu, at vera myndi fjolkynngi Finna í fýsi hans.

Drífa hired a seiðkona called Hulð to work seiðr so as to bring Vanlandi back to Finnland or else to kill him. When the seiðr took effect, Vanlandi was at Uppsala. Then he felt a strong desire to go to Finnland, but his friends and advisors forbade it, and said that there must be some sorcery of the Finns in his desire.

Ynglingasaga 13; my translation

Seiðr and the Sámi

The identification of seiðr and other Óðinnic rituals with what were perceived as similar practices among the Sámi has very long antecedents in Northern studies. Indeed, the first such comparison appears in Fritzner’s work from 1877, which as we have seen was also one of the first to discuss seiðr in specific terms. This paper in many ways set the pattern for much subsequent comparative research, in that Fritzner seems only to have considered a transfer of ideas from the Norse to the Sámi, never in the opposite direction.

Two scholars of Sámi religion have charted this process, Håkan Rydving (1990) and Åke Hultkrantz (2001), and I have been reliant on both these works in the brief summary that I provide here.

Rydving (1990: 359f) notes that the idea of Norse loans in the Sámi religion was current even at the time of the eighteenth-century missions, being found for example in the writings of priests such as Hans Skanke. For the most part, however, prior to the late 1800s Sámi religion was considered very vaguely in systemic terms (Hultkrantz 2001: 413). As Fritzner’s ideas on the Norse origins of Sámi mythology began to be taken up, even the very purpose of studying Sámi religion was subordinated to this notion. The primary value of such research was thus to examine aspects of Norse beliefs that had been preserved in borrowed form after they had ‘disappeared’ among the Scandinavians. The main argument instead focused on the date of the original Nordic beliefs that the Sámi had supposedly taken over, the discussion swinging from the Bronze Age to the Viking period, and even into the late Middle Ages when it was thought that Christian Scandinavians may have passed on their unwanted pagan customs (see, for example, Olrik 1905; Krohn 1906; Holmberg [Harva] 1915).

The idea of Sámi religious borrowing was also adopted as an adjunct to Dumézil’s argument for a three-fold division of the Norse (and Indo-European) divinities, while a related discussion that had begun in the early twentieth century sought similarities between the supposed Norse ‘trinity’ of Óðinn, Þórr and Freyr and what were argued to be the equivalent Sámi gods (Hultkrantz 2001: 417f).

The thunder-god was particularly important in this respect. A frequent recipient of sacrifices, this deity had different names in different parts of Sápmi, but there is no doubt that one of these really is some kind of loan: in the North Sámi dialect he is called Horagállis, the first element of which is related to the name of the Norse god Þórr (numerous scholars pursued this line, e.g. Fritzner 1877; Krohn 1906; Holmberg [Harva] 1987 [1915] and de Vries 1957; for a full review, see Rydving 1993b: 46).

Other comparisons included Varaldenolmmái, the Sámi fertility god, who was equated with Freyr (Olrik 1905: 51 and references in Rydving 1990: 361). The wind god Bieggolmmái was similarly compared with Njorðr (ibid), and Rota the ruler of the underworld was associated with Óðinn (von Unwerth 1914; Olrik & Ellekilde 1926–51: 124). The Sámi mother goddesses, discussed below, have been claimed as versions of the nornir and Scandinavian female deities, in work again summarised by Rydving (1990: 363f).

Seiðr itself came in for special study here, with a number of researchers arguing that this was the origin of the Sámi noaidevuohta, the collective name for the ‘shamanic’ spiritual practices that we shall examine in this chapter. The divinatory aspects of seiðr were taken to be the inspiration for the use of the Sámi drum for a similar purpose (Krohn 1906: 158; Olrik & Ellekilde 1926–51: 107), and even the drum symbols themselves were speculated to have had a Norse origin (Reuterskiöld 1928: 121, though he acknowledged Sámi religion as a separate entity).

Other writers took the opposite approach. The central thesis of Strömbäck’s book on seiðr was that this form of sorcery was not only shamanic in nature, but a loan from the Sámi (1935: 196–206). This can be seen as a clear benchmark in the changing perceptions of spiritual relationships between the two cultures, reversing Fritzner’s theory on the Sámi as recipients of Norse ideas.

John Lindow (2000) has broadly followed Strömbäck’s ideas, but at a greater remove, suggesting that the description of Óðinn’s powers in Ynglingasaga (7) is based on the attributes of Sámi noaidi, ‘shamans’, from Snorri’s own time. He argues that the concept of seiðr as outlined there should not be taken as reflecting very much of the Nordic belief system of the Viking Age. It is certainly possible, even likely, that Snorri knew of the Sámi religion, but Lindow’s argument is hard to accept in that there are so many elements of Óðinn’s skills that are definitely not found among the Sámi (the concept of ergi especially). What is important in the present context, however, is that Lindow accepts the essentially shamanic nature of the Ynglingasaga passage. He links this to Snorri’s idea of a human Óðinn with origins in Asia, what we now know to be the ‘cradle’ of shamanism. I cannot follow this reasoning, again, because this connection is not one which could have been made before the sixteenth century at the very earliest, as we shall see in chapter 5. However, to this Lindow adds an intriguing suggestion that Snorri may have believed that Óðinn lay behind not only Norse sorcery, but that of the Sámi as well.

All these perspectives have several problems in common, which Rydving has summarised thus:

[…] analogies were often sought without critical questions being asked about how the elements had been taken over, why certain elements were borrowed, and others not etc. Methodologically, the theory was treacherous, since similarities could always be explained as loans, and dissimilarities either as examples of beliefs and practices older than the literary Scandinavian sources, or, as more recent borrowed folk customs.

Rydving 1990: 365

The idea that Sámi belief was an independent indigenous development within the larger sphere of circumpolar spirituality, especially shamanism, came astonishingly late. Edgar Reuterskiöld (1912) and K. B. Wiklund (1916) were among the first, the latter with his tentative suggestion that some of the Sámi underground beings could not be paralleled at all in the Scandinavian material, and might therefore be something quite separate. By the 1920s, Björn Collinder (1926: 30) was beginning to shift both the Sámi and the Norse into a broader Eurasian perspective, drawing both cultures into the circumpolar sphere. The idea of the self-contained nature of Sámi religion has since been reiterated many times (e.g. Karsten 1955; Pettersson 1957; Bäckman 1975; Mebius 1968), and even aspects of the earlier debate have been reoriented in this new context (for example by Ränk, 1981, who extends the Óðinn-Rota complex into a Eurasian arena).

If noaidevuohta formed a distinct branch within a larger pattern of Northern religion, it nevertheless took some considerable time before the suggestion was made that seiðr too was part of a similarly independent but related scheme of belief. This idea was implicit in much of the work on seiðr that we have reviewed in chapter 2, but it was first put forward explicitly by Hultkrantz (1979a: 55), and the point was made again by Lotte Motz in 1983.

This is the line that I have myself taken in earlier articles (e.g. Price 1998b, 2000b & c, 2004a), and the one that will be pursued here. This is not to say that we shall not be looking at Sámi religion in search of parallels for the seiðr complex – that is the purpose of this chapter. The important point here is that these comparisons are not made in the context of ideas ‘taken over’ from one ethnic group to the other, in an argument varying only as to the direction of travel.

In making such analogies, we firstly have to once again guard against the notion of homogeneity in both the Norse and Sámi beliefs, and acknowledge the regional and chronological variations involved. With this nuance established, it is clear that if two broadly similar complexes of beliefs co-exist in the same geographical area, maintained by two cultures living in relative harmony, then there will inevitably be some kind of exchange of concepts. Rather than looking at the influence of one culture by the other, we can instead focus on conceptual similarities and separate development within a common tradition. From studies of spirituality among the Sámi we cannot say that the same phenomena must have occurred in Norse beliefs, or vice versa. However, we can test what we already know about seiðr against the Sámi material, to see if the conclusions that we have drawn from the Norse written sources seem reasonable in the light of other circumpolar belief systems. An examination of sorcery among their nearest neighbours therefore provides us with the best framework for the interpretation of the Vikings’ magical practices.

Sámi-Norse relations in the Viking Age

In considering the ethnic patterns of religious belief among the inhabitants of Scandinavia, we first have to consider the nature of the relationship between the Sámi and Nordic peoples. Much has been published on this subject over the last two decades, and only an orientation to the main arguments will be given here.

Until relatively recently, a consistent problem in the understanding of population interaction in Viking-Age Scandinavia has been an unwritten assumption that the Sámi did not play an important role in the structure of late Iron Age society as a whole. This is, of course, a controversial assertion, but attention has been drawn to this on several previous occasions, in far greater depth than I am able to go into here (e.g. Schanche & Olsen 1985; Olsen 1986 & 1998; Zachrisson 1991a, 1994a & b; Aikio 2006; Yamamoto 2010). By way of evaluation, it is worth considering that in most of our synthetic models of the Viking Age the Sámi are either not mentioned at all, or else confined to a few pages concerned solely with a people of exotic arctic snowscapes. This problem is fundamental for any study of Viking-Age cultural interaction and identity.

The best starting-point is probably geography, because any discussion of cultural contact must necessarily proceed from at least an approximate understanding of population distribution. In the Viking Age this is far from simple. Figure 4.1 shows the modern distribution of the Sámi in Scandinavia, although perhaps we should rather say that it maps the distribution of active Sámi cultural awareness, since we have to bear in mind that, for example, the largest concentration of Sámi in Sweden is in Stockholm. This kind of image and the assumptions behind it informs almost every major publication on the Viking Age – essentially depicting the Sámi as a people inhabiting a far northern periphery, with tenuous contacts to the Viking homelands in the south expressed through periodic taxation, the raising of tribute, and a trade in furs. Sometimes the issue is evaded completely by just printing maps of ‘settled areas’ (i.e. the agricultural heartlands of south-central Scandinavia and along the western Norwegian coast) or sometimes their opposite, ‘areas without settlement’, both of these raising the obvious question as to exactly what kind of settlement is under discussion.

For the Viking Age, we cannot simply apply modern population geographies to an ancient ethnic map. The truth of this is confirmed by a substantial body of work carried out over the last twenty years (e.g. Zachrisson 1997; Dunfjeld-Aagård 2005; Bergman et al. 2007; Bruun 2007; Bergstøl 2008a & b; Ojala 2009; Broadbent 2010; Gjerde 2012), in particular the collation and synthesis of evidence for Sámi remains south of the traditional cultural border.

In this context we can firstly consider the belt of cremation cemeteries, distributed across Sweden from middle Norrland as far south as northern Svealand, usually known as ‘inland lake graves’ (Sw. insjögravar). The meaning of these burials, found either in small clusters or occasionally as single mounds, has long been debated, especially in a cultural context (cf. Hallström 1931; Serning 1962 & 1966; Hyenstrand 1974 & 1987). Located primarily in the forests, especially around the shores of the numerous small inland lakes – hence their name – it has been suggested that the graves represent individuals from marginal farming societies (Baudou 1977 & 1978, with a modified position 1988). An alternative viewpoint sees them as the burials of a mobile hunting culture, quite distinct from the permanent agrarian settlements of the plains (Selinge 1976, 1979, 1994); the latter view has also been echoed in Norway (Skjølsvold 1969, 1980). These arguments are complex, and the numerous contributions to the discussion have been ably summarised at greater length elsewhere (Zachrisson 1997: 33–40), but the debate has most often focused on the possibility that the apparent farming-hunting division in the grave distributions may have ethnic overtones, that is to say that it represents aspects of a Nordic-Sámi population pattern.

This is problematic on several levels. On the one hand there is little to distinguish the graves in an individual sense from the burials of the agrarian lowlands, as they exhibit much the same range of monumental types and constructions, and differ mostly in their distribution and landscape setting (cf. Lekberg 1990, who argues that the term is essentially without meaning, at least for northern Dalarna). In addition, it is clear that we should avoid the simplistic assumption that Sámi communities were always composed of hunters and pastoralists while the Nordic population were exclusively sedentary farmers. While it seems clear that the insjögravar do represent the burials of relatively mobile hunters living in a marginal environment, this may reflect lifestyle and economic strategy rather than ethnicity (though the latter may of course be formed by just such a reflection).

However, while we must be careful to qualify our judgements and allow variable pluralities of meaning in the insjögravar, there are a number of compelling factors which suggest that many of them do indeed represent the burials of Sámi. Even in the early Iron Age and Roman period, insjögravar at sites such as Krankmårtenshög in Härjedalen’s Storsjö include stone-set mounds covered with crowns of reindeer antler – a custom completely unknown on agrarian sites even in areas where reindeer are common, setting graves like this apart not just in location but also in character (cf. Ambrosiani et al. 1984; Olofsson 2010). Many finds from insjögravar right across their distribution area are also familiar from Sámi contexts elsewhere, and are equally unknown in the agrarian settlements of the southern lowlands. Objects of this kind include skin scrapers of a form found right across the sub-arctic regions of Eurasia, and pieces decorated in art styles characteristic of artefacts which unequivocally belong to the Sámi culture, such as shamanic drums. These items include sword hilts, weaving combs and even sculpted figurines such as a small bird found at Hästnäset in Dalarna; these and many other examples are again covered in detail by Zachrisson (1997: 189–220).

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Fig. 4.1 The modern distribution of Sámi culture (after Collinder 1949; Zachrisson 1994a).

In addition to the inland lake graves, there are also indications of settlements in the form of semi-permanent encampment sites, consisting of stone tent rings and hearths from circular kåta dwellings. Groups of these have been found at the southern Norwegian sites of Grøv Seter (Helmen 1949), Hallingdal and Hol (Zachrisson 1997: 194; Lindblom 1994), in Jämtland at Vivallen (Zachrisson 1997: 117–24) and on the eastern Swedish coast at Hornslandet in Hälsingland (Westberg 1964; see also Zachrisson 1997: 192ff). This picture of a southern forest culture is also strengthened by written accounts of Sámi settlement in central Scandinavia long into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Erik Dahlberg’s famous illustrated survey of Sweden, Suecia antiqua, even includes engravings of Sámi, with reindeer, in southern Dalarna (Dahlberg 1667–1715, II:45).

Evidence for Sámi activity and contact is also found even further south, in the great ship burial cemeteries of Vendel and Valsgärde, both in the Swedish province of Uppland, where we find artefacts of Sámi manufacture used in ways that suggest more than simple trade. The most dramatic are a number of fragments of birch bark, sewn with sinew-thread and decorated with geometric designs painted or burnt onto the bark. The patterns are typical of Sámi styles found on bark shrouds from graves in the Norwegian Varangerfjord region (cf. Solberg 1909: 112; Kleppe 1977), and the examples from the Uppland ship burials may once have formed part of the flexible walls of kåta tents (Arwidsson 1942: 106–9). The sheets of bark were found in Vendel graves 7 and 12 (Stolpe & Arne 1912: 32, 45), and Valsgärde graves 6 and 8 (Arwidsson 1942: 106–9; 1954: 107–12), all from the seventh to ninth centuries. In every case, the bark was draped in several layers over or under the burial deposits in the ships, in a fashion reminiscent of the Sámi burial rite of wrapping the dead in birch bark shrouds (Zachrisson 1997: 194f).

The implications of this are difficult to assess, but similar issues have been raised in work at the Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Stockholm, analysing human remains from more Uppland ship burials at Tuna in Alsike (Lidén et al. 2001). DNA analyses seem to tentatively suggest that at least one of the individuals buried in these vessels – in grave 6a – may have had partly Sámi ancestry. Clearly caution is warranted here, not least because it would surely be surprising if there was not a reasonably high level of physical interaction between Sámi and Norse, but mostly because we should be very careful in attaching ethnic (as opposed to genetic) identity to strands of DNA. Even more interesting are the nutritional studies of bodies from the same ship burial field, which have located very high levels of selenium in some of the men (Lidén & Nelson 1994). In Scandinavia, this is consistent only with a diet in which reindeer is predominant, and we must bear in mind that the Tuna cemetery lies well to the south-west of Uppsala, in an area far from the natural range of these animals. Moreover, it is interesting that only some of the men have this diet, not all of them, especially considering that all the graves seem to be of similarly high status. It does not therefore seem to relate to the diet of the community as a whole or even of one social class within it. Obviously, eating reindeer does not make someone a Sámi, but the suggestion is tempting in this context. If we consider the artefacts in the graves, the reindeer diet and even the DNA, it is possible that individuals with an ethnic Sámi identity were the primary occupants of some of the Uppland ship burials, an idea with intriguing potential.

When all this material is taken together – the broad distribution of the inland lake graves (albeit with their ethnic qualifications), the excavated sites of kåta encampments, the southerly finds of objects decorated in Sámi styles, and the evidence of the ship burials – a general picture begins to emerge, though not without its nuances and complications. Using this data, Inger Zachrisson and her colleagues have mapped out a new distribution for the Sámi during the Viking Age, a patterning that has wide-ranging implications as it suggests the existence of a broad zone across lowland Sweden and Norway – stretching approximately from Jämtland in the north to Uppland in the south – in which the Sámi and Nordic populations co-existed (Fig. 4.2). This is clearly controversial, as Zachrisson is the first to admit, but only up to point. Even if the southernmost material is the result solely of trading and exchange, nevertheless the unequivocal indications of Sámi presence lie only a few tens of kilometres to the north. One way or another, we have good grounds for suggesting the following:

that in the Viking Age the mobile range of Sámi nomadic populations extended far south of their modern borders

that there was a well-developed network of Sámi trade and trading presence among the Germanic chieftaincies in south central Sweden and Norway

that this presence may have taken the form of active Sámi integration at high levels of Germanic society (and perhaps at other social strata too)

And most important of all,

that very large areas of what we have come to think of as ‘Viking’ Scandinavia, far south of Lappland, in fact supported two ethnically-distinct population groups, broadly equating to ‘Sámi’ and ‘Germanic’ identities. These groups seem to have lived essentially side-by-side, sometimes in literally adjacent communities, with little sign of friction between them.

This picture may be what lies behind the rather garbled information recorded by Adam of Bremen (IV: 25, 32), who describes periodic contacts at a high social level between the Swedes and people who appear to have been Sámis. Several scholars from other disciplines have supported this in different ways, such as Régis Boyer in his work on Nordic magic. Here he argued, rather exaggeratedly perhaps, that the Sámi population distribution once extended throughout the whole of the Scandinavian peninsula, and that their practices were inevitably influential in the development of seiðr (Boyer 1986: 57–71).

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Fig. 4.2 The suggested cultural distribution of the Sámi (vertical lines) and Nordic (horizontal lines) peoples in the Viking Age. The sites mentioned in the text are marked: 1. Vivallen, 2. Överhogdal (after Zachrisson 1997: 219).

We must remember too that all this is looking only at the crudest levels of ethnic identity, let alone at all the additional forms of social distinction that must have been operating concurrently (cf. Price 1998a). Reviewing this material, much has been made of the difficulty in determining whether or not these remains are ‘Sámi’ in origin, and of course this kind of problem is integral to every archaeological discussion of ethnicity. I have discussed this at length elsewhere (Price 1994c, 1995a, 1998a) as have scholars cited above such as Olsen, Schanche and Zachrisson, so I will not dwell on this debate here, but it is worth reiterating that these questions are only asked when it is a matter of Sámi ethnicity – it is never queried whether Gamla Uppsala is a ‘Swedish’ site, or whether the Oseberg ship burial is ‘Norwegian’ and so on (cf. Hætta 1995). In the specific case of the material discussed above, their clear differences in relation to Viking material culture, and their equally clear links with artefactual traditions in the northern Sámi cultural area, then we should perhaps consider that the use of ‘Sámi’ as a cultural term has been avoided for far too long (see also Zachrisson’s 1994a discussion of this theme).

Clearly, the creation of a Viking Age in which the Sámi are not accorded their due prominence, influence and expanded population distribution, is unjust to the Sámi people today, who are thus deprived of their heritage. However, it is also a misrepresentation of the Nordic people’s history, because a Sámi-less Viking Age distorts their past too.

One of the most obvious conclusions to draw from this is that we must start to re-evaluate exactly what we mean by terms like ‘Sámi’ and ‘Norse’ in these contexts. Not least, there are of course considerable regional differences in the different groups of the Sámi people, following different economic strategies and different social trajectories, but it is also true to say that all the Viking-Age Sámi of Fenno-Scandia formed part of an overarching circumpolar culture – and it is with this culture, and its intimate contacts with the Nordic population, that Viking scholars must engage if we are to have any hope of creating rational models for the early medieval period in the European north.

To do this in a spiritual context, it is first necessary to gain an outline understanding of the Sámi belief system in general, unfamiliar as it may be by comparison with the better-known pre-Christian religion of the Norse.

Sámi religion and the Drum-Time

The conversion of Scandinavia in the late Viking period essentially started and finished with the Nordic population. A few Sámi people were caught up in this process along the northern Norwegian coast, but the incidental nature of these contacts with Christianity was typical for the religious encounter long into the Middle Ages. Certainly there were aspects of the alien faith that took root among the Sámi, with an abortive attempt at a mission in the late fourteenth century, and elements of Catholic iconography and nomenclature transformed and incorporated into their traditional religious culture. Notwithstanding these efforts, however, by the Reformation the traditional system of animist belief still provided the fundamental core of Sámi life and community.

Given the predominant polarisation of Europe between two branches of the Christian faith, it was therefore inevitable that curious rumours would spread about this pagan people in the far north, unheard of in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48, when Sweden won a string of victories and began to forge a north European empire, it was perhaps not then surprising that the country’s remarkable success was attributed abroad to witchcraft. The idea grew that the Swedes must have had sorcerous help from these strange ‘wizards’ of Lappland.

It is to this rumour – or rather the Swedish monarchy’s objection to it – that we owe the first careful record of the traditional religion of the Sámi. Piecemeal attempts at church-building and conversion had been underway in the far north since the early 1600s, but these had been more concerned with opposing the Russian presence in the Barents Sea than with saving local souls, and these missions had not met with much success. The embarrassing talk of godless sorcery continued to persist in the decades after the peace treaty, and clearly a concerted scientific effort was required to dispel such slander. In the early 1670s, this resulted in a royal commision given to an Uppsala scholar called Johannes Schefferus, tasked with making a proper report on the truth of the matter. His work built on several other relations and notes compiled by earlier priests, but the resulting book, Lapponia, was the first to collect all the material then available. Published in Latin in 1673 and rapidly translated into several European languages, it became the contemporary equivalent of a bestseller (a Swedish version oddly came much later). Although there are fragmented glimpses of Sámi religion in the Icelandic sagas and medieval works such as the Historia Norvegiae, it was Schefferus’ book that gave a wider world its first detailed view of their beliefs. He described what we would later understand as the noaidi and the ‘shamanic’ séance, the apparent worship of stones and trees, the sacrifices to the gods on ‘altars’ of antler and wood, and the omnipresent realm of spirits.

Although Schefferus seemed to have believed that the Sámi had abandoned their traditional religion, by the 1680s it became clear that this was not the case. In order to stamp out this heresy, the first concerted missionary work began at this time in Swedish and Finnish Lappland. The mission was broken off after a few years due to the outbreak of the Great Northern War, but up to that time it had been pursued with less than fanatical zeal. Partly this was due to the spirit of Lutheran Orthodoxy which focused on ritual rather than faith, and partly also due to the fear that repressive measures would simply drive the Sámi to support the Swedes’ enemies in Russia.

This changed at the cessation of hostilities in the early 1720s, when the main phase of the Christian missions began. These were prosecuted with particular fervour by Norwegian priests within the different doctrine of Pietism, which unlike the Lutheran faith focused on true conversion and a deep change of belief. Led by the Pietist Thomas von Westen, who emerges from the contemporary record as an especially ruthless man, the missions were spurred on by the discovery that many of the shamanic drums confiscated by the churchmen in the 1680s were fakes, made by the Sámi to deceive these representatives of a foreign faith.

It is worth emphasising that some 70–80% of our total sources for Sámi religion emerged from this period of the Norwegian missions, and the bias that this has introduced into our understanding of traditional beliefs in Sápmi should not be underestimated. The priests of course brought their own prejudices with them, social as well as religious, and it is for this reason that the surviving records focus to an overwhelming degree on the male sphere of Sámi religion. The beliefs of women seem to have been generally regarded as uninteresting by the missionaries. In addition to this skewed gender representation, we should note that the churchmen concentrated their efforts within a relatively limited geographical area. In simple terms, today we have little choice but to extrapolate general Sámi spiritual beliefs from what is essentially a record of South Sámi male traditions in Trøndelag during the 1720s (cf. Rydving 2010 on the Western Sámi).

There are, of course, other sources. The majority of Swedish missionary records of Sámi traditional beliefs date from the 1740s and 50s, a period when greater religious tolerance was practised, and there is much to be gained from this material. To this may be added the trial protocols from the accusations of heathen idolatry and witchcraft, and the notebooks of travellers and government officials. The full range of sources for Sámi religion has been summarised once again by Håkan Rydving (1993b: 13–29), who has also discussed their strengths and limitations with great insight in his book on source-critical problems (1995; see also, for example, Hagen 2013).

During the long period of conversion, the end of ‘Drum-Time’ as Rydving (1993a) has rendered the concept of Gáriid áigi, the general interest in the religious customs of the Sámi did not abate. A combination of exotic arctic environments, the thrill of long distance travel and a hint of devilish paganism proved irresistible to the European imagination. Prominent intellectuals such as Linnaeus travelled to Lappland and afterwards posed for their portraits in the Sámi clothes and equipment that they had acquired (cf. Westman & Utsi 1999: 7), and the shamanic drums were eagerly sought by the museum curators of the world.

Even as late as the mid-nineteenth century it is possible to encounter far-flung echoes of this awareness, of which an example can be found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel The Scarlet Letter from 1850. Exploring hypocrisy, guilt and the nature of sin in a conservative moral climate, Hawthorne sets out his story against the backdrop of Puritan New England in the 1600s, with its ever-present fear of witchcraft and all the dangerous freedoms that this stands for in a community bound by repressive norms. Near the end of the book, a self-confessed witch views a parade of church elders with scorn, reflecting on how many of these same people wear a different expression when they participate in the midnight rituals over which she presides in the forest, and in which all manner of demonic figures take part:

Many a church-member saw I, walking behind the music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us!

Hawthorne 1999 [1850]: 181

It says much that the middle-class readership of the United States, only ten years before the Civil War, should find an unannotated reference to a Sámi sorcerer still so readily comprehensible as an image of satanic agency.

Despite all the sources that we have, inevitably there is a great critical problem in moving back in time to the Viking Age, some six centuries before our ethnographies of Sámi spiritual practice. Sámi religion was not a static entity any more than its Nordic counterpart, and in any attempt to reconstruct its original form we must acknowledge the fact of the enormous geographical variation evident in both the archaeological record and later written sources. These patterns reflect a wide range of local and regional customs in the human relationship to the gods and in the mediation of the supernatural world, and equally important is the recognition that these practices changed over time.

Although many of the elements of Sámi religion recorded by the missionaries are probably of considerable antiquity, there are three aspects of these beliefs that would definitely seem to go back at least as far as the Viking period. All of these are grounded in what we might vaguely term the ‘Sámi hunters’ way of thinking’:

the existence of a thought-world of spirits and natural powers

the bear hunt and its ritual foundations

noaidevuohta and the social role of the noaidi

Each of these will be explored in turn below, through discussions of the Sámi pantheon of deities, the supernatural entities perhaps best conceptualised as ‘spirits’ and a special class of beings called rådare (lit. ‘rulers’). Linking all these is the complex Sámi understanding of what we might call the soul, and the loose system of thought within which all these elements were combined. The latter, noaidevuohta or ‘that which has to do with the noaidi’, is the closest approximation in Sámi culture to the notion of shamanism and thus the counterpart to the possible role of seiðr and its related rituals in Nordic society. Together with the individuals at its core, the noaidi or ‘shamans’, an exploration of noaidevuohta forms the focus of this chapter.

There are surprisingly few general works on Sámi religion, but useful overviews have been produced by Reuterskiöld (1912), Karsten (1955), Bäckman & Hultkrantz (1978), Hætta (1994) and Pentikäinen (1997). In addition the edited collections by Bäckman & Hultkrantz (1985), Ahlbäck (1987), Mebius (2003) and Virdi Kroik (2005) contain much of interest. For directed reading on specific aspects of the Sámi religious world, Rydving’s excellent annotated bibliography provides a natural starting point (1993b).

The world of the gods

The notion of divinity in the Sámi belief system seems to have been a relatively fluid concept. While the names and attributes of gods are recorded beyond any doubt – as discussed below – there remains nonetheless an ambiguity as to the relative status of these beings alongside the extensive range of other supernatural entities.

We know, for example, that all the Sámi peoples believed in a very large variety of ‘spirits’, for want of a better term, living in isolation or in entire communities, and at some level divisible into different hierarchies of power, allegiance and form. Along with the complicated ‘rulers’, and the important category of underground beings of various kinds, all these spirits will be discussed in more detail below. In the context of Sámi divinities, however, it is important to note that in some senses these too could take ‘spiritual’ form, whereby some essence of the god could reside in a particular place or be associated with a certain object, in a manner almost identical to other kinds of spirits. On the one hand this can be seen as an aspect of the godhead, as in the case of the door-wife Uksáhkká, who resided in the ground beneath the entrance of the kåta tent (see below) – presumably an element of her was simultaneously present under every such dwelling. On the other hand however, there seems to have been a sense in which the nature of the divinity itself changed according to circumstance, becoming in some contexts more a part of the broader environment in a manner akin to that of the spirits of place and the land.

At one level it therefore seems that the Sámi definitions of what constituted a god were utterly unlike those of the Norse, but this need not necessarily be the case. As we have seen in chapter 2, the conventional notions of ‘worship’ and its components cannot really be said to apply to the Norse pantheon, and I have already stressed that the essential requirement in their relationship with human beings seems to have been the latter’s acknowledgement of the gods’ inseparability from the natural world – the similarity with the Sámi deities is striking here.

As with all other aspects of Sámi religion, there was a perceived division between deities associated with men and women, to the extent of forming two separate spheres of belief. With some exceptions, the gods associated with each sex were generally of that sex themselves, and linked to activities similarly divided along gender lines. However, within both the male and female groups of deities were gods who occupied a transitional zone between the sexes, and it is not going too far to discuss this in terms of a third gender (there is an obvious link between such concepts and the special gender categories associated with shamanism, discussed in chapters 3 and 5). This aspect of the Sámi gods will be taken up in more detail below.

The names of the gods varied from one part of Sápmi to another, following the divisions of dialect-groups, but in some areas even their attributes and functions differed. This variation related particularly to the world of the dead, and the associated beliefs concerning rebirth and the soul which we shall consider shortly.

In common with many other circumpolar peoples, the Sámi seem to have believed in a supreme divinity while simultaneously relegating this figure to a background role, remote from human affairs. Known by several names – Ráddiolmmái or Ráððiáhčči, ‘the silent ruler’, in SaN – the highest god of the Sámi seems to have been what historians of religions call a deus otiosus, that is one who adopted a ‘resting’ profile in relation to the other deities and the realm of mortals. Connotations of neutrality, or at least impartiality, seem to have attached to this god, despite his association with the ultimate power of decision-making, and he seems to have been relatively unimportant for human beings.

Among the gods for men were those personifying aspects of nature, such as Bieggolmmái, the ‘wind man’, who fought with demons and whose importance was reflected by the vital role played by the wind for those living in the mountains or for those drawing their sustenance from the sea. He was paralleled by Čáhčolmmái, the ‘water man’, who had similar powers over lakes and streams, and who could improve fishing luck. Varaldenolmmái was the fertility god, whose powers extended into the giving of souls to the newly born, and to the vital fecundity of the reindeer; in some traditions he also took on aspects of the highest god.

The thunder god, Horagállis, has already been mentioned, and with his life-giving rain was one of the fundamentals of the Sámi way of life. The water from his storms brought the grass and moss which fed the reindeer, cleansed the air and brought new life to the sick. His anger was also feared, expressed in the lightning which killed animals and people, and changed stones and trees to something other than they had been before (lightning scars and fractures conveyed special properties of supernatural power to a place, and as we shall see below the shamanic drums were sometimes made from the wood of lightning-blasted trees).

One of the most important of the group was Leaibolmmái, the ‘alder man’, who was the primary male hunting god. He could control game animals, and bring good fortune to the chase. The element liejp in his SaL name (Liejpålmaj) can refer to alder bark, the sap of which when mixed with blood produced a powerful substance which possessed a range of ritual properties. It was used to paint the images on the noaidi’s drumskins, and could also neutralise the dangerous forces evoked during the hunt. Following the killing of a bear, for example, the mixture was spat into the faces of women to protect them from the bear’s power emanating from its slayer. However, liejp can also mean ‘menstrual blood’, an association that leads us to perhaps the most important aspect of Leaibolmmái, because he was the god of the male sphere who also stood astride the blurred gender zone mentioned above. We will return to this aspect of his nature in the section on soul beliefs below.

The strange god Rota, mentioned above, is an exception among the Sámi divinities. Terrifying if not actually evil, he seems to have represented all that was threatening in the environment, as well as in some way being connected with the powers of the underworld. In some circumstances he also appears as a being of disease, and occasionally its cure. As we have seen, he is also believed to be the Sámi deity with closest parallels in the sphere of Eurasian shamanism (Ränk 1981, 1985; Pettersson 1985). Alongside Rota are other, more obscure divinities or major beings, such as Máttaráddjá, the ‘old one in furs’.

Within the female sphere, the highest goddess was Máttaráhkká, the ancestral mother, who was to some extent a female counterpart to the supreme god Ráddiolmmái. Máttaráhkká forms a close group with her three daughters, who were collectively the most important deities for Sámi women (as with the male gods, some of these figures were also significant for the opposite sex, as discussed below). The three sisters were Sáráhkká, the fertility goddess of birth and the most important of the daughters, in some ways overshadowing even her mother in the role she played in Sámi society; Uksáhkká, the ‘door woman’; and Juoksáhkká, the ‘bow woman’. A fifth goddess, Jábbmeáhkká, was seen in some parts of Sápmi as the ruler of the world of the dead (the goddesses are discussed in detail in Bäckman 1984; Myrhaug 1997; see also Rydving 1993b: 49f for other works).

Nature deities of the female sphere included Ruonanieida, the goddess of spring and the growing season. She was particularly associated with reindeer, representing the green grass and lichen that provided the main source of nutrition for the animals (Hætta 1994: 15).

The sun, Beaivi, also played an important role in Sámi belief, as something between a deity and a personified aspect of both nature and cosmology (the sources are collected and discussed in Westman 1997). Beaivi was a female power, and in many ways can be seen as part of the group of ‘mothers’ described above, Máttaráhkká and her daughters. Some have argued that the sun was more a cosmic being than a personified god, and that it in fact bore the gods on its rays (Hætta 1994: 8). These writers have taken inspiration from the very few surviving interpretations of drum images that were recorded from Sámi informants, but it is clear that these accounts must be treated with considerable caution: they were often given under duress, and it is likely that some elements of them were deliberately invented to obscure the true meaning of the images, knowledge which the informant wished to keep from his non-Sámi questioner.

The sun was reflected by Mánnu, the moon, who was regarded with a respect almost equal to his solar counterpart (it is interesting that the Sámi viewed the sun as female and the moon as male, unlike most European religions). The similar regard paid to both celestial bodies is easier to understand when one considers the seasonal rhythm of light and darkness in the far north – in winter, the sun disappeared and was literally replaced by the moon as a source of light, often shining almost as brightly against the snow as the sun in summer.

Beliefs concerning the solar and lunar bodies were also extended into other celestial phenomena, especially the Northern Lights, Guovsahas, which form such a dramatic element of the winter sky in the far north. These are discussed in more detail below, in the section on magical violence.

Spirits and Rulers in the Sámi cognitive landscape

The notion of spirit beings of various kinds was central to the world-view of the Sámi, but also to their understanding of nature itself, and the landscape through which they moved.

In an earlier article (Price 1998a), I have contrasted the general Sámi perception of landscape with that of their Nordic neighbours. There I argued that the Norse adopted an essentially transformative attitude to the natural environment. The Nordic pattern of sedentary settlement is, of course, familiar: farmsteads and villages in more-or-less permanent locations, re-sited only occasionally over time, surrounded by the enclosed field systems, meadows and pathways of the agrarian, pastoral landscape. This is not to deny any mobility in the population, or the presence of peripatetic elements of society, but there is no doubt that the settled agricultural community was the norm throughout the Scandinavian North. Even in areas with a maritime or forest economy, permanent settlement with as much garden cultivation as possible was still the general trend.

The Sámi, by contrast, seem to have viewed their relationship with the land as fundamentally assimilative – the landscape being seen as something to be moved through or lightly rested upon in as inconspicuous and noninterventionist a way as possible. This takes its most obvious expression in the portable, temporary settlements of kåta tents of various kinds, the archaeological traces of which in the form of hearths and tent rings contrast sharply with the solid postholes, beam-slots and floor layers of Nordic dwellings. However, we also see it in the other most common element of the Sámi built environment (if it can truly be called that), the numerous varieties of pit constructions. With pits for storage, trapping, food preparation, even dwelling under certain circumstances, it is not inappropriate to talk of a Sámi ‘pit landscape’, and indeed we know that in later years the Sámi themselves explicitly viewed the land in this way (e.g. the descriptions in Turi 1987; cf. Kleppe & Mulk 2006).

Even more interestingly, there is a suggestion in one of our earliest contemporary sources for the Viking world that the Norse also understood this fundamental difference between their own view of the land and that of the Sámi. In the voyage round the north coast of Norway related by the traveller Ohthere (Óttarr?) to the Anglo-Saxon King Ælfred in the late ninth century, he mentions several times that the country of the Norse was settled but that of the Finnas (i.e. the Sámi) was eal weste, ‘totally uninhabited’,

… buton on feawum stowum styccemælum wiciað Finnas, on huntoðe on wintra & on sumera on fiscaðe be þære sæ

… except for a few places here and there where the Finnas have their camps, hunting in winter, and in summer fishing in the sea.

Ohthere’s Account 1; text and translation after Lund & Fell 1984: 18

Thus to this particular Norwegian, the place where the Sámi lived was unoccupied. It is in this subliminal and almost contradictory context that I believe we should view the Sámi notion of spirits – and, in some circumstances, gods – seeing them as invisible inhabitants of a cultural landscape that was in many ways also invisible. The idea of the supernatural is also misleading here, because the fundamental presence of these beings in the landscape was entirely ‘natural’ and should not be separated from the human and animal populations (I would argue that this probably applied equally to the Norse belief system). Indeed, there is a sense in which the landscape and its spiritual occupants were synonymous (see Price 2002 for a short case study in Russian Sápmi based on my fieldwork on the White Sea).

Some of this is reflected in place-names, and their relationship with religious practice or belief is one of the great lacunae in Sámi scholarship, very little work having been done in this area. With the possible exception of localities invoking the various names of the thunder-god, there seems to have been much less tendency towards theophoric place-names among the Sámi than among the Norse. The most holy places of all were left un-named, such as the sacred flat-topped mountain Nammatj (‘No-Name’) in Aktse near the Sarek region of Swedish Sápmi.

In terms of the cultural landscape, for the Sámi we have to think in terms of what Richard Bradley has called ‘an archaeology of unaltered, natural places’ (2000: chs 1, 3). This links to the idea of assimilation mentioned above, in which sacrificial sites, graves, stone circles and offering places are in subordinate relationships to their physical environment. In essence, they constitute markers and points of notation to indicate the wider significance of sacred space (Mulk 1994 provides an overview of this; for case studies of the Varanger region and elsewhere in Norway, see Vorren & Eriksen 1993; Schanche 2000; Fossum 2006; Kraft 2010; Äikäs 2015; an essential critique of these concepts is to be found in Spangen 2017).

The saajvh and their sacred landscape

Most of the supernatural denizens of the Sámi world dwelled, like their Norse counterparts, in water or in rock. The most prominent spirits of place were those of the holy mountains and lakes, a geographical location of spiritual power that for obvious reasons was dominant in the far north. The most developed terminologies for these beings derive from the South Sámi culture area, where they were called saajvh (SaS, sing. saajve). In the southern region they were associated with mountains and rocks, while among the Lule Sámi they lived in lakes. Across all the regions they formed a combined concept of both spirit and place, one and the same.

Alongside the ancestors, the saajvh were the most important of the Sámi spirits and were intimately linked to the power of the noaidi (the classic work on these beings is Bäckman 1975). The saajvh were quite small, about 1.5 m high, and could take both human and animal form. They were of both sexes, and at least one male saajve – a saajveålmah – lived in every mountain. On occasion up to five male saajvh dwelt in the same holy peak, and sometimes there were whole families of these beings, males, females and their children.

The key to their relationship with human beings was that the saajvh could be owned, in an entirely literal sense – they could be bought, sold and inherited. The different saajvh living in different places had different values, and status was conferred by the number of such beings that one possessed. It is important to understand that in the South Sámi area, saajvh ownership was the primary indicator of social standing, carrying far more weight that the possession of reindeer. A saajve spirit entered into a kind of contract with a human, in which it would serve its owner and protect his or her life and property. The most valuable were those who had been inherited through several generations, called aarp’saajvh, essentially a kind of protective family spirit. If a person died and had not allocated the inheritance of his or her saajvh, the relatives of the deceased could compete for them by offering sacrifices. Both men and women could own these spirits, though there were some that could only be owned by the noaidi.

The animal-saajvh served only the ‘shamans’, and were inherited from one to another. They took several forms:

saajveledtie – a bird spirit used to gain information about our world or the upper world

saajveguelie – a fish spirit which could travel in water or in the underworld of the dead

saajvesarva – a bull-reindeer spirit which, unlike the others, was a physical being. This was used in conflicts between the noaidi, embodied in the fighting of reindeer males during the mating season

The term saajvh could also refer to the mountains that the spirits lived inside, and to the meltwater that ran off them. The latter was thought to have healing powers and could be bathed in or drunk. The noaidi would enter the sacred mountains, which were also thought to be gates to the other worlds. Inside the rock the noaidi would talk with the saajvh, jojk with them, eat, drink and dance. There are also reverences to noaidi having sex with the saajvh. The humans and spirits contacted one another through dreams, and there were many kinds of sacrifice offered to them, not only at their mountains but also in the kåta.

Among the Lule Sámi we find a range of similar concepts, based around a general category of spirits called vuojnodime, ‘the invisible ones’ (who in turn referred to human beings as almmolattjat, ‘the visible ones’). These beings spoke their own, very complex language which they shared with the noaidi in a kind of secret network of communication. There were helping spirits in human form who seem to have been the equivalent of the South Sámi saajvh, and who similarly appeared in male and female incarnations called respectively basseváreålmmå and basseváreniejda, meaning ‘holy mountain men/women’. A third form, gadniha, could be of both sexes. We also see the same tripartite divisions of animal spirits, the bassevárelådde (‘holy mountain bird’), basseváreguolle (‘holy mountain fish’) and basseváesarves (‘holy mountain reindeer bull’). There were special places were these beings could cross the barrier between the worlds and communicate with humans, called basseváruxa and gadnihuxa, meaning ‘door for the holy mountain spirits’.

The North Sámi again had similar concepts of sacred mountains (bassevárit), but the names of the spirits were instead directly linked to the noaidi. Thus the animal spirits were called noaideloddi (‘noaidi-bird’), noaideguolli (‘noaidi-fish’) and noaidesarvvis (‘noaidi-reindeer bull’). As in the Lule Sámi area we also find an exact parallel for the ‘invisible ones’, in a term with the same meaning in SaN, oaidnemeahttumat. As before, these spirits called people albmulaččat, ‘the visible ones’.

There were also other types of spirits associated with the noaidi. These were of several kinds, such as the nåejtesvoejkene (SaS) and noaidegázzi (SaN), broadly translating to ‘spirits of the noaidi’. There were also helping spirits in human form and of both sexes, such as the North Sámi háldit and uldat. We know relatively little about any of these beings, other than that they were summoned and manipulated during the soul journey. In all these instances, an important distinction was clearly made between the protective spirits such as the saajvh and the helping spirits that were engaged in the ritual performances of noaidevuohta.

It can thus be seen that the saajvh and their analogues in the different culture areas of Sápmi formed a vital part of Sámi society, and that social status at the most fundamental level rested on a relationship with the supernatural. This was both personal – even, on occasion, intimate – and expressed in a structure of power and control. It is also important to recognise the spatial aspect of the saajvh, as the patterns of ownership applied to both spirits and their mountains, and thus of the rights to graze and exploit the resources of these areas (see Bergsland’s 1985 work on mapping ‘inheritance-mountains’ among the southern Sámi). Very close parallels to this can be discerned in the Old Norse sources, with the numerous holy mountains and their inhabitants that appear in dreams, the various beings who emerge from the rocks in visions of warning or doom, and not least the personified aspects of family fortune represented by the fylgjur and hamingjur. There does not seem to have been the same developed system of formal ownership, but the essential framework of human-spirit relations is very similar.

Julefolket and the dead-child tradition

One category of Sámi spirits is worthy of separate discussion here, due to their very close affinities with similar beings in Norse belief. These Julefolk, ‘Yule-people’, appear in some of the earliest sources, being found in Schefferus (1956 [1673]: 105) and in Leem (1767: 482) as the joulo-gazze. Today they are still known as javlla-stállo or rähttuna (Mulk 1998). These spirits were partly connected with the dead, and partly with other, less easily identifiable beings. They appeared during the Yule period, approximately between mid-November and early January, and always travelled in a large body, often in the form of a rajd (a sort of caravan formed of sleds, usually pulled by reindeer) drawn by mice and lemmings. Riding through the sky, the Julefolk would move around habitations at night, drawn by the sound of children playing. Appearing in the form of small humanoid figures, the spirits would then attempt to bear the children away on their mice-drawn sleds. For fear of the Julfolk, children were encouraged to be silent at this time, a feature common to other Sámi responses to dangerous spirits, such as those dwelling in the Northern Lights as discussed below.

In many ways these spirits have affinities with the ‘riders’ of Norse belief, especially in the context of the gandreið and similar phenomena mentioned in chapter 3, and the later folklore on the Wild Hunt of Óðinn (see chapter 6). Earlier writers such as Fritzner (1877: 157) identified the Julefolk directly with Óðinn, whom he believed to be synonymous with the leader of these spirits, a being called Jauloherra. Some support may be found for this, and indeed in the later medieval tales Óðinn’s riders are found by many names, some of which are very close to that of the Sámi spirits, for example the Jolaskreiði of western Norway (Aasen 1853: 27–8; de Vries 1957: § 167) and the Jolasveinar (Wang 1871: 9–10), the latter still current in Icelandic folklore. Óðinn himself was also identified in Ágrip (1) as the being behind the institution of Yule, through his name Jólnir.

However, it is more important to view the Julefolk alongside the Wild Hunt of Óðinn as yet another common feature in the ancient belief systems of northern Europe, in this case once again spanning both the Germanic and Finno-Ugric cultures.

Another category of these spirits among the Sámi was formed by the souls of children who had been exposed to die in the mountains, whose wails could be heard by travellers in the high country. Again, these have parallels in Nordic culture, and they are almost unique among the Sámi spirit beings in that a very considerable body of work has been specifically devoted to them. Pentikäinen’s classic thesis on the ‘dead-child tradition’ (1968) is still the most comprehensive study.

Rulers and the invisible world

The Sámi world also had many other invisible occupants, all personifying positive and negative aspects of the physical environment. These include spirits of the drowned, or a special kind of spirit that had the supernatural power to hear everything that was said in a particular place. There were also counterparts to the Norse idea of trolls and other similar beings, called stálo by the Sámi (they could be either a generic or an individual, the Stálo). Like the ogres of the Scandinavians, the stálo were large, dirty and stupid, and there are many stories of them being outwitted by the clever Sámi.

To these we can add the more widely-recognised category of beings found in several circumpolar cultures and mentioned above, known generically as ‘rulers’, or the ‘Owners/Masters of the Animals’. These spirits are found in their most developed form among the Native American tribes, especially in the east where they have been studied by Hultkrantz (1961a and papers therein). Their function remained generally constant, and was “to exercise stewardship over the wild animals, especially the animals which are hunted by man. [The Owner] protects these animals, sees to it that if they have been slain by man they get a correct ritual burial, and sanctions or prevents the hunter’s slaying of them” (Hultkrantz 1961b: 54–5). We may note the clear relationship between the Owners and the concept of shamanic animal guardians, explicitly so in the case of the North American examples (Hultkrantz 1961b: 61–3; for north-west European and Siberian parallels see also papers by Kock, Liungman and Paulson from the same publication; Rooth 1961a notes some later Scandinavian examples).

In Sámi culture, the most developed set of ruler-beliefs related to the bear. The largest and most dangerous animal of the Sámi environment, the bear was central for a great number of rituals. These have been studied extensively and will not be discussed in detail here, but we can make some brief observations. The bear was regarded as more than an equal of humans, being simultaneously divine and animal in nature. It was the primary ruler figure, and controlled not just the spirits of bears and their supply as food resources but also the natural environment of land and water. It was thought to understand the Sámi language, and was treated with great respect. Hunters took care not to speak to each other during an attack on a bear’s den, so it would not realise their ethnic origin. The opposite was true for the post-hunt rituals, when it was hoped the bear would understand how respectful the Sámi were being to its soul.

The noaidi played a significant role in the hunt, and his drum was decorated with silver nails for every successful bear-killing that it had engineered (several examples of these are still in existence). There were also important sexual overtones for the bear hunt, with the strict segregation of women from its rituals, and an association between the successful human bear-hunter and the dangerous sexual potency of the slain animal. After the consumption of its flesh, the undamaged bones of the bear were buried with care in a ritual found in varying forms in several parts of the circumpolar region, in order to ensure the renewal of its soul and the continued provision of bears for future hunts (see Fjellström 1981 [1755] for an early ethnography of bear-hunting rituals, Edsman 1994 for the most comprehensive survey, and Elgström & Manker 1984 for an illustrated cycle of the ceremonies; bear burials are covered by Zachrisson & Iregren 1974; Mulk & Iregren 1995; Myrstad 1996; and the very similar shamanic bear rituals among the Aino of Japan and Sakhalin are discussed by Akino 1999 and Utagawa 1999).

Names, souls and sacrifice

We have seen above the importance of Norse soul beliefs in the structure of seiðr and its related rituals. How do these compare to the equivalent patterns among the Sámi?

Firstly we can observe that the gender categories that characterise the sorcerers of the Norse are in a sense enshrined even from birth in Sámi society. It is in connection with the sex of the unborn child that we encounter the contradictory sexualities embodied by two of the major gods described above – Leaibolmmái from the male sphere, and Juoksáhkká from the female sphere. It is clear that the Sámi believed all human embryos to be originally female, and that special intervention was required if a male child was desired. To this end, sacrifices were offered to the bow-woman Juoksáhkká, the third of Máttaráhkká’s daughters. The bow was an exclusively male weapon, and it is here that we see Juoksáhkká’s contradictory nature, through her association as a goddess of the female sphere with a tool forbidden for women to use. Her aspect here as a goddess of change is exactly paralleled in the male sphere by Leaibolmmái, the alder man, as we have seen in his name which can also mean the ‘man of menstrual blood’. The binary opposition of these two gods enshrines the fundamental contradictory principle that underlies much of Sámi religion: the two deities hate one another as representatives of the opposite sex, and are locked in a perpetual struggle for the souls of the unborn, while at the same time they contain crucial aspects of the other’s nature.

Elevated above this conflict, and to some extent presiding over it, was the creator goddess of fertility, Sáráhkká. In her supreme power – and distanced from the detailed concerns of her sisters – she was probably the most important deity for all the Sámi peoples, of both sexes. She was also one of the goddesses of birth, as her name was linked to the verb for ‘cleaving’, the act of opening the womb.

During the Middle Ages, as Christian ideas began to filter through into Sámi society, and especially in connection with the main missionary drives of the seventeenth century and later, Sáráhkká began to be identified with the Virgin Mary; by a similar token, Máttaráhkká took on the identity of Anna, Mary’s mother. These incorporations of pre-Christian ideas into a Christian world-view were also reflected in material culture even down to our own times. This is seen in the frequent use of ‘A’ and ‘M’ symbols in Sámi silverwork, especially on women’s belt fittings, and in the appearance of small groups of three figures which have their ancestry in the three daughters of Máttaráhkká.

In terms of the individual soul, the main distinction in Sámi culture seems to have been between what we would call the living and the dead, though this division was not conceptualised in the same way. The world of the living seems to have been conceptualised as being flat, and most importantly, thin. Only a crust seems to have separated our world from that of the dead, which was under the ground and rotated 180° to form a reversed, upside-down realm. There were several names for this underground world, including Jábmiidáibmu and Rota-áibmu. The dead lived here, and walked in the footsteps of the living like reflections in a mirror. This relationship across the worlds was crucial in ways that connected with the nature of the soul and the importance of the ancestors (see Pettersson 1957 for an extensive analysis of the role of the dead in Sámi life).

The definition of life was dependant on the extent of social contact with others, and in a sense the fact of breath or a heart-beat was irrelevant to this. The terms for relatives merely changed grammatical form after death, as an indicator of which world they lived in. The dead remained literally alive so long as the living remembered them. The ‘dead’ could also be actively involved in daily life, for example by minding children or watching over a reindeer herd. The ancestors would also appear in dreams, imparting information, demanding certain things, and so on.

Already we can see parallels with the complex Norse soul beliefs, and particularly the spirit beings connected to the family line such as the fylgjur.

Sometimes children were given the names of ancestors, thereby conferring on them the identity of the dead person and in a sense enabling him or her to be reborn. Men were given the names of good hunters, while women were called after those who had given birth painlessly. Occasionally names were given while their owners were still alive, and in these cases both bearers of the name took on aspects of the same individual. It could also happen that a child was given the ‘wrong’ name, and for example a baby that cried a lot could be thought to be protesting against its name. In such instances it was possible for a name to be changed by means of special rituals in the care of women; there are records of this happening four or five times to the same person. Sickness could also be a sign of an unsuitable name, again connected to the opinion of the dead.

The Sámi dead seem to have constantly striven to return to the realm of the living, not as revenants or ghosts but in the sense of being reborn through naming. A pregnant woman might dream of several different ancestors, all vying with each other to return in their names. The correct name might also be revealed through prayer to Sáráhkká, or by consulting a noaidi. When the name was chosen in a kind of baptism ceremony to Sáráhkká, the child was also given a name-fish, a nammaguolli, which was perceived as living in a certain lake or river near the young child’s home. Throughout life, a Sámi would discuss important decisions with his or her name-fish, and in later times when a person was forced to attend church they would often apologise to the name-fish first. In some areas of Sápmi only men received these fish, and sometimes only men who would become noaidi.

Materially the world of the dead was rich, but also boring because it was a lonely place. Above all, there was no jojk there, and thus no ‘contact’, no rhythm of life. Wanting to be rejoined with their living relatives, the dead would try to draw them down to their own world, not out of malice but simply from a desire for company. In the living world this was manifested as sickness, and if the dead began to get a grip on a gravely ill person then it could be time to call in a noaidi.

It is here that one of the concepts of sacrifice enters the Sámi religious world, as the dead were sometimes willing to be distracted with food and might thereby stop trying to draw their living kinsfolk down to their world. The noaidi could negotiate with the dead, and perhaps agree on a price to be paid in reindeer. In ritually killing the animal, it would pass to the other world and provide sustenance for the dead. If the sick person became ill again, perhaps it was a sign that the ancestors had eaten the reindeer, and wanted some more.

There seems to have been no Sámi concept of an abstract and eternal afterlife, which stresses again the importance of this contact between the worlds. In many ways a relationship with the ‘dead’, the ancestors, was more vital than a connection to the gods. Among the helping spirits, the most important category was also that of the ancestors, in the sense that they blended attributes of humans and more ethereal beings from another world.