Far beyond the Germanic tribes lived the Fenni . . . Farther than this everything dissolves into myths
Tacitus
BACK IN NOVEMBER 2002, across the fog-bound Barents Sea from Svalbard, I had towed my infant son on a sledge among Sámi herders engaged in the age-old rituals of seasonal migration. In the darkness of a winter afternoon, as pinpricks of light from a distant settlement glimmered across the cold fells and my friends goaded reindeer, it moved me deeply to see a European people so closely in touch with their past living in uneasy alliance with the present, and the experience left unanswered questions concerning the indigenous cultures of the far north. The temperate climate and its husbandry brought the countryside home, and so did familiar faces. Sámi descend from both Europeans and Uralic-speaking Asiatics, and in physiognomy the European dominates. Following the 2002 visit, I pursued my interest in that enigmatic land and its hardy peoples while baby Reg grew into a sturdy boy with no memory of the closing moments of transition and assimilation that we had witnessed together. Quite by chance, I found two writers who brilliantly revealed an earlier phase. They were Johan Turi, the first Sámi ever to publish a book, and Axel Munthe, his magnificent Swedish friend.
Sámi occupy the northern arc of Scandinavia and north-west Russia. The land they call Sápmi (also known as Fennoscandia, after its geological shield) extends north from Idre in Dalarna, Sweden and adjacent areas in Norway – across from Engerdal in Hedmark to the shores of the Atlantic. From there it rises to the top of the Norwegian coast; eastwards Sápmi moves through Finland and across to the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Federation.1 The Norwegian seaboard in those regions, deeply indented with fjords and valleys, arches a thousand miles to Kirkenes, a port almost bombed out of existence in the Second World War and so close to Russia that street signs appear in Cyrillic. The stark wilderness of the Finnmarksvidda plateau dominates the interior: people call it Big Sky Country. Elsewhere in Lapland, virgin forest and tundra bogs alternate with fell and marshland, gorges and treeless plains, frozen lakes, the eerie Lappish heartland around Kvikkjokk in Norrbotten, Sweden and the Finnish gold pans of the Ivalojoki and Morgamjoki south and west of Lake Inari. Hard by the Russian border where golden eagles fly, wolves and brown bears roam the forest and the softly rounded fells above the treeline. Sámi once had the barren hinterland of Arctic Norway to themselves, as well as high ground unsuited to cattle further south from which they came down only to trade, becoming famously addicted to coffee. But in Finland, which their ancestors once inhabited in its entirety, Sámi have been on the retreat from invading agriculturalists and loggers for two millennia. On assignment for a newspaper, I had joined a group of herding families north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden to find out how they were coping economically with European Union regulations. Few relied exclusively on herding. Some said everything but reindeer had changed out of all recognition. Others were optimistic.
Sámi have been living off reindeer since the Stone Age and began domesticating their own herds in the sixteenth century, migrating as nomads with the animals.2 Forest Sámi bartered with mountain Sámi and both traded with coastal Sámi who lived at the heads of the fjords and followed sea mammals and fish shoals; when the whales came, a noajdde or shaman sat on a headland and cajoled them to shore with magic spells. In the winter all Sámi made holes in lake ice with a pick and laid gill nets, threading the nets between holes by using a long flexible wooden strip. Many trapped ermine and beaver, luring the animals into underwater cages, where they drowned. Forest Sámi also hunted brown bear through the low-lying wooded lands with spears and bow. Like other Arctic peoples, Sámi regarded the bear as a sacred messenger between gods and people, and it was important to treat him with respect, even when sawing him up for the pot.
All Sámi traded with the foreigner. The biggest fairs were at Varanger, Alta and Lyngen, three major fjords on the northernmost curve of Scandinavia, and from them Sámi skied away first with bronze, then iron, then salt, coffee, flour, cracked barley and cloth (as well as measles), while a pale-skinned merchant sailed off with a cargo of dried fish and beaver furs. The point of a fair might have been primarily economic, but it was also a chance to live it up away from the wife and Lapplets. Eighteenth-century documents bristle with complaints about Lappish drunkenness at the fairs, and Lutheran missionaries who arrived in 1632 at first made little headway. It took seventy years, but from then on their influence grew steadily, often with baleful consequences for the herders. Missionaries introduced compulsory church attendance, with fines for those who did not appear. It was hard for nomads to follow such rules, though harder for shamans, as they were burned at the stake. As for the non-missionary invaders, fur drew them north, just as it was attracting Cossacks to Arctic Siberia and Europeans to Canada. Then minerals began to glint in the tundra, and by the eighteenth century mines were operational across the region, worked partly by Sámi forced labour. In addition, homesteaders tried their luck, encouraged by the Lapland Settlement Act in force from 1673 to 1873. These people were chiefly Swedish cattle farmers or hay harvesters or Finnish slash-and-burn corn growers who destroyed dry land where reindeer grazed for lichen. None of them admired the Lapps, except in one regard. They were the greatest skiers in the world. They had to be: they needed to keep up with migrating animals. Carbon-dated fragments of a ski preserved in a peat bog in Russian Lapland reveal that the Arctic ski is older than the wheel. Lapps appear regularly in the Norse sagas as skiing stars. ‘Lapps’, according to one saga, ‘are so cunning that they can follow tracks like dogs, both in thawing snow and on hard crust, and they are so good on skis that nothing can escape them, whether man or beast.’ Lappish snowcraft reached its zenith in Norway. ‘They ski down high mountains and slopes,’ reported one eighteenth-century Norse observer, ‘at breakneck speed, so that the air whistles in their ears, and their hair streams backward in the wind. Indeed, if you place a cap or something else in their way, they bend down at full speed, and pick it up.’ Skiing soon became a symbol of national identity all over Norway but especially in Finnmark, the largest and northernmost province. Every farm boy there made his own skis, planing and chiselling the blanks and steaming the tips, and specialist craftsmen worked them up from birch, pine, hickory, maple or Norwegian ash, impregnating the wood with pine tar under heat to ensure a good glide and even decorating the upper sides. Both Norwegian and Sámi still have over 300 expressions to describe the interplay between snow and ski.3
In his 1910 book Muitalus sámiid birra (later translated as Turi’s Book of Lappland), Johan Turi depicts herding life in the Jukkasjärvi district as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century; and his prose is as clear as the mountain streams where he herded his deer. Like most Lapps Turi was short, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, black hair, and a face with only a hint of his semi-Asiatic roots. He thought a great deal about the well-being of his people, and had even been to Lulea to lay their grievances before the governor. He wrote in response to what he saw as the imminent destruction of his way of life at the hands of southern settlers, and thought that if incomers knew more about his leaderless people’s lives, they would no longer ‘come to twist everything round till the Lapps are always slandered’. The volume includes bitter memories of ‘the black-clad ones’ (the settlers) who pushed Lapps off the land, as well as thoughtful descriptions of what it is like at night when water gets into the tent and the bedclothes get wet. Turi came from around Kautokeino in the Arctic highlands of Finnmark, the area where men wore four-cornered hats. He was a blue-eyed mountain Lapp – a fell Lapp – and a herder, but in his heart he was a hunter, gliding over frozen bogs and mountain ridges on long slender skis, navigating by the stars. ‘To chase a wolf on skis’, he wrote, ‘you must ski till the blood comes into your mouth.’ Turi considered the wolf the worst enemy of the Lapps; a single animal often killed a dozen reindeer in a night. God, Turi avowed, had created all the animals except the wolf, who was begotten by the devil. He could put to sleep the men who were watching the herd at night simply by looking at them through the darkness with his glowing eyes. Then there was the wolverine, who sprang to the throat of a deer and hung on for miles till the reindeer lost so much blood that he fell down dead; or the eagle who carried a newborn calf if it was left alone for a moment by its mother; or the lynx who crept up to jump at a reindeer who had wandered away from the herd. Turi said he could not understand how his forebears had managed to keep their herds together in the old days, before they had associated themselves with the dog.
Turi tells of the way a mother put a hot stone into the cradle to warm it and sometimes forgot to take it out before returning the infant, with the result that the baby was burned and grew up with a crooked back. In particular he paints a heart-stopping portrait of a sijdda – an association of families – on the move, a caravan of men and reindeer that cannot stop for illness, birth or death. Herders on skis preceded the bulky draft reindeer, which were linked by leather thongs into a group called a string. In the rear came the old folk, on foot, followed by the dogs. Children under four travelled strapped in cribs to the side of a draft beast, while older ones rode on top. The migrating herd were somewhere ahead. Turi describes the precarious business of getting the strings across the river (the herd swam).’ ‘Really’, he says, ‘the Lapps have almost the same nature as reindeer . . . both of them are a little shy, and because of this shyness they have been driven away from everywhere, and so the Lapps must now stop where there are no other folk than Lapps, that is on the naked high fells . . .’
When they were following the migration, Turi said, nursing mothers breastfed their babies while they were strapped into their cradles on the side of a reindeer (I tried this when I was among the herders in 2002 and found it an impossible, Houdini-like manoeuvre). And he told of the way settlers deliberately got Lapps drunk on brännvin (grain liquor), extracted all their livestock as payment, then employed the Lapps as indentured herders. In another section of his book he deals with ‘the Lappish song’, called the yoik. It was a way, as he puts it, of remembering specific people and specific reindeer. Yoiking was a kind of humming either with words or the imitation of animal sounds. In origin spontaneous, like all song, it was often improvised, inspired by an especially fine buck or a moonlit night in the forest. As Turi concluded, if it is really clever, yoiking, ‘is so wonderful to hear that the listener almost has tears in his eyes, but when it is a yoiker who swears and grinds his teeth and threatens to kill reindeer and their owners too, then it is horrible to listen to’.
Axel Munthe, a Swede famous for his bestselling The Story of San Michele, stayed with Turi at the turn of the last century, alighting on Lapland as a personal Shangri-La. He projected his own romantic longings onto the Lapps, perceiving them as antithetical expressions of contemporary society as he observed it in Stockholm and Rome. (He was a doctor for a period to the Italian aristocracy, and remains famous in his native land for his love affair with Crown Princess Victoria, later Queen Victoria, great-grandmother of the present Swedish king.) The beleaguered Lapps already had a troubled relationship with the outside world. But they were still leading a life that would have been at least vaguely recognisable to the writers of the sagas. Munthe describes men returning to camp with lassos swung over their shoulder and women carrying huge birch bowls of milk while a thousand reindeer foraged on the tundra beyond outposts of vigilant dogs. Near what is now the Finnish–Swedish border, Munthe sat in a tent with Turi and his wife Ellekare, hooking slices of reindeer cheese out of the kettle. One by one, wrote Munthe, the dogs ‘had crept in and lain down by the fire. Then we drank each in turn our cup of excellent coffee from the two cups of the household and they [members of the sijdda] all took their short pipes from their leather pouches and began to smoke with great gusto. The men pulled off their reindeer shoes and spread the tufts of carex grass to dry before the fire, Lapps wear no socks. Again I admired the perfect shape of their small feet with their elastic insteps and strong, protruding heels. Some of the women took their sleeping babies from their cradles of birch bark, filled with soft moss and suspended from the tent-poles, to give them the breast. Others explored the heads of their half grown children lying flat in their laps.’ That night Turi was anxious to break camp before the snow became too hard under the birch trees. ‘I can hear by the way the dogs are barking that they are already smelling the wolf,’ he said. Turi and his wife told Munthe that they had three times tried to kill a bear but he had escaped each time, as the Ulda had befriended him. They were trolls who lived under the earth, and quite amiable as long as you left them alone. If you disturbed them, they strewed a powder on the moss which killed reindeer.
When he left Turi, Munthe walked to Forsstugan through the wilderness of marshes, torrents, lakes and forests which was the home of the Lapps. It was a two-day trek, the first leg of Munthe’s journey back to civilisation. His guide was Ristin, the Turis’ sixteen-year-old granddaughter. She was on her way back to the Lapp school at the nearest church-village, and she wore a long white reindeer tunic and red woollen cap. Round her waist she had a broad leather belt, embroidered with blue and yellow thread and studded with buckles and squares of solid silver. Suspended from her belt hung her knife, her tobacco pouch and her mug. Munthe noticed a small axe for cutting wood stuck under the belt. She also wore leggings of soft white reindeer skin fastened to her wide skin breeches and carried on her back her luakos, a birch-bark knapsack. Agile as a goat, according to Munthe, Ristin sprang through the hip-deep water, only occasionally looking from side to side to establish her position. The pair sat down on soft moss for a meal of rye biscuits, fresh butter and cheese, smoked reindeer tongue and water from the brook. Then they lit pipes and listened to the birds. The Lapps say that the bluethroat has a bell in his gullet and that he can sing a hundred different songs.
As they descended, the solitary dwarf birches of the slopes grew into groves of silver birches mixed with aspen and ash and thickets of willow elder, birdcherry and wild currant. Eventually they emerged on a forest carpet of silvery grey moss in the twilight of the northern summer night and slept on their rucksacks until the sun rose in a flame of golden light and they breakfasted on a capful of bilberries. ‘Through the mist of the valley at our feet’, wrote Munthe, ‘a mountain lake opened an eyelid. I approached the lake with uneasy forebodings of another ice cold bath. Luckily I was mistaken. Ristin stopped short before a small eka, a flat-bottomed boat, half hidden under a fallen fir tree. It belonged to nobody, and to everybody, it was used by the Lapps on their rare visits to the nearest church village to exchange their reindeer skins for coffee, sugar and tobacco, the three luxuries of their lives.’ The lake was so transparent that Munthe thought he could see the bottom, and halfway across they met two elk, then on the other side got lost in a fog so impenetrable that they had to hold hands. After struggling for an hour knee-deep in icy water, Ristin said they would have to wait out the fog – rog – which might take a day, depending on the wind. They sat miserably on their packs for several hours, the rog sticking to their skin. Munthe tried to light his pipe, but water had filled his pockets, inundating the matches. ‘While I was still staring dejectedly at my soaked matchbox,’ he said, ‘Ristin had already struck fire with her tinder box and lit her pipe.’ Another defeat for civilisation. At journey’s end an old Swedish couple offered them hospitality while declaring candidly, in the presence of Ristin, that Lapps were superstitious and ignorant: they were not even Christians, nobody knew where they came from and they spoke a language unlike any other tongue. The old pair failed to grasp that they were hooked on superstition themselves. The man, Lars Anders, told Munthe that the trolls who used to live in a nearby mountain with hundreds of dwarves had vanished when the king had begun to blast the rocks for iron ore and started building a railway. The goblin in the cow stable, on the other hand, was doing well. When Munthe announced his departure, Anders said it was ‘an easy and comfortable journey’ to the railhead at that time of year, and there was nothing to fear: an eight-hour ride through the forest to Rukne, three hours downstream in a boat, six hours on foot across the mountain to the church-village, two hours across the lake to Losso Jarvi, and from there an eight-hour drive to the new railway station, where in fact no passenger trains ran as yet but the engineer would be sure to let Munthe stand on the locomotive for 200 miles until he could catch a goods train.
A committed misanthropist and cultural conservative, Munthe empathised with the Lapps’ lack of engagement with the modern world. His attitude had resonance as I struggled, in the Arctic, both to reject the noble savage idealisation of native peoples and also to refrain from judging by appearances when someone was drunk, stoned, depressed or all three. It was extraordinary to realise that even at the beginning of the twentieth century outsiders could imbue the inhabitants of the Arctic Circle with prelapsarian innocence (or was that pre-Lappsarian?). Munthe’s Lapps were the Hyperboreans of Greek myth: a race who inhabited a fertile land of perpetual sunshine in the northernmost region of the earth. According to the ancients, they lived to be 1,000 yet never grew old, and they did not know the meaning of sickness, work, or war. Hyperboreans were happy all the time (‘Never the muse is absent from their ways,’ Pindar wrote), and they enjoyed continuous festivals of song and dance (‘And everywhere maiden choruses whirling’). As for Munthe, he was a figure of uncompromising idealism and had already clashed, in his youthful writings, with the prevailing ideology and aesthetics. He lived his whole life in a no-man’s-land between fact and fiction, a fabricator par excellence, though his portrait of the Lapps rings true, whether or not he ever forded a stream with Ristin. His contemporary Norman Douglas, the improper hedonist who redefined the travel book for a new era, called him a portentous fake; it didn’t quite take one to know one, but similarity helped. Munthe grew more irritable with age – who doesn’t? – and vainer, especially when, well into his seventies, The Story of San Michele (written in English) emerged as an international bestseller, and there was talk of the Nobel Prize. He knew the true value of social success – nothing – but still wanted it; it makes him almost likeable. San Michele reflects both the romantic revival and the world weariness of the twenties. The author, like his contemporary Nansen and the other architects of the League of Nations, pursues a misty vision of a better world. But Scott Fitzgerald got the measure of them all, as he always did. ‘So we beat on,’ asserts Nick in the last line of The Great Gatsby, ‘boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
Munthe’s idea of a 1920s idyll shattered when Ristin and her generation faced fresh horror: the Second World War. This was a shared past that brought the Sámi close. As a result of the triangulation of history that squashed Finland, Norway and the Soviet Union together in one Lappish corner, for settler and Sámi alike the war years were tumultuous by the standards of any displaced peoples. Many died; hundreds of thousands were evacuated and returned to find they had no home left. Survivors did not even have the (admittedly slim) moral comfort of participating in the great battle of good against evil, as at one point the embattled Finns changed sides. Sámi fought Sámi, and then were told to stop, and to start attacking other Sámi, previously allies. Before that turnabout, more than 25,000 Finns had perished in the Russo–Finnish Winter War of 1939–40. Stalin sent the Red Army in over the whole frontier, a 900 km line from the Baltic to the Arctic Ocean. The campaign was a disaster for the freshly purged Soviet army. The newly installed high command was incompetent, junior officers revealed a fatal lack of spirit and the country with the longest Arctic coast in the world despatched men to winter war in their usual brown uniform and without skis or adequate tents. Soldiers regularly froze to death in the frosted silence of the forest. The highly adapted Finns, on the other hand, wore white ski apparel and lived in specialised bell tents which they pitched round a portable wood stove, using the flue as the central pole. Their flying columns that worked through the maze of lakes and waterways were so effective that Russians called them belaya smert, the white death. Finnish troops even enjoyed shallow sauna dugouts near the front. In the negotiated peace that ended the Winter War the Russo–Finnish border moved east as Stalin had wanted, but the debacle was a pyrrhic victory after 250,000 Red Army men perished.
The following year, German and Austrian armies and their Finnish allies invaded north-west Russia. Their primary aim was to block the Allied supply route through Murmansk and Arkhangel; they also wanted to gain control of the nickel mine at Nikel, formerly Kolosjoki, 20 kilometres south of Kirkenes. The troops had to cross Lapland. At that time a single decent road connected north Finland with its south: it went, like an arrow’s trajectory, from Kemi at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia through Rovaniemi and Ivalo to Pechenga and Kirkenes, for the most part across a wilderness of forest and fells. The only other roads were the narrow coastal S-bends that leave the shores of the fjords to traverse mountain passes. The Germans, who could not get any tanks in, needed ten horses to transport one artillery gun. In desperation they built a field railway, but it subsided when the ground thawed. Their maps were so inadequate that a staff officer corrected top-secret information provided by High Command by referring to his 1912 Baedeker. A soldier holed up in an artillery battery defending the coast around Varangerfjord noted in his diary that in the whole of 1943, he had seen the sun seven times. In addition, the retreating Soviets (who did have tanks) set the forests on fire. The pines burned for weeks. As chief of staff Herman Hölter later wrote in his memoirs, ‘Arctic warfare is altogether different from that learned in military academies.’ Wehrmacht divisions took control of the Nikel nickel mine; by 1944 it was the German armaments industry’s only remaining source of the mineral, and almost every time a supply convoy evaded enemy fire both to get in to Kirkenes and get out again, its ships returned to Germany engorged with nickel. The port was among the most crucial polar stations. The Germans posted 100,000 men in frigid barracks close to the Arctic Ocean, and the Soviets raided so relentlessly that hapless Kirkenes became, after Malta, the second most bombed place in the whole war.
Generaloberst Lothar Rendulic assumed control of German forces in Lapland in June 1944, the month the Allies landed in Normandy. On 2 September the Helsinki government announced that diplomatic relations with Germany would cease the next day; President Mannerheim had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union, agreeing, by the terms of the surrender, that Finland would help the Red Army drive its former allies from Scandinavian soil. Rendulic had to get everyone out. The entire civilian population of Finnish Lapland had to get out too – 170,500 of them. And soon the first snow fell.
Retreating German troops destroyed 90 per cent of the buildings in Rovaniemi, 88 per cent of those in Inari and 95 per cent in Savukoski. They burned down 125 Finnish schools. They blew up the nickel mine. One source states that at the end of the war, twenty-four out of 752 bridges in north Finland remained intact. Evacuees who returned throughout the summer and autumn of 1945 found that the ruins of their villages had been systematically mined. A tuberculosis epidemic was probably the result of insanitary domestic conditions during the period of reconstruction. At the beginning, some people lived in holes in the ground. Norwegian Lapland endured the same treatment. While battling snow, exposed rivers and enemy attack to get his demoralised divisions out of Finland, Rendulic received a personal order from Hitler to destroy everything in north Norway too and evacuate the civil population – about 75,000 people – to Tromsø. Despite airdropped propaganda threatening ‘death in the Arctic winter without house or food’, as many as 25,000 men and women in eastern Finnmark went into hiding rather than evacuate. ‘It must be made clear to the troops carrying out [the command]’, Hitler’s order stipulated, ‘that in a few months time the Norwegians will be thankful for having been saved from Bolshevism.’ Norwegians had not been praying to keep Reds out; they hated the German occupiers too much. The stories of what the Resistance achieved in Norway rank among the most Homeric of the war. The name that persistently returned as I kicked up the deep peacetime snows of Finnmark was Jan Baalsrud. Antarctic adventurers like to say that if they had to choose a man to get them out of a polar fix, it would be Shackleton. I would nominate Baalsrud as my man in the north.
A member of a Norwegian Resistance commando unit based in the Shetlands, Baalsrud sailed back to his Nazi-occupied country in 1943 in a disguised fishing vessel armed with seven mounted machine-guns. German forces installed on the thinly populated north Norwegian coast had been attacking Allied convoys to devastating effect. Baalsrud’s twelve-strong party planned to land on one of the small islands screening the Norwegian mainland and sabotage the crucial German airbase at Bardufoss, south of Tromsø, thereby facilitating safer passage for the convoys. Ice and snow cover the land there, foul weather batters it and unsurveyed mountains cut it off from civilisation. Even before the group made landfall, a frightened shopkeeper on the remote shore of Toftefjord on one of the outermost islands betrayed them. (Perhaps he wanted the case of brandy with which the Germans rewarded him.) Enemy soldiers shot one of the Resistance men and tortured ten others to death. Four Norwegian civilians suspected of complicity died later in concentration camps. So the brandy had cost fifteen lives.
Baalsrud alone escaped. He was a twenty-six-year-old apprentice instrument maker from Oslo. Now he was on the run. Furuflaten to Lyngseidet to Mandal, fjord after fjord, plateau after plateau, for ten weeks, at one stage buried under snow for either four or five days straight, until the final spurt, lashed to a Sámi sledge, into neutral Sweden, which he first saw through four hundred galloping reindeer legs. The Germans had installed a tyranny of fear, even up in the remotest villages. Baalsrud’s flight owed everything to the courage of Norwegians who spirited him to safety, handing him on like the baton in a relay. One rowed him across a sound at night even as German searchlights scissored the water. Of the men who hauled him on a sledge up a Lyngenfjord alp after his feet had turned gangrenous, Baalsrud said, ‘All four of them had the unending dogged patience which is typical of Arctic people.’ In addition to their native qualities, people loathed Germans with a ferocity that inhabitants of unoccupied lands cannot share. Those men and women were tested almost to the limit in the last months of 1944. Baalsrud, meanwhile, although the recipient of generous assistance, was alone almost all the time, often near starvation, outside in falling snow, frostbitten and snow-blind. Obliged to chop off his toes with a penknife, he laid the digits on a high ledge so he didn’t have to look at them. His mother had died when he was sixteen, and as he lay mummified in drift and close to death, he said later that he thought of the younger sister he had himself mothered, left now to grow up without him. He had been active since the start of the war, and had not seen her for three years. But he made it to safety, and served his country again. When I first heard this story, I understood why it was a Norwegian who had beaten Scott to the South Pole.
At the end of the conflict, Finland was obliged to cede its mineral-rich territory in the north-east to the USSR, a disaster for the economy of Finnish Lapland as it meant the loss of its only ocean coast. The Sámi there were resettled in Finland around Sevettijärvi and Nellim. From the Lake Inari basin their new land rises gradually north to the tundra plateau, then drops to the sea coast at Varangerfjord and an embayment of the Barents Sea. Those people were Skolt Sámi, the only group in the world named after a skin disease (the condition, to which these particular Sámi were susceptible, has been eradicated). It was Skolt misfortune to live on one of the most geopolitically precipitous borders in the world – the one dividing east and west, Finland and Russia. Sometimes called Petsamo Skolt after the river which flows through their land, they were first evacuated during the Winter War of 1939, and when they subsequently returned it was only to be evacuated again five years later. Resettlement brought them into an undignified relationship of dependency with the Finnish government. Initially, most people ignored them. But in the ‘enlightened’ cultural climate of the 1970s, charitable organisations and Helsinki well-wishers took an interest in their northern confrères, deluging the bemused Skolt with second-hand clothes and malfunctioning sewing machines. But subsistence yielded to cash and the journey from autonomy to dependency took its course. Two decades after the Skolt resettlement, petrol-powered washing machines appeared on the shores of Lake Inari. Skills have been lost, some for ever, and the complexity of herding has been vastly simplified with the reduction of herding families and the introduction of technology. Technological innovation is a mighty thing but it renders herding economically unworkable: to raise the capital required to service and upgrade a snowmobile, one would be obliged to slaughter an illegal quantity of reindeer. The same applies to outboard motors and fish. No wonder most Sámi have fled to the industrial heartlands of the south. As in Russia, Canada, Alaska and Greenland, polar conditions were not conducive to interventionism in Scandinavia. In that fragile region, transhumance was more productive and sustainable than homesteading, yet the latter triumphed, along with the industrialisation of the mines. Of a pan-Sámi population of about 70,000, none remain nomadic; many no longer live on their ancestral land; few depend economically on herding. Trans-national agreements allow herders to cross borders unmolested, but the lack of ‘nationhood’ in the modern, political sense has always worked against the Sámi people. As a Lapp recently told the writer Roger Took, ‘Sámi don’t think about national borders as most people do . . . from the middle ages we Sámi had to submit to Danes, Swedes, Norwegians and Russians. We paid tribute and taxes to whoever claimed to have been granted authority over us . . . but we’re still one nation, although we speak different dialects, and I like to think we can all still look to one another in rough times.’4
In 2007, to celebrate the centenary of the Turi–Munthe journey, Axel’s grandson Adam Munthe made a 1,500-kilometre dog-sledge journey through Finnmark from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic. While the team found much to celebrate, they also learned how government intervention and regulation had ratcheted up the economic challenges of herding, as had in-fighting among Sámi themselves, and the warming climate. ‘Their ancestors had to adapt to climatic variations,’ Munthe told me, ‘and Sámi have to meet today’s challenges, somehow.’ He agreed that the dismissive attitude expressed by Lars Anders in 1907 had barely improved with the passage of time. ‘Sámi are not trusted still, like gypsies,’ he said sadly. It was in the DNA: hatred of the other. The year after my visit to the herders, I attended a meeting with Finnish scientists at the National Meteorological Institute in Helsinki. My hosts told me plainly there were too many reindeer in north Finland, that overgrazing was wrecking the land, and that unlike in Sweden, many of those practising reindeer husbandry were not Sámi, thereby implying that economic privileges granted to the remaining herders on account of their minority status were unfair. Adam Munthe spoke of ‘deep distrust’. The meteorologists told me that Finns drink more as the latitude rises. ‘Up there,’ they said, pointing to the ceiling, ‘they run on ethanol.’ Discounting the Sámi, the meteorologists were the first sober Finns I had ever met. In the evening they generously took me out to dinner at a famous Sámi restaurant in Helsinki, a theme-park approximation of how Finns would like their Lapps to be.
In November 2002 I was standing on the tundra trying to lasso a reindeer. ‘No good!’ cried the man holding the walkie-talkie. ‘Reindeer laughs!’ Three thousand deer were on the loose, and in an hour I hadn’t caught one, not even a calf. I picked up the rope at my feet and walked off, towing little Reg in his sledge. My guide in Sápmi was thirty-one-year-old Lennart Pittja, whose family have herded reindeer on their Unna Cerus community land for many generations. Pittja grew up in Sörkaitum near Gällivare in the heart of Norrbotten, Sweden’s most remote province. His mother was not Sámi, which explained his height (five feet eleven) and his sandy hair; he looked like an archetypal Viking. ‘Officially’, he explained as we sat in a stockade slurping reindeer broth, ‘I am half Sámi, but I believe you are either Sámi or not.’ He had bridled when I asked how many reindeer his family owned. ‘Some,’ he replied, explaining later that the question is like asking how much a person earns. (He had a good ear for a snappy phrase. ‘Our bank’, he added to this last exchange, ‘is on four legs and has antlers.’) Pittja had many qualities and the chief among them was remorseless enthusiasm. When he saw me battling to breastfeed at -10 he launched into a story about a friend who suckled her baby outside in winter by inserting tin foil in her bra to reflect heat back onto her bosom. As he was plainly about to hurry off in search of foil, I steered him back onto the subject of reindeer economics. Inserting kitchen equipment down my shirt was a step too far.5
Pittja had a profound sense of connection with his community land, and a missionary zeal to preserve the traditions of his people. His great-grandparents were among the last flyt Sámi (nomads); they had settled in Sörkaitum in the forties. His father and brother were still herding. After bringing the deer down from the mountain pastures at the onset of winter, they must check every animal each day, no joke at -38. As for the animals: the mortality rate among calves is above 50 per cent in an average winter. In a bad one, they can all die. At that time, twelve autumns in a row had been unseasonably warm, a disaster for reindeer, as if snow melts in autumn and freezes in winter an ice bark prevents them from sniffing out lichen. Elsewhere the new and previously unknown phenomenon of winter rain had dangerously thinned ice on migration pathways. The rapidity of climate change had already led to a decline in the reindeer population. ‘You wonder’, said Pittja, ‘if we can hold on.’
Pittja talked of modest tax breaks for indigenous businesses, but they failed to add up to much, while health and safety laws stymied the small-scale herder. A Sámi man no longer castrated his deer by biting off the balls, like his grandfather did; but he can still do the job himself with a pair of special pincers. The government, on the other hand, insists on the engagement of an expensive specialist veterinary surgeon. Industry, meanwhile, has taken up the slack. The economy around Gällivare, my point of entry into Lapland, is based on the Malmberget iron-ore and open-cast copper mines. One of the largest iron ore deposits in the world lies in Kiruna fifty miles to the north. Swedish Lapland is also a significant source of hydroelectric power. The Suorva Dam on the Lule an hour upriver from Gällivare has created the biggest water reservoir in Europe. When the dam was built, Pittja’s grandfather had to move house four times as the water level rose (it went up 30 metres in total). Each time, his house had to be burned down. Grandpa watched the land on which he had grown up disappear underwater as the five lakes between Suorva and Ritsem turned into one. Valleys where reindeer calved were flooded, forcing cows to give birth at a colder elevation. As my own Arctic journey unfolded, what had appeared to be a series of individual histories had merged into a universal saga. Before my 2002 visit, the Soviet compulsion to extract minerals struck me as an example of that nation’s generally brutish behaviour, like Chernobyl. When I went to the Arctic I saw that we were all at it.
Unlike its Norwegian counterpart, Stockholm will not recognise Sámi as indigenous people by ratifying UN International Labour Organisation Convention 169. Operations that compete with reindeer herding for land are legally obliged to give consideration to the interests of reindeer husbandry, but provisions work poorly in practice. Pittja reeled off case after case in which a herder had effectively been forced to move. ‘Look,’ he explained, the enthusiastic voice for once exposing a weary undertow. ‘We don’t consider that we own the land. We just look after it for future generations. But we have to claim ownership now in order to participate in the system. The trouble is – one of the many troubles – other people show papers to prove ownership, but we don’t have documents. Ours is an oral culture – our books are flesh and blood.’ Nobody minds too much what Sámi do in the mountains, because Swedes don’t use that land. The pressure is on winter grazing in developed areas. When Sámi in Härjedalen lost a court case in which they were claiming rights to their traditional winter grazing, other landowners took the opportunity to get Sámi reindeer off their land ‘once and for all’. A Sámi parliament of sorts does exist in Sweden, based in Kiruna, the most northerly town, but it has no constitutional status and, according to Pittja, is little more than an advisory service. Down in far-off Stockholm, the government has always shrunk from anything approaching a concession to indigenous land rights. Norway, with a larger Sámi population, has a better record; its own all-wood parliament building is in Karasjok on the Finnmarksvidda.6 Meanwhile efforts to establish pan-Sámi cultural institutions have found expression in a flag and a football team. When it came to native peoples, even the most humane and advanced welfare states couldn’t get it right. All round the Arctic, I had seen every dominant culture grappling with a legacy of miscarried cultural assimilation and racial marginalisation.
Behind his home, the industrious Pittja had made a sturdy tent-house from skins and peat. If you overlooked the aluminium poles, it was a perfect model of the traditional lávvu. When Reggie and I arrived for the evening, a pair of draft reindeer were scooping snow outside with their front hooves, burying their noses into the mushy ground beneath and whistling softly as they exhaled. Constellations of white-faced stars hung low, the abutting spruce grove a cavern of moonlight and shadows. Inside, we lounged on pelts as Pittja’s herding assistant, Anders, rolled out flatbread and the fire hissed to life, catching first on resin in the birch bark then crackling over pine and juniper. A small hole in the apex of the lávvu drew off aromatic smoke. We lay snug in our poled fortress. Pittja had cooked up a máles, the Sámi meal prepared at slaughter time, and it bubbled with ominously pungent eructations in a cauldron lashed to a lateral rod between tent poles. A máles consists of almost every part of a reindeer boiled in the same pot: liver, tongue, bone and steak with its hump of canary-yellow fat. ‘Even the hooves are boiled!’ Pittja announced, handing me a green birch skewer with which to poke marrow from bone. I could see the flickering ion-stream of the Northern Lights through the roof opening. Anders offered a chunk of cooked reindeer fat on a plate. ‘For the baby,’ he said. ‘He’s not weaned yet,’ I said. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s what we wean them with.’
We ate the dish with lingonberry relish, black pudding and a patty made with blood and oatmeal. Breastfeeding makes one hungry enough for anything, except perhaps boiled hoof, though fortunately one was not called to put that to the test. Reggie didn’t care much for the smoke, however, and I didn’t either, as I couldn’t see what I was eating, though this had its advantages. Pittja, ladling vigorously, dealt with the problem by sporting a Davy lamp on his forehead. After the meal we drank coffee brewed on the fire in a tin pot. I watched an approaching milk jug with trepidation – reindeer milk is so high in fat that it practically curdles into cheese in your mouth – but it was cow’s milk, bought from a shop. It was hard not to feel relieved. But then the other two lobbed cubes of cheese into their coffee.
The day after the herding, we started up Route 45, ‘the Route 66 of Sweden’, in Pittja’s four-wheel-drive Nissan. Through a break in the rim of a mountain bowl the Lule River heads west into the heartlands of Laponia, 9,400 km2 of wilderness north of the Arctic Circle from Jokkmokk to the Norwegian border and beyond. The road was built for the hydroelectric plant; before that, Sámi travelled on the Lule. The sky was full of lenticular stratocumulus, and the sun cast the shadows of slender birch trees over the lakes.
Two hours in, I hoisted Reggie into his sling and with Pittja in the lead we hiked eastwards, following lynx tracks across wetlands where whooper swans nested in the grass of the eskers. When Pittja stopped to examine snow with foot and hand, like the herder he was, I heard again the crisp Arctic silence – the heaped-up orchestra of high latitudes. In the forest a flock of bramblings rustled up from the cotton grass. They were preparing to migrate, fat as the reindeer. It was -15 and the tips of our noses had turned cerise.7 Reg slumbered deep within the folds of my multitudinous layers. (I only wished I hadn’t been up half the night feeding him; but what a wickedly ungrateful thought that was.) Suddenly, we heard the click-click of walking reindeer. A special bone on the hind feet clicks so they can hear one another in darkness and mist. Today 50,000 reindeer live in the park and twenty of them were looking for angelica not far from where we stood. Pittja got out his binoculars to see if he could identify animals from his own herd. Each deer is labelled with notches cut into the ears. The markings on the left ear record the family, those on the right ear the individual within the family (babies receive a quota of reindeer at their baptism). A directory records the marks, like a telephone book. But a herder like Pittja knows hundreds of different markings on sight.
Emerging from the conifers, we entered a belt of mountain birch, the last cover before the alpine slopes. ‘Look,’ said Pittja, poking the forest floor with a stick. ‘See these blackened stones? They were the hearth of a goahte, a herders’ camp. People returned to the same sites year after year. Somewhere round here there will be a hunting pit where they snared moose.’ Seasonal migration routes have crossed Laponia since the land rose up from the ice, and traces of human habitation date back 8,000 years. We stopped to picnic on the western shore of Lake Satis, among pink bulbils of netted willow that peeped cautiously from the lime-rich soil. Along the shore, ice manacled the lower spruce branches. Pittja produced a hunk of smoked reindeer and began stripping off pieces with a pocket knife. As he and I drank coffee from our wooden bowls, I felt ice crystals softening in my nostrils. Baby breath pearled my undershirt. It was a good place to rest. When we finally brushed ourselves down, the sun had already vanished and the slopes of the blue mountain glittered with patches of snow. Pittja carried a GPS unit, but I never saw him use it. ‘We know our land,’ he said as we hiked back to the Nissan. He lived and worked with a beguiling combination of technology and tradition. As we walked, he fished out a mobile phone and began punching out a number. ‘I am ringing the car,’ he said. A diesel-burning heater with controls on the dash could be operated remotely by telephone. Pittja had been yakking all day. ‘No need for talking here,’ he said quietly as we reached the Nissan and looked over at the ice on the birch branches, the spangled glint of the lake and the miles of rounded mountains beyond. ‘It speaks for itself.’
And it did.
1 The word Sápmi occurs in all Sámi dialects and in fact refers to Sámi territory; to one Sámi; to all Sámi; and to the Sámi language.
2 In the reindeer world, the line between wild and domestic is blurred; the creatures I saw referred to as domesticated looked anything but, and they certainly weren’t prepared to footle around in the presence of humanity for a moment longer than necessary.
3 The Sámi language is in fact three separate and highly inflected Finno-Ugric tongues, each split into dialects, many barely mutually intelligible. About a third of modern Sámi speak a version of it. Strong linguistic similarities between Finnish and Sámi bear witness to centuries of close contact. The word ‘tundra’ has its origins in Kildin Sámi, entering the English language via Russian.
4 Kirsti Paltto, one of the best known Sámi authors, wrote a short story about what it was like being both Finnish and Sámi. In it, the protagonist grows two heads. ‘The Two Headed Woman’, according to the author, is ‘A story about a woman’s life between two cultures.’ Who said the subtle image was the best?
5 Though improvisation was the key. On the road in small-town America some years earlier with my elder son, then a baby, I went down to reception at our motel to ask if they by chance had a crib (cot). They did not, but kindly set about trying to find something that might do. Half an hour went by, and the receptionist knocked on my door. When I opened it, she wheeled in a shopping trolley.
6 Sometimes things go backwards. In an article in northern Norway’s largest-circulation newspaper, Nordlys, Sámi language professor and former president of the Norwegian Sameting (Sámi parliament) Ole Henrik Magga wrote that he was more optimistic about the possibilities of working Sámi interests into administrative and other bodies twelve years ago than he is today. Magga cited doubts about ‘whether the power structure in place is willing to prepare a permanent spot in the country’s political and administrative system for Sámi culture’.
7 Cold noses notwithstanding, the deceptions of latitude are most apparent in the Scandinavian north. The topmost points of Finland (Nuorgam at 70º) and Norway (Nordkapp at 71º) are further north than much of Arctic Canada and almost all of Arctic Alaska, yet enjoy a more temperate climate and lighter ice cover as a result of moderating southerly air currents associated with the Gulf Stream. The coasts have a long ice-free period and snow melts everywhere in summer except on high mountains. Inland, on the Norwegian Finnmarksvidda and in Swedish and Finnish Lapland, the climate is continental, with warmer summers than along the coast, but considerably colder winters.
