Sámi Religion

The noaidi was the specialist of Sami religion, and the instrument of the office was the frame drum: an oval or bowl-shaped wooden frame, a reindeer-hide membrane, and a painted design in alder bark red laid out as a map of the cosmos, with gods, the sun, dwellings, reindeer, and the roads to the land of the dead. A marker was set on the skin and the drum struck; where the marker travelled answered the question. The same drum, beaten harder and with joik, carried the noaidi into trance, in which a helping spirit in animal form went out to look for a lost soul, to find game, or to argue with the powers holding a sick person.

That much is reasonably secure. Beyond it the evidence is awkward, because almost everything written about the drums was written by the men suppressing them, and the surviving objects are few. Roughly seventy to eighty drums are known to exist worldwide, out of a great many more that were taken.

Joik, the Sami vocal form, was bound up with all of this and outlived it. A joik is generally described as being of its subject rather than about it: a person, an animal, a place, evoked rather than narrated. Missionaries treated it as devil-song and it was still being punished in schools within living memory. It is now the most publicly visible element of Sami tradition, and the least restricted.

The drum is not a museum object to Sami people today. Its confiscation is remembered as theft, and the drums held in Nordic and German collections are the subject of active repatriation claims rather than of antiquarian interest.

Sami religion was not uniform across Sapmi, which stretches from central Norway and Sweden through Finland into the Kola peninsula, and the names of the powers differ by region and by the language of the recorder. A layered scheme is usual: sky and creator figures above, thunder, sun and fertility powers between, the dead below. Horagalles, the thunder god, appears widely; Beaivi is the sun; Maderakka and her daughters attend birth and children; Jabmeakka governs the land of the dead. Some of these names show contact with Norse religion, and how much is borrowed and how much is old Finno-Ugric material is disputed.

Offering was made at a sieidi, a stone, rock formation, spring or tree that was not itself a god but a place where the relationship was transacted. Sieidi received reindeer antlers, bones, fish, fat, coins. Many are still known, still visited, and still receive offerings, which is one reason their locations are not always published.

The bear hunt is the best documented ritual complex, recorded in detail across Sami and neighbouring Finnic groups. The bear was addressed with indirect language, killed under strict procedure, eaten at a communal feast, and its bones buried in anatomical order so that it could return. The point was not honouring a symbol but keeping an agreement with an animal understood to be aware of how it was treated.

Reindeer herding shaped the annual round for many Sami, and the sacred year followed the herd, the sun, and the fishing rather than a fixed calendar. That is one reason the tradition proved hard for missionaries to locate and stamp out: much of it had no building and no fixed date.

The Nordic states did not merely convert the Sami; they prosecuted them. Sweden tried Sami practitioners under witchcraft law, and in 1693 the noaidi Lars Nilsson was burned at Arjeplog together with his drum and his images, after being seen drumming in grief for a drowned grandson. In Denmark-Norway, Anders Poulsen was tried at Vadso in 1692 and killed before sentence; his drum went into a Copenhagen collection and stayed there for three centuries.

The organised Norwegian mission followed under Thomas von Westen, who from 1716 travelled the north, trained missionaries in the Sami language, and personally collected well over a hundred drums. Confiscated drums were burned or shipped to southern museums. In Sweden the Church built the market-and-church towns that reorganised the Sami year around Christian obligation.

Suppression did not end with the mission era. From the later nineteenth century Norway pursued fornorsking, Norwegianisation, and Sweden and Finland pursued comparable policies: boarding schools, prohibition on the language, land law favouring settlers. The Kautokeino rising of 1852, in which Sami acting out of a Laestadian revival killed a merchant and a sheriff, is usually read now as a response to that pressure rather than as fanaticism, and Laestadianism itself, a severe Lutheran movement, remains strong in Sami communities and is genuinely theirs.

Recovery is recent and political as much as religious. Sami parliaments were established in Finland in 1973, Norway in 1989 and Sweden in 1993. The Church of Sweden apologised formally in 2021, a Norwegian truth and reconciliation commission reported in June 2023, and Denmark transferred ownership of the Poulsen drum to a Sami museum in 2022. New drums, offerings at sieidi and open ceremony now exist alongside a largely Lutheran Sami population, and the reconstruction is honest about being reconstruction: the chain of trained noaidi was broken, and what is being rebuilt comes from written sources, surviving custom and deliberate choice.