Sámi Drum

The face of a Sámi drum is covered in figures painted on the hide in a red dye made from alder bark, and the arrangement is not decorative. Northern drums, made on a frame, and southern drums, made from a hollowed burl of birch, organise the field differently, but in both the figures constitute a picture of the world the drum was used to consult: people, dwellings, herds of reindeer, wild animals, boats, churches, and the beings of Sámi cosmology in their places. Drums differ from one another in detail because they were made by and for individuals, so the corpus is a set of related personal statements rather than copies of a standard.

The drum was consulted by moving a marker over that field. A ring, a piece of bone or a bunch of brass rings was laid on the membrane and the drum was struck with a hammer of reindeer antler until the marker travelled, and where it came to rest, in relation to the figures, was read as the answer. The drum was also the instrument of the noaidi, the specialist who dealt with the beings of the other world on behalf of a community. Both uses are recorded, and the second is described almost entirely by outsiders who regarded it as diabolical, which is a serious limitation on the record.

Almost everything known in detail about the drums comes from the campaign to destroy them. Lutheran missionaries working in northern Norway and Sweden in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identified the drum as the central instrument of Sámi religion and set out to eliminate it. Drums were surrendered or seized, owners were prosecuted, and in the worst cases the penalty was death. Some drums were burned. Others were kept as curiosities or as evidence and travelled south into royal and university collections, which is why they exist at all. The missionary manuscripts that describe how the drums were read are simultaneously the best source and a hostile one, written to justify what was being done.

Roughly seventy drums survive, and the overwhelming majority are held by museums outside Sámi communities, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Leipzig, Rome and elsewhere. Returns have begun, with drums moving from national collections back to Sámi museums, and the process is unfinished and negotiated case by case. This is a living matter, not a closed historical one. Sámi people today hold a range of positions on the drums, from religious to cultural to political, and no single one of them can be reported as the Sámi view. Nothing in this entry sets out how a drum was used in practice, because that is not the atlas's to reconstruct and the surviving instructions were written by the people confiscating them.