I think the following few postcards are a nice way of saying Happy Easter!
Do note that virtually no-one knows much about them; there’s now a new two-vol. History of the Sámi People (orig. Samens Historie, see here for part 1 until 1750 and here for part 2 from 1750-2010). My colleagues are currently working on getting it published in an English translation. There’s also a quite interesting entry on Wikipedia.
Without much further ado, here we go.
Happy Easter, lest I forget.
The wiki article is not too shabby, but it has this part wrong, or misleading:
"... the Sámi primarily lived in the inland of northern Fennoscandia, while Scandinavians lived in southern Scandinavia and gradually colonised the Norwegian coast..."
There are rock carvings and rock paintings made in Härjedalen (just to name one place) made by the ancient hunter-gatherers who came there when the lower fjells in Dalarna and Härjedalen was a coastal archipelago while the ice was retreating. Settlement of areas in lower fjell-areas in Sweden predate sámi by millennia.
However, I was happy to see an old myth mentioned correctly:
"Sámi settlement of Scandinavia does not predate Norse/Scandinavian settlement of Scandinavia, as sometimes popularly assumed."
Many swedes, sámi or not, believe that the sámi are the indigenous people of Scandinavia, which isn't true. The word "lapp" also means "patch" and an older hypothesis was confusion between lappi/lappa and the word for patch having been used to refer to sámi wearing clothes made of patches of animal skins in olden days (no historical basis that I know of, and it seems to neat).
If you want to read historical sources on the sámi, check out Heimskringla.no where the old documents are collected in their respective languages:
This is from the swedish section on sámi:
https://www.heimskringla.no/wiki/Tekster_p%C3%A5_svensk
Scroll down to "Samisk och finsk mytologi och religion" to find links to texts dating back fifteenhundreds:
https://www.heimskringla.no/wiki/Beskrifning_%C3%B6fver_Lappland
The above is a short text by the portuguese knight Damianus à Goes from 1540, where he describes Lappland and the sámi and speculates about the origin of the name Lappland. It's been transcribed to modern swedish. Quite fun:
"De känna så mäktiga besvärjelser, att de, många andra underliga ting att förtiga, kunna bringa fartyg att stannar midt i deras lopp, så att de starkaste vindar ej kunna rubba dem ur stället. Enda botemedlet mot slik illfundighet är att bestryka skeppens däck och roddarbänkar med jungfrurs träck, för hvilket dessa onda andar, efter hvad jag erfarit af befolkningen, af naturen hafva afsky."
He claims the sámi can cast powerful spells, capable of stopping s ship from moving until the deck of it is smeared with fresh feces from a virgin. . .
Glad Påsk!
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