Crisis rituals: the ritual specialists and their instruments

had visited the grandfather in the world of the departed and secured an assurance from him that he would stop longing so intensely for the grandmother if he was offered a reindeer sacrifice as a feast.

At other times, the naejtie was asked to call down rain, to secure good luck in hunting or to predict the future by divination. As his most important aid in the latter function, he used a drum (gzevrze) with the drumhead embellished with figures painted in red alder sap. Of these ritual drums, just over seventy are preserved, forty of which are South Sami. One reason why such a disproportionate number of South Sami drums have survived is that among the South Sami it was not only the naejtie who had a drum, but nearly every male head of a family, whereas in the other regions it was an instrument exclusively reserved for the ritual specialists. The majority of the drums were taken from their owners by force and burned during the most intense periods of religious confrontation, especially during the 1680s, 1690s and 1720s, but some were transferred to collections of antiquities in Copenhagen and Stockholm and from there a few entered private collections and museums in other European countries. Of course, the drum figures are impossible to interpret without explanations, but since the figures on two of them were explained by their owners and on five others by other Sami, at least we have a starting point for our interpretive work. Even so, many problems remain regarding the interpretation of the drum figures, among other things because it is impossible to know anything about the ideas that a seventeenth-century maker and owner of a drum associated with each of the figures. For instance, does a figure that looks in some way like a boat symbolize a boat of some kind, something associated with a boat, or something else?