Source material and source criticism
How do we know anything at all about how the Sami interacted with their culturally postulated invisible beings during pre-Christian times? As a matter of fact, there are several types of sources at hand, some of them primary in the sense that they were produced by persons living within the cosmos of the indigenous world-view, others secondary and written by outsiders.
As with some of the other traditions discussed in this book, the majority of the written sources were created during the period of religious confrontation with Christianity and written by representatives of the new religion, the same people whose mission it was to control the indigenous religious traditions. The primary sources, on the other hand, are not verbal, but consist exclusively of preserved archaeological artifacts from indigenous religious contexts, like ritual drums and sacrificial sites in the Sami case.Compared to the other pre-Christian religions of Europe, the main written sources for Sami religion are comparatively late. In fact, we know very little about the Sami rituals and narratives that would reflect their pre-Christian world-view prior to the intense period of missionary work that started during the sixteenth century among the eastern Sami of Russia and the second half of the seventeenth century among the western Sami. The great bulk of the written sources describing the religious customs of the western Sami of Norway, Sweden and Finland was amassed as late as the eight decades between 1670 and 1750, and those containing information about the eastern Sami are of even later date and hence present other source-critical and methodological problems than those documenting the western Sami. Given this situation, what I will discuss in the following are some traces of indigenous customs performed by Sami individuals and groups during this period, when Christianity was becoming increasingly influential, and when to an ever greater extent the indigenous rituals had to be performed in secrecy.
We know very little about the pre-Christian religion before that period, and also curiously little about how some aspects of the indigenous religious traditions were transformed and integrated into the new official and unofficial world-views of the ensuing centuries. Unfortunately, the latter process has so far been one of the most neglected topics in research on Sami religion.Accordingly there is a pragmatic reason why this chapter focuses on the pre- Christian religion of the Sami during the relatively short time span of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: the fact that the majority of the written sources are from this period. In addition, most of the scholarly activity has so far been based on material from these decades. It is therefore a period from which we have a lot of information and about which scholars who have dealt with pre-Christian Sami religion have produced most of their texts. However, it should be noted that many scholarly texts fail to make it clear that they deal almost exclusively with this period, since even today there is a tendency to present and discuss the source material as if it represented some kind of timeless and static Sami religion that showed neither change nor variation (cf. Rydving 2010).
Primary sources
Unfortunately, there are no written sources from people who lived within the framework of the indigenous religion. Certainly, some of the authors of the source texts were Sami, but they were Christians, and although they knew the language and had a much better general knowledge of their own culture than the foreign clergymen could have had, they wrote about the indigenous religion from a clearly Christian perspective. Their texts will therefore be dealt with among the secondary sources.
On the other hand, there exist many non-verbal primary sources, although they are silent, as non-verbal sources generally are. The foremost types are the preserved ritual drums with their ornaments and figures, and various places that the Sami classified as sacred (bissie), such as sacrificial sites and graves.
Interestingly, the latter group encompasses the graves not only of humans, but also of bears.since there were no collective burial places. When the surviving family passed by the grave during the yearly migrations it was customary to offer a small gift to the deceased relative there.
Example: naming and naming ceremonies
During the naming ceremony, which was conducted by the parents, the child received its name (nimme), in addition to which the mother performed a waterpouring ritual and the father made a sacrifice. It was also common to give the child a piece of jewellery (a nimmesjiele “name ornament”), which functioned as an ethnic symbol. It symbolized that the child was taken up in the Sami community, was worn under the front of the dress by girls and women and under the left armpit by boys and men, and was only shown to other Sami. Furthermore, the child received a guardian spirit (a nimmeguelie “name fish”) in the form of a fish that was said to follow the individual everywhere during his or her life. Whenever one encountered problems, one could always go down to the nearest stream or lake and pray to the “name fish” for assistance.
When children were a few years old and the relatives had become acquainted with their personality, they were given a short melody (vuelie) of their own. This melody was created by the parents or some other relative to reflect the child’s character and could thereafter be used by other persons as a help to concentrate one’s thoughts when thinking of the child - or the grown-up person later in life.