The human being

The short melody (vuelie) given to each child at an early age played an important role as a vocal aide-memoire·, since everyone had a short melody of this kind, a person’s melody could be chanted by someone thinking about that person.

The reason why this melody and chant was so important was because thinking about and having social relations with others was regarded as the main criterion for “life”. The Sami made an important distinction between physical and social life. According to traditional Sami conceptions, physical life in this world lasted for as long as a person breathed and his or her heart continued beating, but social life continued for as long as a person was remembered, and this could go on long after physical death. Departed ancestors were regarded as still alive in their world beneath our world, albeit only as long as they were remembered, and this meant as long as the deceased’s vuelie was chanted by his or her family and friends. Each Sami family consisted of members in both worlds. As long as the family members on the surface of the earth chanted the chants of family members down below, the ancestors were regarded as still alive. They revealed themselves in dreams, gave advice to family members and, the sources tell us, could even be used as helpers when hunting or reindeer herding demanded it, or when parents needed someone to guard their children.

This important role of the chants as a mode of communication thus transcended the boundary between the realms of those living in our world and those living in the other world, between the visible and invisible parts of the landscape. One could even say that the chants constituted the social network between people and as such indicated and even determined the line between (social) life and death. A person who breathed but was lonely and without social contacts, one whose chant no one chanted, was in this sense dead, whereas someone who was buried long ago could be regarded as living because his or her chant continued to be performed.

However, it was not only people who had chants, but also areas in nature, animal species and invisible beings. In fact, it seems as if the Sami regarded their entire cosmos as held together by the threads of communication created by these chants.