Thanks to a travel grant from the American-Scandinavian
Foundation in New York, I had the good fortune to spend most of August in Northern
Norway, specifically in Eastern Finnmark. I flew into Kirkenes, on the border
to Russia, and then made my way slowly, by bus and car, around the Varanger
Fjord. From Vadsø I took the Hurtigruten to Tromsø for a last week of visiting
friends and doing research in the Tromsø Museum library.
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| Hurtigruten arriving in Vadsø |
Most of this travel was in service to a project I’ve been
working on for the past two years, a translation from the Norwegian of a
significant collection of Sámi folktales. These appeared a bilingual (North Sámi
and Norwegian) series of four volumes,
Lappiske eventyr og sagn [Lappish
Folktales and Legends] in 1927-1929 under the name of J.K. Qvigstad, a Lappologist
and college rector in Tromsø. In 1997, the thousand or so folktales in
Lappish
Folktales and Legends were condensed into a hefty book of around three hundred
stories in Norwegian,
Samiske beretninger [
Sámi Narratives],
edited
by Brita Pollan, a Norwegian scholar of religion. My version has echoed many of
her choices though I’ve added and subtracted some tales (it will be published
by the University of Minnesota Press in a year or so).
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J.K. Qvigstad
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Dozens of Sámi storytellers contributed to the volumes. Most
of their tales were told in Sámi dialects to Qvigstad, from the 1880s through
the 1920s; he then transcribed them into a standardized North Sámi and
translated them to Norwegian. The stories came from different regions of Sápmi,
particularly the Lyngen Peninsula, the Varanger Fjord, and Karasjok and
Kautokeino. But the work of another collector, Isak Saba, was also important to
the first volume of Lappish Folktales and Legends.
Saba, born on the Varanger Fjord and a former student of Qvigstad’s
in Tromsø, played an important part in Sámi politics in the early twentieth
century, as the first Sámi person ever elected to the Norwegian parliament. He later
resumed teaching back in North-Varanger, but also decided to become a
folklorist. With support from the Norwegian Folklore Archives in Oslo, Saba
collected folktales from the Varanger Fjord area and from lands to the southeast,
still inhabited by the Skolt Sámi in Neiden and Boris Gleb. Sadly, Saba died in
1921, just forty-five. Over a hundred folktales collected by Saba made their
way into Qvigstad’s hands and into Lappish Folktales and Legends.
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Isak Saba
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Over the course of working on the translation of the
folktales and writing a draft of the introduction, I became more aware of the
extent of Isak Saba’s contributions, and I also grew determined to make them
more visible. So my trip this summer was in part to educate myself more
thoroughly about Isak Saba’s work as a folklorist, as well to get a sense of
the landscape of these stories. I have long been curious to visit a few of the museums
in East Finnmark, and particularly
Ä´vv Saa´mi Mu´zei, the Skolt Sámi
Museum located in the border area of Norway, in Neiden. The Skolt Sámi are far
less written about than other groups of Sámi, and there’s not much about their
history in English. But having translated a number of Skolt tales transcribed
by Isak Saba, I was eager to see something of the Skolt landscape, however
truncated by state borders and time.
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