Helene Uri's Novel Clearing Out, now in paperback

 Thrilled to announce that Clearing Out, a fantastic novel by Norwegian author Helene Uri, is now available in paperback from the University of Minnesota Press. I had the joy of translating it some years ago, and it's one of those books that has really stayed with me. It's not just another book about the Sami by an outsider; nor is it a book by someone who has grown up in a Sami family. It's a layered story of a novelist very like Helene Uri who is writing a novel about a linguist who goes north to do language research, a novelist who in the course of writing this novel finds out that she has Sami background. This is not unusual in Norway, especially for those whose relatives once lived in Northern Norway. As readers we learn a lot, but in a natural and absorbing way, from both women's experiences--Helene's and her character Elinor's.

Nadia Christensen Prize for translation from the American-Scandinavian Foundation

Here's what the publishers write about it, in greater detail, followed by praise from two writers who have also spent time up in the North, Rebecca Dinnerstein and Vendala Vida.

Inspired by Helene Uri’s own journey into her family’s ancestry, Clearing Out, an emotionally resonant novel by one of Norway’s most celebrated authors, tells two intertwining stories. A novelist, named Helene, is living in Oslo with her husband and children and contemplating her new protagonist, Ellinor Smidt—a language researcher, divorced and in her late thirties, with a doctorate but no steady job.

An unexpected call from a distant relative reveals that Helene’s grandfather, Nicolai Nilsen, was the son of a coastal (sjø) Sami fisherman—something no one in her family ever talked about. Uncertain how to weave this new knowledge into who she believes she is, Helene continues to write her novel, in which her heroine Ellinor travels to Finnmark in the far north to study the dying languages of the Sami families there. What Ellinor finds among the Sami people she meets is a culture little known in her own world; she discovers history richer and more alluring than rumor and a connection charged with mystery and promise. Through her persistence in approaching an elderly Sami activist, and her relationship with a local Sami man, Ellinor confronts a rift that has existed between two families for generations.

Intricate and beautifully constructed, Clearing Out offers a solemn reflection on how identities, like families, are formed and fractured and recovered as stories are told. In its depiction of the forgotten and the fiercely held memories among the Sea (sjø) Sami of northern Norway, the novel is a powerful statement on what is lost, and what remains in reach, in the character and composition of contemporary life.

"Lyrical, brave, and luminous, Clearing Out offers the overdue translation of a signature Norwegian voice into rapturous English."—Rebecca Dinerstein, author of The Sunlit Night
 

"I’ve long been fascinated by the culture of the Sami people and the part of the world that Helene Uri explores in her new novel. Beautifully translated, Clearing Out is a well-crafted investigation of the stories we inherit and the stories we create."—Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

A Skolt Sámi Folktale from Neiden

 

The Guoddan

Mother Ondrej had come from Suonjel [Suonjel, or Suõ’nn’jel, was one of seven Skolt Sámi sijdds; Suõ’nn’jel is on the Russian side of the border with Norway.] Her childhood home was Vilggis-vandet. She told me that once as a girl she went to see the wild reindeer pit traps there. The pits were between two lakes, as is the custom.

As she was walking and looking at the pit traps, she heard a faint cry from up in the sky, and then it sounded a bit stronger, and then she heard the crying coming closer. Then she saw a fearfully large bird coming. It flew with the claws of both feet curled together, and in between the feet hung a young Russian woman crying. The bird dropped her on the ground under a tree; it perched in the tree itself, and the tree began to sway this way and that, because the bird was as big as a reindeer ox. The Russian woman said to the young Skolt girl, “You must tie yourself to a pine tree or the bird will take you.” The bird could have left the Russian woman, but it was better if it flew away with her since it had already almost crushed her to death.

But when the bird noticed that they were talking, it shook its head, and the feathers on its neck all sounded like bells, clanging so that they could no longer hear to keep talking.

The bird perched in the tree for a while. It tried to attack the Skolt girl, but it only got the hat off her head, then it settled in the tree again. It perched there a while, and then it took hold of her again. But as she was tied to the pine tree, it could not take her this time either. Still the bird grabbed her hair and her skin along with it. The girl fainted and fell to the ground. When she woke up again, the bird was about to fly off. The Russian woman was again between its claws, crying, and then it flew westward. The Russian woman's cry was heard for a very long time in the air. Then that cry also disappeared

Such a bird was formerly called a guoddan. The guoddan was also the kind of bird that an evil man set on another man. From that comes the Sámi proverb: “He screams as though he’s in a guoddan's claw.”

Mother Ondrej, to whom this happened, had come to Neiden and married. She had regained some hair, but it wasn’t much. And there were claw marks on her neck. 

(Translation copyright, Barbara Sjoholm, 2024)

           

 

Isak Saba, politician, teacher, folklorist

This Skolt Sámi story was transcribed in 1918 or 1919 by Isak Saba in the village of Neiden, Norway. The storyteller was either Ivan or Nikolai Ondrevitsj, the sons of “Mother Ondrej,” Marie Avdatje Vasilevna. It’s one of many tales that Saba collected in Neiden with financial support from the Norwegian Folklore Archives in Oslo. Saba also collected other tales about animals, about the hidden folk, and about noaidis, revenants, and the robbers from “the East,” called Chudes. Saba’s original transcriptions and translations into Norwegian of this material became part of J.K. Qvigstad’s four volume work, Lappiske eventyr og sagn (Sámi Folktales and Legends), published in 1927-29.

My translation from Norwegian is part of a selected collection of around three hundred tales collected by J.K. Qvigstad and Isak Saba, to be published in late 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press.