The Skolt Village of Neiden, Norway

One focus of my recent travels in Eastern Finnmark this past August was to learn more about the Skolt Sámi or Eastern Sámi. I'd contacted the staff of the Ä’vv Skolt Sámi Museum in Neiden, Norway, and was encouraged to visit them. One of the staff, Christina Mathisen, who has Skolt heritage, was kind enough to offer to drive me to Neiden from Kirkenes, since she lived in the area.

We passed the airport on the E6 and then headed west and south along the Neiden and Munkefjord, a relatively shallow bay that is now a nature reserve and important home for birdlife. As we drove, I saw the landscape around Kirkenes and the fjord gradually and then quickly change from mostly treeless hills and shorelines to lakes and rivers edged by scrub birch, and to farmland.

The Neiden River

By the time we came to the old Skoltbyen, a preserved village of a few buildings, the landscape resembled northern Finland—unsurprisingly, for the border divides the old Skolt territories. Before 1826, this was a common area, used for grazing reindeer and salmon fishing; after Russia and Norway signed a treaty affirming the state borders, the large siida of Neiden (Njauddâm in the Skolt Sámi language) was split in two and remains so: one side is in Norway and the other is in Finland, which was, until 1920, a Russian duchy. The Finnish town is called Näätämö.

For many centuries there were seven siidas (or sijjdds) in the extensive Skolt territories. Border closures, war, and forced evacuations have left their mark. Many Skolt left the Soviet Union after the Second World War, and now the largest population of Skolt-speaking Sámi live in Northern Finland. Of the c. 1,000 people who still identify as Skolt (sometimes called Eastern Sámi), about 600 live in Finland, 250 in Russia, and just 150 in Norway, where the modern museum, Ä’vv,  was built in 2017. The largest number of Skolt speakers is in Finland. In Norway, the Skolt language largely disappeared around 1900 Among the Nordic Sámi population, estimated at from 80,000 to 100,000, depending on the criteria used, the Skolt have long been a minority and a neglected one. That is changing, at least in Finland and Norway, where younger people have begun to reclaim their identity, and more concrete measures are underway to revitalize the language and make Skolt history and identity visible again.

What is called the Skoltbyen is not a really a village now, but a protected area managed by the museum.   One small building goes back to 1565, though it has been rebuilt several times and its altarpiece and icons are older than the structure. This is the chapel of St. Georg, reputedly built by Saint Trifon, a Russian Orthodox monk who also founded the church at Boris Gleb on the Pasvik River.

St. Georg Chapel, Neiden

Another building from the 1870s still exists, a one- room house that once belonged to Ondre Jakovits and his wife and children. Like the homes of several Skolt families who stayed on in the area, Ondre House is built of split logs; photographs from the early 1900s show few trees in the area, where now there are woods of scrub birch along the strongly flowing Nieden River. Ondre Jakovits is remembered today as a storyteller; in 1918 Isak Saba traveled to Neiden from Vardø in North Varanger to write down several dozen folktales and legends from Jakovits and to translate them into Norwegian. These tales of noaidis, Chudes, and the small folk called Chakkalakkas were included in the first volume of bilingual Sámi folktales and legends published in 1927 by J.K. Qvigstad.

That summer’s day in early August the sound of the river and the sough of the birches cast a mood of enchantment over the Skolt village, but as with so many places in the north of Norway, there's a darker history. Beginning in the late 1300s through the early 1600s, the Skolt buried their dead in a churchyard in the village. In 1915 Johan Brun from the Anatomical Institute at the University of Oslo was responsible for excavating and then removing approximately 94 skeletons from the Neiden churchyard in order to preserve them as part of a much larger project connected with the racial biology studies popular in Norway and Sweden at the time. Although in 1915, the Skolt allowed the excavation, a hundred years later, the Orthodox congregation of Neiden requested the remains back. The remains were returned and reburied in 2011. There’s now an Orthodox memorial on the mound.

The reburial ceremony in Neiden, September 2011 (reburial place, lower right).
Photo: © Tonje P. Solem 2011

August Travels in East Finnmark, Norway

 

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. 

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). 

J.K. Qvigstad

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.

 

Isak Saba

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.

 

Two new podcast interviews about From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture

 

 

I had a great time at the KPTZ radio station at Fort Worden in Port Townsend WA, talking with Cris Wilson, the host of Booklovers' Cafe. The interview aired June 18 and is available in their archive for streaming.

I was also interviewed recently for an episode of the podcast Crossing North, produced by Colin Gioia Connors for the Scandinavian Studies Department and Baltic Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. In the episode ("Repatriation is in the Air"), Amy Swanson King, a graduate student at the UW and member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi, and I talk about From Lapland to Sápmi, published a little more than a year ago by the University of Minnesota Press.

Crossing North has all kinds of fascinating interviews with scholars, artists, and community members about Nordic and Baltic topics, including the "Nordic Languages of Middle Earth" and "Werewolves on Campus." Check it out!