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.

Suõmmkar

Last August I was lucky enough to get a personal tour of Ä´vv Saa´mi Mu´zei, the Skolt Sámi Museum in Neiden, Norway, by the new director Hanna-Maaria Kiprianoff. As it turns out, she is one of two female vocalists in the group, Suõmmkar, which combines the traditional lyrical and dance music of the Skolt Sámi with contemporary sounds of folk and world music.We walked through the exhibits of this beautiful museum space and then Hanna-Maaria announced she would sing me a song, a leuʹdd, a song genre specific to the Skolt. The leu'dd is not the joik associated with the Sámi in the Nordic countries. The leu'dd, at least as far as I grasped the term from Hanna-Maaria, is more of a ballad, a story about people and their lives. I didn't understand a word of the song, but emotions came through. 

In his paper, "Historical Skolt Sami Music and Two Types of Melodic Structures in Leu'dd Tradition," Finnish ethnomusicologist, historian, and musician Marko Jouste writes that the leu'dd is an indigenous musical genre "which is used to describe and comment on Skolt Sami life, both as 'history' and 'present,' so that the leu'dd's form a bank of shared memories of the Skolt Sami society." In addition to being a university lecturer in Saami Cultural Studies at the Giellagas Institute of University of Oulu, Marko Jouste is also a member of Suõmmkar. 

Suõmmkar started performing in 2016 and has sung on stages in Finland and Norway, including the Riddu Riđđu festival at 2018. Their first album, also called "Suõmmkar" came out in 2018. I was able to buy the CD in the gift shop and have listened to it a number of times now back at home. The text of the songs is printed in Skolt Sámi and English (Hanna-Maaria is fluent; she told me she spent five years with her family as a child in Canada). 

The second song on the album, "Äʹrbbvuõtt," or "Tradition" begins with these lyrics (in English translation).

I don't want to  forget my family's language

it isn't too late to learn it

Though I didn't get to learn my tradition naturally

I will now take it back, it's a part of me. 

 

Skolt Sámi is one of the world's critically endangered languages. It's spoken by between 300-400 people, largely in  Sevettijärvi region in northern Finland, and by a few elderly Skolts in Russia. Hanna-Maaria Kiprianoff, who has lived in Sevettijärvi, is one of the very few speakers in Norway.

Members of the band Suõmmkar

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