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.

The next few posts will be about my travels in Finnmark, with more about Isak Saba and Qvigstad.