Sami Tales Told "By the Fire"

The Sami of northern Sweden "felt such a personal connection to the trees whose wood they burned, mostly birch and pine, that they chopped 'eyes' in the firewood, so the pieces of wood 'could see they were burning well.'"

I learned this in a delightful book called By the Fire: Sami Folktales and Legends. Collected and illustrated by Emilie Demant Hatt, and translated by Barbara Sjoholm, it includes 70-some tales, along with Demant Hatt's introduction, selections from her fieldnotes, and an essay by Sjoholm.

The nomadic reindeer-herding Sami of the far north often appear in the medieval Icelandic sagas, which provide the source material for most of my own books. The Vikings traded with the Sami for skins, furs, feathers, and walrus ivory, and several Norwegian kings and chieftains forced them to pay tribute--that is, protection money. Sami men and women also appear in the Icelandic sagas as sorcerors and shamans, able to shift their shapes, foretell the future, and find lost things.

As a student of comparative literature, I am intrigued by how similar some of Demant Hatt's Sami tales are with other folklore I’m familiar with. For example, Cinderella-type stories are found among the Sami, with evil stepmothers, handsome princes, too-small-slippers that require the chopping off of heels or toes, and all.

As in Icelandic folktales, the Sami speak of Hidden Folk or elves, here called the Haldes. In one story, for example, the evil stepmother tells the girl to spin yarn "at the edge of a gorge, at the bottom of which there was a deep spring. The ball of yarn rolled away from the girl, and when she tried to snatch it, she fell into the spring. But down there she met the good Haldes." The Haldes hire the girl to tend their cows, and eventually let her return home, carrying her wages in gold and silver.

But what I really enjoy reading folktales for are the differences—the things I have not heard before and would not have thought of myself.

Along with the Sami chopping "eyes" in their firewood, for example, in By the Fire I learned about the evil Stallo. A kind of people-eating troll, Stallo "goes around whistling all the time so one can hear when he is in the vicinity. All whistling is taboo among the Sami: the sound of it is absolutely connected with the Evil One and with sorcery."

In Sami language, you can be deaf as Stallo, large as Stallo, or have Stallo's skinny legs. If you had a large head--a small, round head was key to the Sami concept of beauty--you had a Stallo head. If you ate alone, you ate like Stallo. If you had a child with a man you didn't care to marry, that child was Stallo's child.

Stallo also explains the landscape: A single standing stone marks a Stallo grave. A ring of stones is a ruined Stallo tent.

And while Stallo is usually presented as evil, his belt is decorated with a silver star bearing three faces; if you find (or steal) a Stallo-star, you can cure many diseases.

Unlike most folktale collections from the north, as translator Barbara Sjoholm points out, By the Fire contains stories told to Emilie Demant Hatt "as part of other conversations, ethnographic and social, that took place 'by the fire' in tents or turf huts or out in the open air."

Demant Hatt was the first ("and for a long time the only," Sjoholm adds) Scandinavian anthropologist to take an interest in the lives of women and children. Most of the stories she recorded were those that women told among themselves as they worked--sometimes answering Demant Hatt's questions, more often giving conscious performances to entertain the group. In these stories, girls outfox their attackers, girls save their people--and murdered babies come back to haunt their parents.

By the Fire is beautifully illustrated with Demant Hatt's bold and eerie linocuts. Trained as an artist, Demant Hatt first went to northern Sweden in 1904 as a tourist. Inspired by Sami culture, she returned to live with them for many months in 1907. She studied Sami language at the University of Copenhagen, soon becoming fluent, and taught herself ethnography. From 1910 through 1916 she spent her summers with the Sami, first by herself, then bringing along her husband, a graduate student in cultural geography, who sometimes took notes for her while she conducted interviews. Her field notes fill 500 typed pages.

Demant Hatt wrote a memoir of her early adventures, With the Lapps in the High Mountains: A Woman among the Sami, 1907-1908, which has been edited and translated by Barbara Sjoholm. Sjoholm also wrote her biography, Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, Artist and Ethnographer. Two more books to add to my reading list!

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