A Sámi drum, is a shamanic ceremonial drum used by the Sámi people of Northern Europe. Sámi ceremonial drums have two main variations, both oval-shaped: a bowl drum in which the drumhead is strapped over a burl, and a frame drum in which the drumhead stretches over a thin ring of bentwood. The drumhead is fashioned from reindeer hide.
In Sámi shamanism, the noaidi used the drum to get into a trance, or to obtain information from the future, or other realms. The drum was held in one hand, and beaten with the other. While the noaidi was in trance, his "free spirit" was said to leave his body to visit the spirit-world. When used for divination, the drum was beaten with a drum hammer; a vuorbi ('index' or 'pointer'), a kind of die made of brass or horn, would move around on the drumhead when the drum was struck. Future events would be predicted according to the symbols upon which the vuorbi stopped on the membrane.
The patterns on the drum membrane reflect the worldview of the owner and his family, both in religious and worldly matters, such as reindeer herding, hunting, householding, and relations with their neighbours and the non-Sámi community.
Many drums were taken out of Sámi ownership and use during the Christianization of the Sámi people in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many drums were confiscated by Sámi missionaries and other officials as a part of an intensified Christian mission towards the Sámi. Other drums were bought by collectors. Between 70 and 80 drums are preserved; the largest collection of drums is at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm.
Terminology
The Northern Sámi terms for the drum are goavddis, gobdis and meavrresgárri, while the Lule Sámi and Southern Sámi terms are goabdes and gievrie, respectively. , ;Anonymous 1723/1903 In English it is also known as a rune drum or Sámi shamanic drum.Liv Helene Willumsen. Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark. Brill, 2013. Juha Pentikäinen. "The Saami shamanic drum in Rome". Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis; Vol 12 (1987)
The Northern Sámi name goavddis describes a bowl drum, while the Southern Sámi name gievrie describes a frame drum, corresponding to the distribution of these types of drums.Kjellström & Rydving 1998 Another Northern Sámi name, meavrresgárri, is a cross-language compound word: Sámi meavrres, from meavrit and Finnish ('dig, roar, mess'), plus gárri from Norwegian ('cup, bowl').Solbakk 2012
The common Norwegian name for the drum, runebomme, is based on an earlier misunderstanding of the symbols on the drum, which interpreted them as runes.Lars Ivar Hansen and Bjørnar Olsen. Samenes historie, fram til 1750. Cappelen, 2004. Suggested new names in Norwegian are sjamantromme ("shaman drum")Pareli 2010 or sametromme ('Sámi drum').The drum in the web exhibition Sámi Faith and Mythology at the Várjjat Sámi Musea The original Swedish name, trolltrumma, comes from the Christian perception of Sámi religion as witchcraft (trolldom), and it is now considered derogatory. In his Fragments of Lappish Mythology (ca 1840) Læstadius used the term divination drum ("spåtrumma"). In Swedish today, the term that's commonly used is ('the Sámi drum')."Trumman"; Samer.se
Sources on the history of the drums
There are four categories of sources for the history of the drums. First are the drums themselves, and what might be interpreted from them. Secondly, there are reports and treatises on Sámi subjects from the 17th and 18th centuries, written by Norwegian and Swedish priests, missionaries or other civil servants, like Johannes Schefferus. The third category are statements from Saami themselves, given to legal courts or other official representatives.Kildetyper at Roald E. Kristiansen's website Samisk religion. The fourth are the sporadic references to drums and Sámi shamanism in other sources, such as Historia Norvegiæ (late 12th century).
The oldest mention of a Sámi drum and shamanism is in the anonymous Historia Norvegiæ (late 12th century). It mentions a drum with symbols of marine animals, a boat, reindeer and snowshoes. There is also a description of a shaman healing an apparently dead woman by moving his spirit into a whale."Finnene", from Historia Norvegiæ Peder Claussøn Friis describes a noaidi's spirit leaving the body in his Norriges oc omliggende Øers sandfærdige Bescriffuelse (1632). The oldest description by a Sámi is by Anders Huitlok of the Pite Sámi in 1642 about a drum that he owned. Huitlok also made a drawing; his story was written down by the German-Swedish bergmeister Hans P. Lybecker. Huitlok's drum represents a worldview where deities, animals and the living and the dead are working together within a given landscape.Brita Pollan 2002 The court protocols from the trials against Anders Paulsen in Vadsø in 1692 and against Lars Nilsson in Arjeplog in 1691 are also sources.Karin Granqvist. "Till vem ger du din själ, berättelsen om Lars Nilsson på liv och död". In: Fordom då alla djur kunde tala... – Samisk tro i förändring. Åsa Virdi Kroik (ed). Rosima förlag, 2001. .
During the 17th century, the Swedish government commissioned a work to gain more knowledge of the Sámi and their culture. During the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) rumours were spread that the Swedes won their battles with the help of Sámi witchcraft.Westman and Utsi 1998 Such rumours were part of the background for the research that lead to Johannes Schefferus' book Lapponia, published in Latin in 1673.Johannes Schefferus (1621-1679) in the Web exhibit The Northern Lights Route, Tromsø University Library, 1999 For Schefferus, a number of "priests' correspondences" (prästrelationer) were written by vicars within the Sámi districts of Sweden. Treatises by Samuel Rheen, Olaus Graan, Johannes Tornæus and Nicolai Lundius were the sources used by Schefferus.Mebius 2007Kuoljok and Kuhmunen 2014 In Norway, the main source are writings from the mission of Thomas von Westen and his colleagues from 1715 until 1735. Authors were Hans Skanke, Jens Kildal, Isaac Olsen, and Johan Randulf (the Nærøy manuscript). These books were, in part, instructions for the missionaries and their co-workers, and part documentation, intended for the government in Copenhagen. Late books within this tradition are Pehr Högström's Beskrifning Öfwer de til Sweriges Krona lydande Lapmarker (1747)Beskrifning öfwer de til Sweriges Krona lydande Lapmarker; fulltext at Runeberg.org in Sweden and Knud Leem's Beskrivelse over Finmarkens Lapper (1767) in Denmark-Norway. Notable is especially Læstadius' Fragments of Lappish Mythology (1839–45), which both discusses earlier treatises with a critical approach, and builds upon Læstadius' own experience.
The shape of the drums
Wood The drums are always oval; the exact shape of the oval would vary with the kind of wood used. Drums which still exist are of four different types, and can be divided into two main groups: bowl drums and frame drums. In bowl drums, the wood consists of a burl shaped into a bowl. The burl usually comes from pine, but sometimes from spruce. The membrane is attached to the wood with a sinew. Frame drums are shaped by wet or heat bending; the wood is usually pine, and the membrane is sewn to holes in the frame with sinew. Ring drums are made from a naturally grown piece of pine wood. There is only one known drum of this type. Angular-cut frame drums are made from one piece of wood cut from a tree. To bend the wood into an oval, angular cuts are made in the bottom and the side of the frame. Only two such drums are preserved, both from Kemi Sámi districts in Finland. The partly preserved drum from Bjørsvik in Nordland is also an angular-cut frame drum.
In his major work on Sámi drums, Die lappische Zaubertrommel,Manker 1938 Ernst Manker lists 41 frame drums, one ring drum, two angular-cut frame drums and 27 bowl drums. Given these numbers, many tend to divide the drums into two main groups: bowl drums and frame drums, seeing the others as variations. Judged by these remaining drums and their known provenance, frame drums seem to be more common in the Southern Sámi areas, and bowl drums seem to be common in the Northern Sámi areas. The bowl drum is sometimes regarded as a local adjustment of the basic drum type, this being the frame drum. The frame drum type is more reminiscent of other ceremonial drums used by the indigenous peoples of Siberia.
The membrane and its symbols
The membrane is made of untanned reindeer hide. Lars Olsen, who described his uncle's drum, the Bindal drum, in 1885, said that the hide was usually taken from the neck of a reindeer calf because of its thickness.Pareli 2010 The symbols were painted with a paste made from alder bark.
The motifs on a drum reflect the worldview of the owner and his family, both in terms of religious beliefs and in their modes of subsistence.Westman 2001 A world is depicted via images of reindeer, both domesticated and wild, and of carnivorous predators that pose a threat to the herd. The modes of subsistence are presented by scenes of wild game hunting, boats with fishing nets, and reindeer herding. Additional imagery on the drum consists of mountains, lakes, people, deities, as well as the camp-site with tents and storage-houses. Symbols of foreign civilizations, such as churches and houses, represent the threats from the surrounding and expanding non-Sámi community.Original Swedish quote: "" Each owner chose his set of symbols; According to Louise Bäckman, they "drew from their own imagination" , quoted by Kroik 2007 there are no two drums with identical sets of symbols.Mebius 2007 The drum mentioned in the medieval Latin tome Historia Norvegiæ, with motifs such as whales, reindeer, skis and a boat would have belonged to a coastal Sámi. The Lule Sámi drum reflects an owner who found his mode of subsistence chiefly through hunting, rather than herding.
A typology based on the structure of the patterns can be divided into three main categories: Southern Sámi, characterized by the rhombus-shaped sun cross in the center Central Sámi, where the membrane is divided in two by a horizontal line, often with a solar symbol in the lower section Northern Sámi, where the membrane is divided by horizontal lines into three or five separate levels representing different worlds: the heavens, the world of the living and an underworld.
In Manker's overview of 71 known drums, there are 42 Southern Sámi drums, 22 Central Sámi drums and seven Northern Sámi drums.
The Bindal drum is a typical Southern Sámi drum, with the sun-symbol in its center. Its last owner also explained that the symbols on the membrane were organized according to the four cardinal directions around the sun. South is described as the "summer side" or "the direction of life," and contains symbols of the Sámi's life in the fells during summer: the goahti, the storehouse or njalla, the herd of reindeer, and their pastures. North is described as "the side of death," and contains symbols of sickness, death and wickedness.Pareli 2010
Kjellström and Rydving have summarised the symbols of the drums in the following categories: nature, reindeer, bears, elk, other mammals (wolf, beaver, small fur animals), birds, fish, hunting, fishing, reindeer-herding, the camp site – with goahti, njalla and other storehouses, the non-Sámi village – often represented by the church, people, travel (skiing, reindeer with pulk, boats), and deities and their worlds. Sometimes even the use of the drum itself is depicted.Alternative lists also exist, such as Shaman's drum symbols in Scandinavia, slightly different from Kjellström and Rydving's categories.