I have been wrestling with various sources of Sámi mythology for weeks now and often seem to be getting no closer to the essential core of their beliefs.
Part of the reason is that the original oral sources told their stories in two or three different languages with numerous dialects and their accounts were written down in Latin, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish or Danish, in archaic or later, modern forms which, because I speak none of the above, have then been re-translated into English at some point.
As result, a single mythological entity can end up with a staggering list of names, variations of those names and different phonetic spellings of those names or variations. Aaaaaaaargh....
Then the stories themselves... In one version the hero gets the girl. In another version he doesn't get the girl. Sometimes he gets a completely different girl. But, maybe it's just another name for the same girl?... On the other hand maybe it isn't? Trying to fit these differing narratives together is like trying to piece together a skip full of pieces from hundreds of jigsaws. To top it off, most of the jigsaws are incomplete anyway.
I've just come across a quote from a man called Johannes Schefferus who wrote a Latin account of the Sámi in 1673. The first systematic attempt to do so.
He says this: (Translated of course.)
“At first, there is no doubt that they were pagans, as all Nations were, but being all Pagans were not of the same religion.”
So not only do I have the many linguistic variations to contend with, it would seem that the core beliefs that I have been searching for, are in fact many different beliefs. I had hoped to distil these disparate and varying sources into some essential coherent narrative but it would seem that coherence was never really there in the first place.
No wonder I feel like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again when I think I've reached the top.
What I am finding of course in all these stories, are certain archetypes that correspond to common mythical archetypes found throughout most world mythologies and I think this will need to be the direction of my research from now on.
The names of these archetypes may have been impossible to pin down completely and my inept pronunciation of them would probably add to problem anyway, so I have decided that I can only adopt the storytellers privilege and form my own narrative based upon my understanding of the originals with the most consistent direction.
An interesting challenge in itself.
