Saivo Bowl

[Robson Valley]

That dish is almost poetic in appearance.
Paleo stories as are the old story poles here.

Do you ever worry about breaking the very tips off the scalpel blades?

An electric cable thermometer might show you a thermocline in the lake.
Has the effect of compressing the fish populations according to water temperature.
Steady wind can create a seche with daily oscillations in depth.

Looking at the dish, my very first thought was that they knew about thermoclines.
The theoretical definition is a change of 1 degree Celsius per meter of depth.
Fact is, the boundary is often 5-7 degrees per meter, or more. Profound layering.

 

[Tengu]

Id like some sources for the stories

 

[Broch]

Id like some sources for the stories

Ah, for that you'd have to pay a professional Norse story teller - I wonder where we could find one of those?

 

[Brizzlebush]

Thank you.

I put a post up about Korosing a while back. The knife I use is a scalpel with a 10A blade in a retracting handle.

I've never made the alder dust myself, I've always assumed it was from sanding but I could be wrong.

In practice, cinnamon is functionally the same thing, powdered red bark, but someone has done the work for you very cheaply.

Thanks for the link, it's something I'd like to try someday.

 

[Wayland]

Id like some sources for the stories

This one is a good place to start but you have to dig deeper for the older stuff.

Inari Sami Folklore

 

[Wayland]

That dish is almost poetic in appearance.
Paleo stories as are the old story poles here.

Do you ever worry about breaking the very tips off the scalpel blades?

An electric cable thermometer might show you a thermocline in the lake.
Has the effect of compressing the fish populations according to water temperature.
Steady wind can create a seche with daily oscillations in depth.

Looking at the dish, my very first thought was that they knew about thermoclines.
The theoretical definition is a change of 1 degree Celsius per meter of depth.
Fact is, the boundary is often 5-7 degrees per meter, or more. Profound layering.

I've never broken a blade tip yet but there's always a first time I guess. The limiting factor tends to be my first index finger knuckle which makes me take a rest every quarter hour or so.

Interesting about the temperatures, I've never taken fishing that seriously, I usually thrash the water with a few flies and hope I go home with supper. Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong.

The Sámi are thought to be the oldest inhabitants of northern Europe and there seems to be a direct correlation between the rock petroglyphs at places like Alta and the drum figures which survived until the last couple of centuries. I find that intriguing.

 

[Broch]

Alta today

Norway landslide sweeps homes into the sea

Watch as land continues to collapse during the rescue effort.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Wayland]

Wow. I hadn't heard about that.

It says no one was caught up in it, let's hope that is true.

I visited the petroglyphs there many years ago, I wonder if they will be seen again.

 

[Herman30]

Regarding saivo. In finnish Lapland, in Muonio, there is a canyon lake called Pakasaivo. No creeks or rivers run to the lake, it gets its water from a spring on the bottom of the lake (geologiccal studies say its 60m deep).
Saami people believed that the dead lived under the lake.

67°36'46.8"N 23°47'20.4"E · 67.613000, 23.789000

www.google.com

 

[Wayland]

I believe that is one of the most famous of the "Saivo Lakes" but there seem to be many others according to folk lore including one not far from where we are heading.

I'm really enjoying learning so much about it all at the moment and it's rewarding to find that the little I have gleaned so far obviously has some resonance with people like yourself or TLM living closer to the scene.

 

[TLM]

... and lower gods and goddesses.

Apparently they had gods but not quite in the sense many other "original" people had. Supernatural beings existed on many levels.

But they had "seita", lots of them, special places for various natural happenings or animals and small sacrifices were given there.

 

[Wayland]

From an anthropological point of view thier perspective falls neatly into the concept of Animism where the belief is that every thing has a soul or spirit, most of the entities they paid respect to were personifications of important natural phenomena or forces.

Nature, the Sun, Thunder, the Wind, things like that. There were beings responsible for fetching the soul and wrapping it in flesh before putting it in the womb and choosing it's gender. Those are more abstract concepts. There are beings that oversee the hunt and illness, and there is a guiding principle over all which correlates with most people's idea of a supreme being.

What comes across as it does with most mythologies is a wish to explain the inexplicable. To order things that are beyond normal understanding and for most people such elemental chaos requires the concept that someone, somewhere must have made it this way. Perhaps if we are nice to them they will make it better.

Such thinking might seem odd to many of us brought up in the Monotheistic traditions of the Near East and West but it would be perfectly understandable to an Amazonian tribesman half a world away.

 

[TLM]

For some reason that I don't know "animism" is not often used in this context. I agree that most of their beliefs fit neatly into the concept.

Also there seem to have been a lot of variation from one area to another just like in the language.

I remember about 30 years ago when Sami drawings were shown to some Sibirian reindeer herders they were quite at home with them. I understand their belief system to be fairly similar which, I guess, should not be a surprise.

Sami apparently were family centered tribes who had fairly clearly marked territories even before reindeer herding started.

 

[Wayland]

Very few people like to be pigeon holed which is why I rarely use such broad blanket terms but it is how an anthropologist would tend to categorise things. If I walked into a church and dismissed the priest as being a simple monotheist I would expect similar disgruntlement.

In reality peoples beliefs are rarely that simple and much more nuanced.

I'm reading an interesting book from the early sixties by Ørnulv Vorren and Ernst Manker which, despite using the old fashioned and now unpopular term "Lapp" in it's title and throughout, is very informative. ( Lapp life and customs. Oxford 1962 )

They had the advantage over many more current writers in that they were able to speak to people that still had some memory of the older ways even as they were quickly fading. They point to many similarities between the various nomadic peoples of the Taiga which had always struck me too.

Older historical sources such as the writings of Laestadius offer glimpses of the old beliefs too but in a fragmentary manner and with little understanding.

I would love to sit down and talk with someone that had deeper, more native understanding at some time but I suspect such people are few and far between these days.

 

[Wayland]

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.

 

[Wayland]

Just decorated this, my Fire Fox Kuksa, to make a pair with it.

 

[SaraR]

Just decorated this, my Fire Fox Kuksa, to make a pair with it.

Gorgeous!

 

[TLM]

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.

This is a quote from the Finnish WP article:
The ancient Sami religion was not a single coherent religion but a collection of beliefs linked to various cultural attributes of the Sami people.

If so and I have heard that in another form before, the essential core was the culture not the religion.

 

[Wayland]

That is certainly consistent with the information I have been finding so far.

Even the cultures varied between mountain, forest and coast of course.

 

[TLM]

The culturally really large change happened fairly late early 1700 when became the change from reindeer hunting to reindeer herding. The previous larger change was of course Christianity a bit earlier, curiously though it looks like the effect was not very large as the Ancient Belief was not a system and the culture stayed pretty much the same. There was a Christ but bear still had a soul and Seita was given sacrifice.