On 7 December 1691, a precious rune drum, created to help a noaidi, or shaman, to enter a trance and walk among spirits, was confiscated by the authorities. The owner, Anders Poulsson – or Poala-Ánde in the name’s Sámi form – was tried for witchcraft the following year.
Poulsson told the court, according to official records, that his mother had taught him how to use the rune drum, because “he wanted to help people in distress, and with his art he wanted to do good, and his mother said that she would teach him such an art”.
Before a verdict was reached, he was murdered, with an axe, by a man who had “taken leave of his senses”.
Poulsson’s drum entered the Danish royal collection, and later became the property of the National Museum of Denmark – until now. The drum has officially been handed back to the Sámi people, after what Jelena Porsanger, director of the Sámi Museum in Karasjok, northern Norway, called “a 40-year struggle”.
An indigenous people of northern Europe, the Sámi inhabit Sapmi, a territory straddling northern Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia’s Kola peninsula. “It’s a precious object for us that is a symbol of our history, values and culture – and at the same time a symbol of colonisation and unequal power relations,” said Porsanger.
The drum had been on loan to the museum since 1979, but earlier attempts formally to regain ownership had been rebuffed. Last year, Norway’s Sámi president appealed to Queen Margrethe of Denmark over the issue, hoping she would act as “the conscience of the Danish people”.
Photograph: Pump Park Vintage Photography/Alamy
“For us these objects are not about collections, or representing a historical period,” said Porsanger. “They are not material objects. We think of them as humans, as persons.”
It is the first Sámi drum to be repatriated from abroad and the only one in the collection in Karasjok. Now undergoing conservation, the drum will go on display as the centrepiece of a new exhibition on 12 April.
The formal handover of the object is an event of huge significance, according to Sámi film-maker Silja Somby, who is making a film about rune drums to be shown during the Venice Biennale in August. They are, she said, “like bibles for us. Each has its own special meanings and symbolisms”.
The largest single collection of more than 30 is held at the Nordiska Museet, Stockholm; there are examples too in Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg and Rome, as well as in the British Museum and Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA).
The Sámi population numbers about 60,000 to 70,000, of whom about 25,000 speak any one of nine surviving (and related) Sámi languages.
Rune drums were once a central aspect of their nature-based religious life. When a noaidi struck a reindeer-skin and birchwood rune drum with a reindeer-antler hammer, a brass ring would move across its surface. Depending on how the ring moved in relation to the symbols on the drum (painted in a red dye made from alder resin), the noaidi would divine future events. The drumming would also help the noaidi enter a trance and travel in different realities, for example among the spirits of the dead.
At the time Poulsson’s drum was confiscated, the Sámi were being aggressively Christianised, and he was brought to trial in February 1692 “on the grounds that he has owned and used an instrument they call a rune drum with which he has practised that wicked and ungodly art of witchcraft”. Since Norway was at the time of the Denmark-Norway union, effectively ruled from Copenhagen, it was to Copenhagen that the drum was sent.
Poulsson’s evidence survives – he even demonstrated the use of the drum to the court. He also explained the drum’s symbology, though according to recent scholars the framing of his account in broadly Christian terms may have been an attempt to tell the court what it wanted to hear.
For example, naming one human figure depicted on the drum as Diermis, he said that: “When God is prayed to, Diermis is helpful in that when there are floods and a lot of rain, he will call back the weather, and this Diermis has no power unless God gives it to him.”
On the figure of a reindeer whom he referred to as Gvodde, he said: “when God is prayed to, [Gvodde] gives good fortune in the hunt for wild reindeer. If the rune drum is beaten, and the ring will not dance for this reindeer, the one who asks for good hunting will not get any reindeer, no matter how hard he tries.”
According to Porsanger, the present Karasjok Sámi Museum is unsuitable for the housing of a large number of objects as vulnerable as the drum – it is too small, with inadequate storage facilities and atmospheric control. “We are looking at plans for a new museum,” she said. “Hopefully we will realise the dream.”
The museum, she said, has made no further requests for repatriation of drums, but, she added: “We have the stories, the language and the terminology, which we would love to share with other museums if they would listen.” In May, she confirmed, she is planning to visit UK institutions that hold Sámi material, including the British Museum and the MAA, as well as the Horniman Museum in London and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The last owns Sámi-related items collected by Sir Arthur Evans, most famous as the excavator of Knossos, who visited northern Finland in 1873.
Somby is uncompromising in her desire for repatriation of Sámi items, however. “There is momentum building now,” she said, mentioning the drums in Sweden and Germany. “First we take Berlin – then we take London.”
