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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Like the Stallus, trolls, they're easily outsmarted. If you have a flashlight on the ready or a bell or something, you can always outwit a troll.
Barbara Sjoholm:The Sami have been up in the North for far longer than the more recent Norwegians and Russians and Fins. Some of their traditions may have developed from other sources.
Barbara Sjoholm:I'm Barbara Sjoholm, a translator and writer in Port Townsend, Washington. So I'm here today to talk about my new translation from Norwegian, Sami Folktales from the Near and Far Worlds. This selection of 300 stories from Northern Norway comes from a four volume Sami and Norwegian bilingual edition of about a thousand stories published a hundred years ago in 1927.
Barbara Sjoholm:This is the first time most of the stories have appeared in English. It's really a landmark collection of centuries of Sami oral storytelling. The main collector and translator was the Norwegian professor and linguist Jus Knut Kriegstad in Norway. But over a 100 of the stories in the four volumes and 48 in this selection were collected and translated by Isaac Saba, a Sami politician, teacher, and folklorist. And with me today is Lisa Luga Larsen from Duluth, another University of Minnesota author and a storyteller who'll be guiding our conversation about Nordic folk tales.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Thanks, Barbara. Like Barbara said, I'm Lise. If you want to say it in Norwegian completely, you came very close. It's Lise Lunge Larsen. And I'm from Duluth, Minnesota, but I'm a native of Norway.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:I arrived in The United States at age 19 on a Crown Prince World scholarship to attend college for just one year, but I fell in love. So I'm still here And I'm still married to that guy I fell in love with. Because I had to stay, the only way to stay was to keep being a student. So in the end, I have a master's degree in applied linguistics where I actually wrote my thesis on using storytelling to teach English as a second language. I've also studied folklore at the University of Oslo.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:I have been a professional storyteller of Norwegian folk tales for over forty years. And I'm also a children's book author specializing in Norwegian folklore, trolls, and generally things that go bump in the night. I have been riveted by Barbara's Sami folk tales. And it's a delight for me to be here to talk about her new book because it's it's really something. It was I have read hundreds, hundreds of collections of folk tales.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:And this one really stands out as something very, very unique. So Barbara, because it is so unique and for people who are not familiar with the topic, could you start out by giving us an overview of the Kriegstad, the Saba collection and maybe talk a little bit about some of the figures that are so different in Sami folklore compared to other folktales?
Barbara Sjoholm:Yes certainly. Well, first of all for anyone who doesn't know the Sami are the indigenous people of northern Norwegian, Swedish, Russian and Finland. They have lived there for millennia. Most of these stories are passed down orally. The Sami did not have a written language for the most part until the late sixteen hundred's and it was still being worked on into the 19 hundred's and twentieth century to find final forms for the different Sami languages.
Barbara Sjoholm:So this is kind of a very unusual landmark book and the stories about lots of different figures some of which people would recognize from Scandinavian folklore like trolls, wise grandmothers, kings and princesses, talking animals, lots of stories about young people, often the youngest son or daughter who go off to the magic mountain to find gold and perhaps kill or outwit the troll. But the Sami folk tales also have a number of variations on these recognizable fairy tales like the Cinderella motif. They often put them in a Sami setting so they're not living in the palace necessarily. They're living in a tent or goatee, a kind of a turf dwelling. And there are reindeer sometimes.
Barbara Sjoholm:There are no dragons, but there are definitely lots of, whales, eagles, and, people who can talk to those animals and then of course the animals speak themselves. So this collection is around 300 stories. They're divided into 10 secondtions. So we've got the fairy tales. We've got stories about enemies, including the semi mythical chewed figures from Eastern Russia.
Barbara Sjoholm:We also have Halis who are spirits who aren't visible by the naked eye, sort of like Ulda sometimes they're called. And they're very friendly to the Sami usually but occasionally they have a more mischievous streak. They're sea creatures and there are Noaides who are spiritual guides and also clergy and the devil. So that reflects some of the Sami's experience of Christianization. And then there's a very long section on omens and hauntings.
Barbara Sjoholm:So that's kind of the basic overview to what this book is about.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Yeah. It was just fascinating. You know, one of the things that I was really struck by that you and I talked about was they have these stalus. And in Norwegian folktales, of course, we have trolls, but they're really very different. It was it was fun for me to just think about, you know, the differences between these stories and and and and, the Norwegian ones.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:I don't know if you wanted to talk a little bit more about the specifics. Of course, the reindeer are so important. And just the whole the whole landscape and the way they move about. And then the the sense of directness in the telling of the stories was really interesting to me.
Barbara Sjoholm:Sure. Well, I know you're kind of the authority on trolls. So, and there are some trolls in these stories too, which is kind of interesting. And I think they've migrated there from the Norwegian because they'll have three heads or or nine heads, and they'll be very large and they usually live in the mountains. And you can talk a little bit more about what trolls are really like.
Barbara Sjoholm:But the Stalhus are interesting because they are a little bit more like people than they are like trolls. They're not huge. They seem to be around the same size, though sometimes they're pictured as larger. But there's not that much in the text that suggests that they don't have kind of human characteristics, you know, arms and legs and heads and whatnot that they walk. They don't have any necessarily magic powers, and they tend to live in families.
Barbara Sjoholm:And so the Stalu is usually male, but he has a wife. Sometimes when he doesn't have a wife, he's a bachelor, and he's courting a Sami girl who's usually trying to get out of it. Sometimes her parents say, well, I'm sorry. You have to marry him. And the girl is like, no.
Barbara Sjoholm:No. No. I'm not doing that. And will disguise an old stump or something and kind of try and pass that off as herself as the bride. But the Stalus, they are evil, and they they do wish people harm.
Barbara Sjoholm:They're cannibals. So sometimes they eat babies and they will bite off someone's fingers or they'll try and put their iron pipe into a little child's ear and suck out their brains. So not very pleasant figures at all. But the good thing is they can be, outwitted because in addition to being kind of violent, they are also incredibly stupid and kind of pathetic figures really. So the Sami are always much smarter than the Stalu.
Barbara Sjoholm:So over and over again, the Stalu sort of comes to grief and is killed in one way or another either by falling through the ice or drinking up a whole lot of water and exploding. They never come to any good, and so that kind of reinforces the Sami's power over them in most of these tales. So they're stories with a happy ending even though they're kind of scary when you're reading them.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:I know. I they are terrifying. But in one story I just read this morning, a Sami girl was able to bite off the stalu's fingers, and that did him he would bug them ever again. Clearly, if you can bite off their fingers, you know, that's that's a good thing. And you're right.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:You know, they really are they felt to me almost more like a boogeyman kind of a character, like a really spooky and they move kind of closer. Trolls try to stay far away from humans. They hate noise. You know, they hate church bells. So they they live deep inside the mountains or in the forest because they just they hate noise.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:And they're of course, origin is from Norse mythology. I think they were born of Ymir from underneath his armpit. When he lay in a deep sea, the frost giant, and out from his armpit and from between his toes crawled the first trolls. You know? So they so trolls have actually been around longer than humans in Norse mythology.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:And, you know, like you said, they're they're they look very different. They're much more tied to the landscape. And, you know, they're they they are they turn into mountains when they when the sun shines on them or they turn into rocks. And, they're very grotesque in a different way from the stellus because they're huge, but they can have one head with only one eyeball in the middle, or they can have three or six or nine or even 12 heads. And in some stories, the trolls carry the heads underneath their armpit.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:So there you know, there's some some troll hags, the female trolls, have noses so long that they touch the ground in front of them. They use them to stir the, you know, the stew pot. So it's they're very they're very disgusting. But like the Stellus, they, you know, they're they're easily outsmarted, and they're they do they have not good intentions. And they they they would like to eat the humans, especially small children and and billy goats.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:But, you know, if you have a flashlight on the ready or a bell or something, you can always outwit a troll. They're very stupid.
Barbara Sjoholm:Yeah. And one of your books actually is how to trick a troll. So you offer some very good advice. Well it's interesting how the Stalus sort of seemed to have developed in a different way and I don't know why that is because the Sami of course have been up in the North for far longer than the more recent Norwegians and Russians and Finns. And so some of their traditions may have developed from other sources.
Barbara Sjoholm:They may have come from shared Norse myths, but they also may have come from other parts of Europe and from Russia because the Sami, especially in Eastern Finmark near the border to Russia, had some very different sources and traditions. And they're sort of some of the stalus are actually a little bit golem like in Russian Jewish tradition. You know, people can create a stalu and then send it out to do harm through kind of molding it from earth. And that has some connection with Jewish fairy tales too. The Sami also, you know, they worked alongside the Norwegians in the fishing industry so troll stories were probably told by the fishermen in the Lou Foot And Islands when they were fishing for cod and the two groups of people were fishing simultaneously.
Barbara Sjoholm:But the stala was definitely a separate tradition and I found that really interesting when I was translating.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Yeah. They were one of the creatures that were the most interesting to me. And the other one that's so different that you don't really find in Norwegian folklore at all is the Noadis.
Barbara Sjoholm:Yes. The Noadis.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Noadis. Yeah. That's another figure. I mean, I and I love it that you have all of these words in Sami throughout the collection because these are things that are so unique to the Sami. So it feels very right to have the right word.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:But can you tell us a little bit more about the How did you say I can't even say noaide?
Barbara Sjoholm:Noaide. Yes. Kind of long vowel in the middle, n o a I d I in one, transcription of it. But they come out of sort of circumpolar religion, so they're not really a folk fairytale figure. They were and are a living figure in Sami traditions.
Barbara Sjoholm:They're connected with shamanism. They are religious figures in Sami society. So they can heal, and they can foresee the future. They also aid in the transition to death and they can travel in different worlds. A lot of the Noaide stories that are included in this collection also show the bad side of Noaide's that some of them are killers and they also duel with each other.
Barbara Sjoholm:So there's kind of the good witch bad witch dichotomy in some of the stories. That's very different from Norwegian literature. I think you know a lot of those deeper darker elements were probably edited out a bit of some of the familiar Norwegian folk tales. I'm not sure because I'm not an expert in that but noides still exist in Sami culture and they were active really up until the early twentieth century So some of the folk tales about the Noidaes in this collection are based on real people. And Kriegstadt had heard stories that said he was born in the seventeen hundreds or he was one of the last important Noidaes born in the eighteen hundreds.
Barbara Sjoholm:So they can sort of be traced to people in the community who were acting as doctors and spiritual helpers. Lots of stories would not have made it to Kriegstad's ears because they're sort of a sacred part of the Sami spirituality and they would not necessarily have wanted to tell those stories to an outsider.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:That's a really good point and that kind of brings me around to the next thing I think is so important to talk about and that is about Kriegstad and Saba and the folktales and how they were collected.
Barbara Sjoholm:Right. Well there were sort of two main collectors. One of them is Juss Knut Kiegstad and the other is Isaac Saba. And Kiegstad was sort of a very remarkable man. He lived a hundred and four years.
Barbara Sjoholm:He was born in 1853 and died in 1957 at the age of 104. And his student Saba lived a much shorter life. He was born in 1875 and died in 1921 at 45. And the year he died is kind of important because it was the time when Kvigstad was putting together these four volumes. They both came from multi ethnic areas of Northern Norway where North Sami dialects which means the Varang or Fewer dialect, the Western dialect and Skolt Sami were all spoken.
Barbara Sjoholm:Also Finnish was spoken, Norwegian was spoken, Russian was sometimes spoken, and Saba also spoke some Skoltsami which is a group of Sami who live on both sides of the Russian border. Kriegstad was a lipologist which means that he studied Sami culture, lapology as it was called in the nineteenth century. He was a linguist with a doctorate. He was a teacher. He played a role in Tromso's history as mayor.
Barbara Sjoholm:He was the mayor for a while. He was also part of the parliament and the Ministry of Health I believe in Oslo and he was the rector of the Teachers College in Tromso which was the only institute of higher education in Northern Norway where Sami people could study. They had a scholarship program and some could study every year. And Saba was his student. Saba had gotten one of the scholarships and it was free schooling and returned for teaching for five years.
Barbara Sjoholm:Saba then became a teacher but he was also the first Sami ever elected to the Norwegian parliament in Oslo. He was in the Labour Party and he was an important pioneer in the movement for Sami rights And he believed in bilingual education and the right of the Sami to preserve their heritage while still taking part in modernity. And Kneiksta believed something completely different. He believed that many of the Sami would assimilate or die out and that the main reason he was collecting all these folk tales, vocabularies from different dialects, folk sayings, and healing remedies, and publishing them was that he thought this is kind of the end of the Sami culture and so I need to record it. Isaac Saba did not think that at all.
Barbara Sjoholm:He thought that the Sami would continue and he was determined to do everything he could to help his people. So he had a really different agenda and it was late in the process of translating this book because only Kriegstad's name is on the cover of that four volume compilation from a hundred years ago and a later condensed version that was published just in Norwegian and came out in 1997 which was kind of my primary text for translating. But I realized late in the process that Saba must have played a very important role and Kvigstad hardly gave him any credit at all. He says he was a teacher and that he came from the Varangerfjord and that he collected. Kvigsat actually doesn't say very much about any of the 80 storytellers who were included in these four volumes so I didn't realize that Isaac Saba had actually translated about a 100 of 110 I think of these stories himself from both the Varanger Fjord dialect of North Sami and Skolt Sami which is the sort of Russian influenced version.
Barbara Sjoholm:So it took research at the Norwegian folk archives at the University of Oslo to sort of figure some of this out because I could find there Saba's correspondence with the archives where he told them what he was doing. He said he wanted to collect folklore. Could he get some kind of stipend? They were overjoyed and said yes and here's a bit of money. He could only do it in the summers but he traveled around from 1917 to 1921, the year of his death from heart problems.
Barbara Sjoholm:He collected all this material as well as some yoikes musical form of Sami expression. So I think that some of why Saba's material ended up in the first volume Kriegstad is that Kriegstad sort of took his material and published it and of course he acknowledged Saba as the collector but he didn't really give him the credit that he should have gotten as a very important part of collecting and especially translating this material. When I was in the archives, I could see all of Saba's material. I could see these manuscripts written Saba had a beautiful handwriting and it's written in Norwegian it's written in Sami and they're just pages and pages of this so it's obvious that he had actually done this and I think that he expected that he himself would have published some of the folk tales himself because there's correspondence about that with the archival directors. He imagined either a book for children or something else and instead pretty much Figstad took credit for all of that.
Barbara Sjoholm:So that was actually a kind of amazing insight and it came to me after my first trip to Tromso to look at Figstad's paper and learn more about the storytellers. The director of the Norwegian Folklore Archives had recently published a book about Saba and so she was a great resource to me and so when I came back the following year to do more research specifically on Saba by going to the Fjord up way in the North Of Norway and doing work at the archives. She understood what I was trying to find and what I was trying to prove and was immensely helpful in giving Saba the credit that he really obviously deserves.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Yeah. When I read that introduction, I was completely blown away having studied folklore, but I knew nothing about that, about Saba's role in this. It was a real eye opener, and it was really interesting to read. Because I'm a storyteller. One thing I'm curious about is how did Kriegsta and was there a difference in the way Kriegsta and Saba collected their stories?
Lise Lunge-Larsen:And, you know, did they go out to the community and hear people tell stories? Or did they ask people to come to them? I'm I'm just thinking about how that might change the nature of the telling. Because I know that if I'm sitting in a room and I'm just telling a story to a person versus I have a group of people or a bunch of children and it's a performance it's a whole another story. So do you have a sense of that?
Barbara Sjoholm:Yeah and I think that's a really good point you've made you know and it comes from you being a storyteller yourself. You know the importance of performance and the audience which is laughing which is smiling which is sort of shrieking they're feeling all those emotions and for the most part Kvigstad did not have that and did not want that I mean he was an academic and actually just trying to record a lot of dialects. I mean, language was really crucial and important to him. So there was never a sense of performance. And what he would do when he was younger and more mobile is that he started in the eighteen eighties, and he would go by steamship and smaller boats to these little hamlets all around the fjords of Western Northwestern Norway, and then he ventured further away, to the Varang or fjord, which is near Russia.
Barbara Sjoholm:And he sometimes had helpers, who were usually pastors in the area, like a man named Sonberg who was a pastor in the Varang or Fjord area, I think in Nessibi. They would tell the story sometimes several times or sometimes with variations and he would write them down in Sami and then he would translate them when he got home. And this went on for a long time, but he also had informants. And so one of the main storytellers was a man named Johann Eikio, who was a lay pastor and fisherman in the Nessibi Baranger Fjord area. And he had a correspondence with IKEAL that's in the national library in Oslo where they're writing in Sami.
Barbara Sjoholm:And so IKEAL actually could write, and he wrote down a number of stories and sent them to Kvigstad who then sort of polished them up and and published them. And another really important informant of Kvigstad was a man named Efraim Pedersen and he came from the same area where Kvigstad had grown up on the Lingenfjord in North of Trumseh. And Efraim Pedersen I think contributed more than 70 stories and it started out that Kvigstad would go to him but as Kvigstad got older he was actually in his seventies by the time he was putting this four volumes together He thought it was simpler just to pay people to come to Trumseh. So Efron Patterson was one of the men who came to Trumseh, and he sat in Kvig Sud's yard. And there's a photograph of him sitting on a chair, and he told multiple stories.
Barbara Sjoholm:I think he was a really good storyteller, and, Kvigstad befriended him. He was an a very important source. I don't think he thought of him as an equal exactly, but he was a very important source and good storyteller. And Peterson had been a fisherman so he had a huge repertoire of stories of all sorts. And in other cases there was a young woman Ellen Uzzi who told many stories.
Barbara Sjoholm:She's the youngest storyteller and one of the few women and she came from the reindeer herding districts in the Finmark Plateau and she had a lot of stories about omens and hauntings and dead babies. Many of them came from her family and she had a medical condition. She was in Trumso, and I think he heard of her. So he befriended her, and she told him many stories as well while she was in Trumso. And other stories were just picked up along the way from earlier kinds of forays, especially some that go all the way down to closer to the Arctic Circle in an area called Tisfjord.
Barbara Sjoholm:And they were told in Lula Sami, a different Sami language which Kriegstad also knew. So the process was very different for Isaac Saba because he came from the Sami area. He grew up speaking Sami. His mother told him many stories. Friends of the family told him stories as well and what he specifically sought out were more unusual stories told by the Skolsomni in an area kind of south of the Varanger Fjord.
Barbara Sjoholm:And the Skolsomni were Russian Orthodox so they had been converted by the Orthodox Church. They were not the usual Protestant congregations and they also had some really amazing stories about giant birds that pick people up and fly them away. They had stories about enemies who would desecrate the church of Saint Trifan, who's a Russian saint. So there was a lot of great material there, and Isaac Saba is one of the very first to have recognized how important that was. But in every case, he was on the spot, and there are lots of photographs of him, together with some of these storytellers as well as photographs of the storytellers too.
Barbara Sjoholm:And so I think that, you know, all of the stories in the book have a kind of liveliness and humor. So it's not that Kvigstad wasn't aware of that and didn't try and transmit that in some ways. But I think with Isaac Saba, you get this kind of wonderful combination in his stories of, real people's voices as well as his, storytellers ear for kind of making it beautiful, making it more dramatic. And you know yourself as a storyteller how much it can vary. Who's the storyteller?
Barbara Sjoholm:Who's telling this? And in Izak Saba stories, I think you really kind of start getting a feeling for when people are a little bit unbuttoned and they start they're really telling a good story. And he was very attuned to that and managed to get that down on paper.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:You can really tell, you know, when you read the stories. And for people who are familiar with the Norwegian folk tales, this doesn't sound anything like them because of course, the Norwegian folk tales by Aspunshin and Moe, collected the story. They went out and they heard the stories. But they specifically did a lot of rewriting and editing. So they kept a few dialectal words, but they rewrote them and edited some that it there is a sense of a a one voice, like a coherent voice that's transmitting these stories.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:And, you know, they got a lot of credit and they as they should for kind of capturing the essence of the stories. These Sami stories, what's really fun is the you know, some of the stories is all folktales, of course, travels. You know, like, there's more than a thousand Cinderella variants in the world. And so some of the stories in here, you kinda recognize the elements of it and the different storytellers, and there's kind of an abruptness about the telling that's very different. Would you would you say that that's an accurate observation on my part?
Barbara Sjoholm:Yes. And it I'm really glad you brought in the kind of way that Asbjornsson and Moe collected their stories and then polished them. I mean, they're they're works of art. You know? They're literature, and part of the reason was to kind of create a Norwegian folklore tradition that could help with the idea of making Norway independent from Denmark and Sweden.
Barbara Sjoholm:And I think the Sami folktales do have some interesting qualities that are sort of specific to them. And one of them is this kind of abruptness, as you say. Some of them just sort of stop. You know? And You're still going forward somehow, but you don't exactly know what had happened.
Barbara Sjoholm:Sometimes they actually have a closing line of and I don't know anything more about that. But other times it's just that you know, somebody dies or she never goes back to work for the devil again. There's just a brief summary. And so I have heard from Sami people who study folk tales and know something about it that this is very intentional and that you're not supposed to judge the story. You know, everyone is supposed to take away their own impression of it.
Barbara Sjoholm:And I think by these abrupt endings, there's a way in which you're invited to participate. You know you could add on something yourself if you want to tell it later, or make a variation of it. But you're you get to play a role in them because they're not polished And at the same time, Fiegstad usually chose the most fully developed variant of the story, and he didn't do anything like Ospirin and Amo did with kind of mashing together two stories or three stories and trying to smooth things out taking good elements from each of them. So I've read some of the variants and sometimes he only uses a variant because that's better than the main story but you see in the original versions just how the same story will be told in a lot of different places by a lot of different people who each take some part of it that they really like and emphasize that. And some of them are more bodied, Some of them are surprisingly sexy or puriant in some ways, and I hadn't been expecting that.
Barbara Sjoholm:I think I had read in some articles about Pig Studd that, oh, you know, didn't dare to tell him anything he would be offended by. Then you come to these stories and you're thinking, I couldn't have been that offended because it's in here, you know, the golden penis for one thing. Some of them are really funny, you know, especially the Sami like to make fun of the clergyman. There are a number of stories about the pastor who gets caught in a barrel, you know, because he's trying to go to the other world where he can get a lot of herds of cattle and he ends up going down the waterfall. There aren't very many stories about Norwegians.
Barbara Sjoholm:There might have been some censorship there that they didn't want to tell stories where Norwegians are the villains. But you can assume that these pastors are Norwegians, and that's a coded way for kind of making fun of them.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:And in the Norwegian folktales, the pastors are usually pretty stupid too. My understanding is that that is because they often were actually Danish. They were trained in Denmark. You know, all the officials because Norway was Danish territory. If you wanted to get an education to become a minister, you would have to go to Denmark.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:All higher education happened there and I think they became more and more identified and were associated with the crown, which was Danish and not Norwegian. So the Sami and the Norwegians might have been on the same side in this particular case. That's true of the kings too. The kings are usually not that brilliant and that's because the king was Danish.
Barbara Sjoholm:Oh, that's actually a really interesting point because there certainly would have been Danish educated, pastors up in Norway. There's nothing about Danes in any of the stories, but I suppose that it just implied everyone knew, oh, the pastor, you know, studied theology in Copenhagen or something, and he just doesn't fit in here, and he's really an idiot. So yeah. So there's a whole section on the church and the devil. I think does the devil appear in a lot of Norwegian folk tales?
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Yeah. The devil and the nut. Yep. Not not a lot. Not as much as there, but there's a fair number of stories with the devil in it.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Outwitting the devil is a, you know, an important skill to have.
Barbara Sjoholm:Yes. Yes. And that was also interesting and surprising to me because the Sami kind of retained a lot of, traditional spirituality. At the same time, they allowed themselves to be converted or had to convert and take a Norwegian name in order to buy land or, you know, be taken seriously in the courts and things. They were forced to understand Norwegian, but they maintain their traditional spirituality.
Barbara Sjoholm:So there's an interesting mix in some of these folktales of Christianity, and church mention of churches and God and the devil. And then there are a lot of stories that are taking place completely outside that framework of the Protestant Christianity.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Yeah. One of the things I'm also wondered about is, you know, you said that the or did you read the entire four volume? And did you read it both in Norwegian and and also some Sami? Because I wanted to ask you about your process for translation because that whole issue of what people know and don't know. You know, as a storyteller, when I came to The United States, that was one of the things that I realized is when you tell American kids, especially back when I started in the in the mid seventies about trolls, they they knew nothing.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:And so I had to I had to explain what a troll was and what their characteristics were and all of these things that were assumed, you know, that could assume that any Norwegian child would know, American children didn't know. And so there's a way I wondered about these stories because, again, you know, what is it that we we don't at all understand about these stories because we don't have the right cultural knowledge? And as a translator, you know, did you feel like you could insert some of that in there? Because I I certainly felt very free as an oral storyteller to just, oh, man. I gotta I have to just really explain this.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Did you have any thoughts about things like that when you were working on the translation?
Barbara Sjoholm:That's interesting. No. I didn't think about inserting anything. I really tried to stay true to the translation. I do explain a certain number of things that I understand from years of writing about Sami culture and having translated some Swedish Sami folk tales.
Barbara Sjoholm:But I for the most part, I just thought if people don't understand, that's okay. There's enough that's understandable about every single story that you enter into this world, and you think, okay. I don't completely get it that the corpses, you know, can talk or that they wanna be buried on land and not sea or they do wanna be buried on sea and not the land. But I think that there's enough sort of shared culture internationally in some ways with literature that you it's human beings telling the story, and they live in a different world than you do. But I think that people are willing to sort of take a leap and say, okay, this is new to me, but I I like it, or I'm moved by it in some ways.
Barbara Sjoholm:And as for my own process of translation, I worked mainly from this condensed version that was edited by a woman named Rita Pollan, who is a theology professor in Oslo, and that came out in 1997. And she later did an even more condensed version of around 250 stories. And I know some Sami, but I don't know Sami in any way well enough to translate from it and do a good job. And so it helped that I knew some Sami and kind of a little bit about the structure of the language and, you know, vocabulary words because that helped me when I was looking up things, of course. But I basically made the decision to translate from Norwegian, and there was no complete standard for the Sami that the bilingual books are Norwegian on one side and North Sami on the other side.
Barbara Sjoholm:But Kvigstadt also used dialect words and so did Iseksaba and they come from Skolt Sami, from the Varanger dialect, and from the Western dialects. So there's no standardized Sami either to translate from. So it may be in the future, either people or machines will be able to get across all of that richness. But I think that, the Norwegian is pretty darn close to the Sami, from people who know and have told me and what I've read that Kriegstad was a good translator in that way. And he was literal in lots of ways.
Barbara Sjoholm:And I think that probably given my own choices for words, it's possible that I slightly improved his language, just by my sort of fluidity or choices as a translator but I don't know that. I went through about four drafts and the first one I just did a rough draft from the condensed version and I translated everything. I would put questions or I'd highlight things like in the margins I would have things like have no idea what this means or what does this mean must find out. And then the second draft was a lot of research on these questions through using the Internet. Often, used a number of dictionaries as well as some Sami dictionaries.
Barbara Sjoholm:I asked people different questions, and I also looked up pictures of things that might be in museums that were used then, implements, you know, tools, clothing, things like that that aren't in use now and then weren't in the dictionaries. And I also did some reorganization, and I dropped some stories. And I added more, especially by Isaac Saba and a few women because I wanted to show a little bit more range. So it ended up with about the same amount of stories but a slightly different component, and I kind of rearranged them in terms of the sections. And then the next thing I did was go on internet archives where I could see the originals of the books and then I compared my translations with the originals to see that they were pretty much correct because Brijapolin had made some of her own editorial choices and I could decide whether to go on with those or just drop them.
Barbara Sjoholm:And I could also look at some of the Sami too and guess or look up certain words and and try and get it a little more accurate. And then finally, there was a lot of polishing at the end. So it was a pretty time consuming project considering it was about 500 pages.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:I have to because I do have Bridget Pollan's book. And so I've read a lot of these stories and could compare, you know, your translation. And, you know, I really felt like what your process was a little bit like the process I go through to prepare for an oral storytelling where, of course, I'm I'm not tied down to any particular wording. But but you have a what I loved about reading it is there's a certain there's a sense of fluidity. Like, I feel like you had an audience in mind.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:You know, like, when you were when you were rewriting when you were writing this and translating it, that you almost could visualize an audience. Did you?
Barbara Sjoholm:I think so. You know, I'm an American, and I write American English. So I sort of was looking for something that didn't sound too colloquial, didn't sound too American. I looked for kind of simple words, Anglo Saxon words for the most part with a few Sami expressions in there. But clearly, hear a kind of music when I'm translating often and get in the flow of it.
Barbara Sjoholm:And I did you know, I do think about people reading it, and and I want I wanted to bring out the humor because some of it is really very funny. Not always laugh out loud funny, though there are occasionally some, you know, really amusing parts. But there's a really great tongue and cheek quality about some of the stories that I just thought was really so delightful, and it was really important to me to somehow get that across. And so I I focused a lot on that as well as, you know, things that are scary. You want people to feel that it's really quite nerve racking.
Barbara Sjoholm:You know, you think about every word that you choose, and you try and make it the right word. So there's a lot that's sort of intuitive about that and sometimes in the polishing I'm still changing things and think oh it would be a little bit funnier if I just said it like this. It was great to be able to translate the whole thing over and over again because it got closer and closer to something I thought, oh, people will enjoy this. This is really great.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:I know I did. Mean, I really caught that quality that you have a sense. I felt very included, you know, as a reader. I was aware that these stories really spoke to me. But it is a big collection.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:You know, I think everybody should just start. This is not for children, by the way. I get this people always think that folktale for children. You know? And so it's like, this is you better read this very carefully before you pick out the ones that you, you do for children.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Although, I talked to my little grandson earlier today, the one in Norway, I and told him, I'm gonna talk about the Stalus. And he said, I love the Stalus. But do you do you have how do you think people ought to read this book? I didn't do it in one setting. I read the introduction, and then I just kind of dipped around in the different sections and then back to some of the other sections.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Do you have any ideas for people for how to approach it? Because it is a really different kind of collection.
Barbara Sjoholm:Yeah. Well, I think the idea of just jumping in and dipping around is a great one. And that's what I did, I think, originally years ago when I bought that Bridget Pollan book. I felt very daunted by it. And so I would just sort of look around, and think, oh, this sounds good.
Barbara Sjoholm:And I'm kind of like that with all collections. I look for a title that sort of appeals to me and then my I might read a number of them around that. So some of them have ordinary titles many of the stories actually did not have any titles at all and it was Kriegstadt or Saba that gave them a title. They're just the name of a person or there are you know it's just a basic thing like the dog who saved folk from the plague or how lice were created, the frog mother, animals have ancestral mothers. Those are all titles in the animal section.
Barbara Sjoholm:And then there are the noides, but some of them are only the names of a certain noide. They're interesting titles like people as wolves or the kettle boils without fire or, to make a with the Waide skills. You know, some of those sort of stand out and you think, oh, yeah. Let me read that. Most of them are very short.
Barbara Sjoholm:You can read a handful in half an hour and feel like you've got a little bit of a handle on what's going on. So I think that people will just have to find their way. There are 10 sections, so it's broken down even more and whatever sounds good, you know, just go for it.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Yeah. That that's good advice. You know, if you're into mermaids, here's a sea creature for you. There's not gonna be any Hans Christian Andersen mermaids, but
Barbara Sjoholm:No. I think that children could read some of them, and older kids could read more of them. I mean these were actually told in settings that included a wide range of ages and many people grew up hearing them. And some stories were told specifically to teach children how to stand up for themselves, you know, kind of like the troll stories. It's the same with the Chuds, these sort of semi mythical people who come from the East, they're robbers, and they always wanna kill the Sami, but they also can be outwitted or hidden from.
Barbara Sjoholm:And the stories about the Stalus, these were told to children to sort of know that they didn't live in always in a safe world. There were a lot of challenges to be growing up in the Arctic, you know, with the weather and with people who are colonizing you and people who wanted to convert you and people who wanted to kill you and steal your reindeer. It was not sort of like growing up in Southern California and going to the swimming pool. It was really a challenging world. And so you needed to develop a sense of survival and, cleverness and solidarity with others and also knowing when not to trust people, and when to hide and when to fight back.
Barbara Sjoholm:So all these lessons are embedded in the stories, and they were used to teach children. So, I know that today, we there are a lot of stories we probably wouldn't necessarily pass on to children. But I think there are others that that I think children could really respond to. And I I know you've seen it when you've told stories about trolls, but also, I mean, I remember I was love fairy tales when I was growing up. And I love the Brothers Grimm, and a lot of those are really creepy and strange and involve wolves eating people and, you know, same with Hans Christian Andersen.
Barbara Sjoholm:I mean, one of my favorite stories was the girl who trod on a loaf where she puts a loaf in a puddle and her feet gets stuck to it and she gets drawn down to hell where all the spiders she's tormented wrap their webs around her. And, no one ever told me that story. I just read it and it stayed with me and it was the moral was be nice to spiders, essentially. So I don't know. I guess I take a progressive view to what children can tolerate and what they might actually enjoy.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:But I agree. I you know, we kids are coddled. They're not as sturdy as used to be. They had to be sturdy to make it.
Barbara Sjoholm:Yeah. And I think the Sami today also, you know, are very cognizant of that. And there are a lot of picture books told about some of these Sami stories and they're much friendlier. You know, they have nice pictures of reindeer sort of sleeping in the tent with you and stalos that look kind of cozy. And so I think that through picture books, teaching kids the Sami language, there's a lot of attention to making it a little less scary and a little more friendly.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Yeah. And, of course, you know, kids, they grow older. What you can tell to a five year old is very different from what a 12 year old likes. I mean, you know, telling troll stories when you get to those 11, 12, 13 year olds who begin to think they're too old for stories, they would love the Stalis. Maybe you should write one of these collection for children.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Is that something you've thought about?
Barbara Sjoholm:I think it would be really interesting to do a children's book with some of these stories or translate maybe from a contemporary Sami author. You know, I'm aware of some collections that are being published in Sami now, because it's a good way. There are lots of Sami kindergartens, immersive classrooms, and that's one way that they're bringing the Sami language back. A lot of the Sami language was lost during the twentieth century by forced conversion and by also boarding schools where they weren't allowed to speak Sami. So reteaching these stories and getting kids to speak Sami but also to know more about their heritage is important.
Barbara Sjoholm:I think some of those could well be translated. As for me what I'm kind of working on now is kind of a travel memoir. It comes out of traveling around, Eastern Finmark and the coasts of Norway, the Far Northern Coast in 2024 because I went I got a grant from the American Scandinavian Foundation to go up and learn more about Isaac Saba and the Skol Sami. And so I spent some weeks up there traveling around by myself and meeting people and doing research and learning and visiting the museums. And I got really, really interested in that part of Norway.
Barbara Sjoholm:I've not read very much about it, and it was kind of an incredible time to be there because, of course, Russia is just across the border. And there's a lot of threat coming from Russia at the moment with a lot of jamming of the airwaves at times. There are ships in the Baranger Fjord. There are nuclear submarines, and there's a constant level of threats coming towards Norway from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. So it's very, very chilly up there between the two countries, and you really feel that when you're up there.
Barbara Sjoholm:And you feel at the same time this kind of immense sense of history. There are some really, well known archaeological sites that go back 10,000 years from Sami settlements around the fjord or sort of right after the melting of the glaciers. And there are folk tales kind of embedded in the landscape. You know, are lots of stories that are in this book that referenced in the topography of that landscape. And then the other thing is the results of the second world war.
Barbara Sjoholm:I guess I hadn't realized the devastation that the bombing from the Russians especially did to places like Watsa and Chirkynez. And then the Germans when they did their scorched earth retreat across Finmark from Finland to the West Coast. They basically just burned everything and so they destroyed a huge amount of not only dwellings and boats and businesses, but they also destroyed a legacy of handicrafts and art and books. Really, all these years later, those cities and that area are still dealing with reconstruction and the memories of of what happened. And that is really not obvious.
Barbara Sjoholm:Now when you read histories of Norway or when you visit the more popular cities of Oslo and Bergen and even Tromso, you don't really realize that people up in the North were kind of held hostage for, four years by the Germans. There were just a tremendous number of soldiers, something like 250,000 up in the North that Hitler sent. This is something I'm really interested in writing about so I've been writing this travel memoir which it turns out University Minnesota is going to publish next year. I'm very excited about that.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:That will be great because from Narvik on North, it's another Norway you're in.
Barbara Sjoholm:Yeah. And I think translating these book tales got me really interested in the North in the first place. I hadn't really also realized how multicultural the history is and how it's still very multicultural. Many people have Finnish, Sami, Norwegian, and Russian in their background and the history kind of reflects that and you see that in some of the folk tales as well. And so it made it more alive and vivid to me to actually be up there and travel around.
Barbara Sjoholm:Plus, it's just beautiful. I mean, it's extraordinarily mysterious and unpopulated, very dramatic scenery along the coastline.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Wow. I can't wait to read that. My husband's whole family comes from North of Narbek, and I'm an Oslo girl, but with a Danish grandfather. Sorry. Well, I was doing your name completely Norwegian.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:How do you say?
Barbara Sjoholm:I'm talking to people in this country, I just say. But if I'm in Sweden or Norway, I say something more like.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:Well, thank you, Barbara. It's been so illuminating. I have learned an immense amount. And here I thought I knew all kinds of things about folklore, and I'm just in awe of everything, you know, that you've taught me and that you have put into this book. I hope everybody goes out and get it because it is really, like you said earlier, it's a landmark collection.
Lise Lunge-Larsen:There's nothing whatsoever out in English like this. And so thank you for talking with me today. So this is with Barbara Shoholm talking about her new book, Sami Tales from Far and the Near Worlds. Thank you so much.
Barbara Sjoholm:Thank you, Lisa. It was totally a pleasure talking to you, and I loved hearing about the trolls. It's wonderful that you're a storyteller too, so thank you.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Sami Folk Tales from the Near and Far Worlds is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Narrator:Thank you for listening.