Olaus Sirma: Saami poetics and clerical networks in early modern Swedish Lapland

The two songs by the Kemi Sami Olaus Sirma (c.1655–1719), published in the famous book Lapponia by the professor and antiquarian Johannes Schefferus in 1673, are the first well-known examples of long Sami poetry.1 Lapponia was translated into several languages, and the poems also circulated as separate translations and adaptations, first in the periodical The Spectator in 1712 and later in versions by Herder, Goethe, Longfellow and others.2 Reception as proof of ‘natural tenderness of sentiment’ of uncivilised people changed when, in 1890, it came to light that Sirma was not a random ‘Lapp’ that Schefferus found in the wilderness, but a student at the University of Uppsala and a priest-to-be.3 This led to two parallel processes: questioning the authenticity of these songs as oral tradition, and finding out who actually this Sami student was.4 Yet these processes were tied to a dualistic understanding of relationships of oral and literary cultures, and to stereotypical evaluations of seventeenth-century sources and ethnic minorities.

Our aim is to analyse the poetic reception, personal networks and wider historical context in relation to the later reputation of Olaus Sirma. After giving an overall context of the changing administrative status of early-modern Lapland, we begin by concentrating on the ways Sirma is presented in Lapponia and in the historical reception of the two Sami poems, also setting these songs in a comparative perspective. The main part of the chapter discusses Sirma’s personal history and local networks: besides later oral history, a surprising number of official documents relating to him remain, partly published by Isak Fellman, with more of them investigated and copied in the personal archives of K. B. Wiklund and Erik Nordberg during the early twentieth century.5

The Sami are an indigenous people living in Scandinavia, northern Finland and the Russian Kola peninsula, speaking several Sami languages. Olaus Sirma’s native tongue belonged to a dialect continuum nowadays called Kemi Sami that was spoken in the central and southern parts of present-day Finnish Lapland and in the regions west of the White Sea in the Murmansk oblast, and the Republic of Karelia in present-day Russia. Only a few texts exist in Kemi Sami, as the speakers became gradually assimilated with Finnish-speaking settlers, with only a few speakers left by the beginning of the nineteenth century.6

Although often represented as wild nomads, the Sami living in the southern and central parts of Norway and Sweden had their first contacts with Christianity as early as the eleventh century through Scandinavians living in the neighbouring regions. At least since the fourteenth century, Christianity and indigenous religions of the Sami were intertwined into a syncretic practice with several regional subvariants. Yet the conversion to full Christianity was slow and ended only around the 1750s. As early as 1388, individual Sami started to demand the teaching of Christianity amongst their people, and since the 1550s the lack of sufficient ecclesiastical services was evident.7