Introduction
Certain places in Northern Norway are perceived as especially disrupted, dangerous, or unrestful. In this paper, I investigate a handful of such places with connected narratives from my own fieldwork on unrest. The places investigated are situated in the North Norwegian county of Troms, which is the second most northern county in Norway, and part of the original living areas of the Sámi population. The unrest within these sites is, in the narrative material, caused by human activity but carried out by disruptive forces. Sometimes the causes are known; sometimes they are unknown, but still connected to active agencies. Some of these narratives are revealed by (references to) domesticated animals with anticipated ability to sense and react to forces unknown to humans. Animals still may be able to warn humans, while other warnings may come in dreams that allegedly heighten a sensitivity toward such forces. The warnings from domesticated animals and dreams relate to two types of forces that make a place uneasy: chthonic forces and harmful deeds of humans against nature or other people. Implicit within these narrations and interpretations is an animistic worldview: places can and do remember (Nergård, Reference Nergård2022; Pedersen, Reference Pedersen and Kirby2009, Swancut, Reference Swancut2019; Willerslev, Reference Willerslev2007).
These remnants of past animisms point back to ways of living and perception in a landscape that goes beyond all science-based understandings of nature. Particular places are guarded by human-like persons, stored in the narratives, and based on experiences with human encounters with them. In the Sámi tradition, these narratives bring land and such places intimately close to emotions and thoughts. In nature you are not alone. This cosmology does not disregard knowledge of plants and animals but brings human relationships closer to them. All kinds of life belong together.
In contemporary politics, however, the animist-inspired arguments are not considered valid. For example, in connection with the building of the wind turbine park at Fosen, mid-Norway, local Sámi reindeer herders claim that the area under threat belongs to the reindeer, foremost. But this idea, based on a different ontology, would not be accepted as an argument. This is an apt example of “cosmopolitics” (e.g. De La Cadena, Reference De La Cadena2010; Nergård, Reference Nergård2022) where the conflict over the environment is based on two radically different ontologies or world views, but where only one of them is considered legitimate in our contemporary political climate, and where this form of intangible cultural heritage of the Sámi is ignored.
Today, we associate disruption of nature with environmental destruction that is the result of human activity. In indigenous Sámi cosmology nature is not a clockwork or machinery that appears in a certain manner, but rather a personhood with its own will and language who asks to be handled with care, especially if it is poorly understood (Nergård, Reference Nergård2022; Olsen, Reference Olsen2020, Reference Olsen2021).
In his analysis of Sámi pre-Christian cosmology, and what is left of it today, Nergård (Reference Nergård2022) argues that the Sámi conversion to Christianity was dependent on the church’s acceptance of the Sámi cosmology as it happened in Laestadianism, the pietistic Lutheran revival movement that had its origin in Sápmi in the mid-19th century. A contemporary reminiscence is that public life and nature are woven together, and the guards and deities also exist continuing a traditional spirituality and closeness to nature (see also Kristiansen, Reference Kristiansen2007).
Before the construction of the Sámi parliament in Karasjok in 2000, Sámi officials and a state delegation stayed overnight on the building site to check whether it was quiet and harmonious or troublesome. This old Sámi ritual is widely practised before raising any new building. According to tradition, the overnight stay may clear senses and memory for warnings about possible future conflict and unrest caused by the new building, and this is the background for my use of the concept of “unrest” in this paper. According to Sámi custom, a site (whether a building or a site in nature) has a memory of its own and will speak up in the shape of a guard and warn about potential conflicting interests. In the narrative tradition, any place or site of common interest keeps a guard to remind visitors about a track or certain sites of a busy landscape (Nergård, Reference Nergård2006).
The sites and places presented in this text are close enough to settlements to be in regular use, whether it be grazing, hunting, fishing, or gathering. Connected to this common use, nature, according to tradition, keeps agents there to remind one about the limits of the resources and the justice for not respecting them. An anticipated overexploitation of a resource not only connects to local justice but also to a living nature that contains moral obligations for individuals through experiences of a more spiritual character (e.g. Oskal, Reference Oskal1999). The place of unrest can result from several different types of disturbances: from problems in human-to-human relationships, to human/nature relations, given voice and remembered by a guard of a place. The presence of the guard normally is experienced through unrest of various experiences at a site or as mental states of unrest.
When one arrives at a fishing/hunting or gathering spot, one is supposed to ask the guard watching over it for permission to be there, what the purpose of the stay is, and how long one plans to stay. This can be an outspoken request or just a quiet thought. Nergård (Reference Nergård2022) argues that this introduction of oneself to a site and the guard demand something from you. The very act of asking is at the same time a promise to act there with respect and care for the resource they are after. As permission is received, a promise is given. The guard has certain sanctions available for the visitor not respecting their demands. A candidate accepted on the site but not acting according to the promise may risk a lot. They may feel the revenge as unrest in the house at home, in a troublesome period of any kind or simply general emotional unrest. What is at risk is downloaded in a huge narrative material that any user of any common site is supposed to be familiar with. In some cases, another person visiting the site can be punished for former disrespect against the order of a site the guard is watching over. The displacement of responsibility also belongs to the order of a site. A guest may incidentally be involved in the Career of unrest within a site. Many Sámi narratives on nature deal with this displacement of responsibility for not acting respectfully. The ultimate rationality of the narrative is speaking up on behalf of the community sharing its resources. The narratives do in that respect give nature a voice of its own.Footnote 1
In the following examples of detections and narrations of places of unrest, we shall see how aspects of morality, justice, and spirituality contribute to the complexity of the phenomenon in different ways.
A nightmare at trollriver
In the late winter of 1976, I went for a hike with a friend in the mountains near the city of Tromsø. After sleeping over in an open cottage, the next day we decided to go down to a valley nearby to sleep in a goahti (Sá) – a small traditional Sámi turf hut.
We had not slept much the first night, so we ended up sleeping from early afternoon. I then had the strangest dream, following a terrifying creature in the snow-covered forest. As I woke up, I realised that I had been sleepwalking a considerable distance in the metre-thick snow. My friend and I followed my tracks until, terrified, we fled home that evening.
Recovering from the experience, I shared the story only with my nearest family, fearing I had a serious problem with sleepwalking. My brother, however, knew someone from the settlement near the place who said I should not worry about it, as very many people had experienced strange and scary things at this exact place. There is something wrong with it, locals insisted. When asked why this place was “uneasy,” an elderly Sámi claimed with certainty: “Somebody must have been murdered there.” He also added a question: “Did you ask for permission to stay there?”
More than forty years later, the event and explanation becomes relevant according to my research in human/nature relationships in North Norway. During my fieldworks, from around 2008 and forward, stories of places of unrest have surfaced many times, thus making relevant my own introduction to the phenomenon.
Sometimes, the perceptions of places of unrest are reflected in Norwegian place names that have replaced the original Sámi names, many of them forgotten and left behind during colonisation of Sápmi and the Norwegianisation of the Sámi people. The Norwegian (ised) names in many instances invoke narratives of supernatural beings, almost always Trolls. The incident from my youth thus happened near one of the many Trollrivers and Troll lakes in the area.
The Puffindog warns
Trollvalleypond. map ref. 69.43°N, 18.50°W
I was told about the place in 2020 when invited to visit a nearby old shrine and autumn camp for Sámi reindeer herders having their summer grazing area on the island of Senja. The shrine, now abandoned for 80–100 years, consists of several flat stones, now fallen over, that have constituted a kind of altar, and lies around a kilometre from the pond. It is unclear if it was connected to pre-Christian or Laestadian rituals. The story of “Trolldalskjønn,” which means Trollvalleypond, like the story from TrollRiver, involves the narration of a sort of murder.
When Anni was a young girl, she and her aunt were on a hike in this mountain terrain with their dog.Footnote 2 They had an especially smart and balanced dog at the time, a Norwegian Lundehund (No), which is an old breed relatively small and originally used for hunting Puffins (fratercula arctica). When they encountered the little pond, the dog went crazy, running around it, barking and growling, body-hair strutting. They had to drag the dog away from the pond, but it fought hard, and her aunt damaged her hands on the thin rope they used. Around 50 metres from the pond, the dog stopped growling, and after that, it was totally exhausted, as if it did not know anymore what the fit was all about. Back at the family, they were told the story of a young girl who had left her little baby there. This allegedly happened in the lifetime of the father of Anni, around the year 1900, but was never detected or prosecuted by the authorities, so the story goes.
The exact place was however hard to find, as neither “Trolldalen” (No) nor “Trolldalstjønn” was named on any map. There are five other “Trolldalstjønn” in Norwegian maps, the nearest outside of a nearby village, but not here. When inquiring of the locals about the name, I was eventually told that the unofficial names were connected to a small valley, running parallel to a bigger one. The valley has two small ponds or lakes, one of them rich with trout while the other is a small pond higher up the valley. This is the one where Anni and her aunt had their experience.
Adding to the complexity of this narrative is the secret or unofficial name of the pond: Not only are the old Sámi place names gone or forgotten but so are the unofficial Norwegian ones that reminds of the past landscapes here. The tragedy, if we believe the story, lies in the (forced) conversion to Christianity that introduced a strict sexual moral that left many unmarried, pregnant young girls in an impossible position: The priest would probably condemn the child, which meant no baptism and no burial on the official and blessed churchyard in case of death. She and others like her had to make an impossible choice, heartbreaking whatever she chose.
The billygoat in the rock
Map ref. 70.08°N, 21.59°W
Else, a young woman with ancestry from this fjord could tell about two difficult or dangerous places connected to old vacated Sámi settlements in this area. One of them, the one closest to today’s settlement, had no stories about it. The other is linked to an old, strange story. This is a small, somewhat isolated settlement further out in the fjord than the other local settlements. The old settlement stood close to the seabed in a small bay facing the open fjord. Else and her uncle visited the place a few years ago, something local people here very reluctantly do, according to her.
Some of the inhabitants were holding goats, the story goes. One autumn, they could not find one of the billygoats. They searched but gave up when winter came and counted it as lost. When spring came, however, it suddenly came out of the rock face in the middle of the settlement, totally twisted. The animal was twisted to such a degree that one of its front legs now came out of its upper back, and it was not possible to save.
This story has a parallel in the North Norwegian folk-litterateur (Hveding, Reference Hveding1944), that concerns a lamb that was “rock-taken” (No: “bergtatt”), but was extracted within a day, seriously twisted, but was finally (barely) saved.
In Sámi folk beliefs, and also in (old) Norse ones, “rock-taking” refers to supernatural beings that takes or lures humans or animals into a rock. These supernatural beings are called “underjordiske” (chthonic deities), in Norwegian language, while in Sámi they are associated with gufihtar. This reference has however not been much used, as most people with Sámi ancestry in the areas have lost their Sámi language due to Norwegianisation, that tried to assimilate the Sámi and Kven (people in North Norway with ancestry from immigrants from Finland and Sweden) into a uniform culture and ethnicity (Hansen & Olsen, Reference Hansen and Olsen2004; Minde, Reference Minde2005; Myrvoll, Reference Myrvoll2010; Nergård, Reference Nergård2019).
Human beings most often encounter the subterraneans when a barn or enclosure for domestic animals has been placed on a spot already occupied. If there are serious problems with the animals, the behaviour can be read as an external influence.
The settlement in the story is old, isolated, and vacated a long time ago. The little bay, far from roads or other settlements, and the strange story point to a past alien landscape. People seldom go ashore there, like Else and her uncle did, and no one stays after darkness has fallen. The story represents an alien past landscape that is hard to come to terms with, even in daylight. At night, no one can. Time does not heal here, but increases the distance to the old landscapes, forces, and secrets as time passes.
Two rivers
A curse and the death of a brother
Map ref. 69.77°N 19.84°W
This is a place of serious unrest according to local population and people with ancestry from the area. A goahti (Sá), a traditional Sámi turf hut, has been raised and rebuilt several times in an open space on a ridge where two rivers meet. It is said to be hard to sleep here, because of some sort of traffic, signified by noise from what sounds like human voices. The unrest characterises the whole river valley, but is more concentrated here.
There are two different local stories that both connect the unrest to Sámi reindeer-herding activity in this summer camp for herders who had their winter-grazing camp on the Swedish side of the border.
In one story, a reindeer herder killed his brother by accident, whom he had fallen out with, when he chased his brother’s reindeer herd off a cliff, not knowing his brother was in the herd. After that he turned crazy, the story goes, walking up and down the valley, shouting for his brother.
The other story concerns an old Sámi reindeer herder who was too old and weak to follow the herd to the winter-grazing area and had to rely on the goodwill of locals. Not everybody treated him well, and sometimes he had to sleep in the barn, with the animals. According to the story, he laid a curse over the whole area.
One contemporary reindeer herder, belonging to the reindeer-herding unit (Sá: Siida) holding the grazing rights of the area, claims that it is almost impossible to gather reindeer in closures there, as the animals are constantly disturbed by something and refuse to move into the closures.
A man who had grown up in the nearby village had a scary experience with a friend in the narrated goahti but also talked about a place further up the valley. The whole place is warm, he claimed, so the snow never covers it.
The end of the road
Map ref. 70 (21)°N 73 (44)°W
This is an old Sámi settlement with several stories about different kinds of places of unrest locally. Just outside the settlement, there is a small bay where some people from the settlement kept their domestic animals in a barn used in the summertime. There are several stories about this place, and it has been considered a place of unrest for generations. One time, the barn had to be moved, as it was built on a place that affected the animals severely. This place has several problematic places connected to different types of beings. In the settlement itself, there is one place connected to “grey people” (ghosts), while the place at the end of the road more connects to the “small people” traditionally understood as chthonic forces. People also quite recently experienced strange things here. One woman who slept over in a hut at the end of the road experienced that a small stone landed on the roof of the hut when she laid in bed one late evening. The stone then rolled slowly down the roof before falling to the ground. The landscape here is very open, with no forest or even tall trees, connected to the severe weather on this outpost to the North Atlantic Ocean. There was no one around. The story thus connects to a local traditional perception of the place, a perception that is revitalised by events and stories like this.
The sources of unrest
From these examples, we may develop some preliminary notions about the anticipated sources of unrest. The fact that the naming of the small valley where Anni and her aunt had their experience is a local secret, not visible on maps, suggests that the story is part of a local esoteric knowledge.
By the end of the road, the barn had to be moved, because the sheep reacted to something that their caretakers could not perceive, the local story goes. This story has a number of equivalents in North Norwegian folk literature. In Hveding (Reference Hveding1944, p. 22), Lars dreamt that the new barn was put up in “the wrong place” and experienced unrest among his animals. He also had a strange meeting with the figure he had dreamt, whom he understood was one of the little people, “småfolk” (No), living under the new barn. The story has many equivalents in folk literature and local stories in North Norway. The notions of warmth inside the goahti by TrollRiver can also be understood to deal with chthonic proximity.
Anni and her aunt detected their place through their domestic animal, when their dog went crazy by the pond. This way of detecting troublesome places is a classical theme in Sámi narratives and in north Norwegian folk literature (e.g. Schøyen, Reference Schøyen1977). The domesticated animals work as translators of the spiritual state of places and react with fear and unrest towards something there.
«The end of the road» has a story that originates from experiences with domestic animals, like the examples above. The caretakers found the sheep exited and uneasy in the barn, and gradually connected their uneasy behaviour to the place where it was built. I know a lot of these narratives about animals disturbed in barns. The code in most of them is that the unrest in fact is addressed to the owner. He or she cannot escape the threat when the animals are made objects for it (the animals have not misbehaved). The strange little story where a small stone lands on the roof of the hut reflects a tendency of attention to small details in the stories of the places of unrest generally. Small and discreet is considered more disturbing than clearly visible, as we are dealing with forces of nature that are discreet and silent. The narratives are shared inside the community– hidden from the world outside.
The Two Rivers example, like the Trollvalleypond, connects to the (Norwegianised) Troll names, as one of the rivers is Trollelva (No) that runs out of Trollvannet (Troll lake). The Troll names involve a quite large area here.
The billygoat in the stone implies narrating animals in a different way. The billygoat disappeared for a whole winter, just like a bear that hybernates. The bear was a respected and feared animal in sámi cosmology and referred to as “Gods dog” (Sá: Ipmilabeana). When killing it, this brought fear of spirit revenge, which probably led to much of the secrecy and human-like ceremonies of the bear cult funeral (Myrstad, Reference Myrstad1996).
The billygoat story also connects to stories from North Norwegian folk literature where animals were bergtatt (rock-taken) and twisted because of this. In a strange way, the stories of twisting also connect to stories about the practice of leaving infants in nature. In Gulatingslova chapter 21 (Riksarkivet, 1994), one of the first Norwegian legislative assemblies, the rules for the “carrying out” (No: utburd) of babies were stated: among other anomalies, it says that if the face turns to where the neck should be or the toes turns to where the heel should be, it would give permission to leave an infant out in nature. Twisting seems to concern creative processes in nature, or more precisely, disturbances of such processes of creation. This connects the stories about utburd to the billygoat and the lamb in the rock, thus connecting both rock-taking of animals and malformation of babies (and probably also domesticated animals) to active agencies in nature.
In the Sámi tradition, you gave a child back to Gufihtar, some narratives tell. As she had taken yours and left one of her own with some sort of handicap in the family she invented. In some narratives, the mother hoped the baby was found by someone and taken care of. The Sámi did not give the child back to “nature,” as their notion of nature is that of a living subject. In the Laestadian movement spiritual beings from the Sámi tradition such as Gufihtar (subterraneous being) Fárru (travelling group), Rávgat (water trolls), eahpáraš (dead child beings), and Gomit (ghosts), that are connected to nature and landscapes, have been accepted as part of legitimate beliefs (Kristiansen, Reference Kristiansen2007; Miller, Reference Miller2007, pp. 80– 95).
In Norwegian stories, the ghost of a left baby should be named immediately if one encountered it in some shape or form: “I baptise you in hope, either Kari or Jon” (No: Eg døyper deg på von, enten Kari eller Jon). In Sámi narratives on meeting a ghost of an unnamed child, the ghost should also be named, but according to some Sámi narratives, be given a non-human name (Nergård, Reference Nergård2022).
Why is lack of naming such a problem? Was the baby a creature of nature until it was named? In a paper on the Norwegian tradition of foetus burials, Anja Magnussen (Reference Magnusen2006) sees the beliefs connected to utburd; to leave a marked child in nature, to the widespread fear of the ghost of the unnamed child. The ghost was feared like a ghost of a killed bear, and Myrstad (Reference Myrstad1996) suggest a connection between the complicated rituals of the bear cult and the possible revenge of the bear’s spirit.
The alleged fear and outrage of the spirits that is expressed in the stories of evil deeds at places in nature, like the explanation of the unrest at Two Rivers, could be connected to a sort of perceived liminality, a dangerous and evil domestication of the wild. In the domesticated murder site, there are possibly thousands of good and loving human acts, and one evil. Sometimes human beings are close, vulnerable, and at the mercy of the forces of nature in this thinking. During pregnancy, illness, or death these forces are especially close (Olsen, 2019). A certain category of unusual death can also bring such forces closer, this time remembered by the place from where it can disturb humans (and animals). But it is not necessarily the death of a human being that we are dealing with. A broken promise to a guard may also leave a place of unrest. Of the examples here, it is Two Rivers which most likely connects to guards and broken promises, as the watercourse is relatively rich in arctic char, salmon, and sea trout, and the unrestful place lies just above a large pool, where the two rivers meet.
In 1860, A.J. Friis led a survey from which ethnographic maps covering the two northernmost counties in North Norway was made. Connecting my findings of stories about places of unrest to these ethnographic maps, it is striking how all the places lie near past Sámi settlements. There is thus a strong connection between a Sámi presence or at least a past Sámi presence and the conception of places of unrest.
Understanding places, understanding nature
As the Sámi philosopher Nils Oskal (Reference Oskal1999) notes, there is not just one mother nature but many small mothers, a claim related to Sámi views on nature and morality connected. Related to the narratives that connect a place of unrest to a problematic death (like in place 1, 3 and 4), suggest several concerns: As nature is not seen as one single deity or spirituality, places can be marked by very different qualities, without seeing nature as a whole or a (non-violent) cosmology being affected. In their article on spiritual change among homicide survivors, Johnson and Zitzman (Reference Johnson and Zitzman2020) argue that spiritual and religious crisis are common after the violent bereavement of a loved one, while in our case, the place is affected, not the beliefs of people, as an understandable consequence of an animism where places may act (and experience) like persons. Concerning the other source of unrest, the gufihtar is connected to certain places in nature and is detected only through warnings from domesticated animals in the narratives here. With little place in today’s cosmologies, troublesome for humans and domesticated animals, the unrest remains.
In pan-Sámi culture, a joik (Sá: Sámi traditional form of song) brings a person to you. You do not joik about a person or a landscape; you joik them, inside out in a way that is a classical trait in Sámi approaches to people, animals, and what we could call nature generally. Anni, who took her dog to Trollvalleypond, refers to both profane and life changing incidents when she talks about “taking her thoughts seriously.” She claims no Sámi ancestry herself, but is seriously interested, from a distance in one way, very close in another, very typical in the aftermath of the Norwegianisation of the Sámi and Kven populations.
The narratives about gufihtar most often concern encroachments on nature that is followed by problems, affecting domestic animals as a barn or other building have been placed where it should not. As domesticated animals are considered closer to nature than humans, it is through their reactions that the flaw is discovered. But animals, according to the story from Troll valley pond, can also detect a left-behind and lonely child, as it creates a sort of trauma, remembered by the place, from where it has nowhere else to go.
Throughout my fieldwork, it has been someone’s strange experiences at specific places in a landscape that have released the relevant narratives of the places of unrest, if they still are remembered by anyone. I have information about around 16 unrestful places in the county of Troms, but not all of them are connected to relevant narratives, only someone’s knowledge that the exact place is problematic while the story of what allegedly caused it has been forgotten. The stories have been told in everyday settings like at the kitchen table or campfire conversations, often together with other stories about landscapes and specific places in a local area, and often connected to fishing, hunting, or gathering.
The gufihtar in narrations of troubled places has many equivalents in other hunter/gatherer or pastoralist societies around the world. “Badagshiin” are the “half people” of the Duka reindeer herders in Mongolia (Pedersen, Reference Pedersen and Kirby2009). Just like the gufihtar, they are encountered in the wilderness by lonely herders or hunters and are to some extent always present in narratives but seldom seen. Pedersen suggests that the Dukha conceive their landscape as a “heterogenous network of prominent places” (ibid, p. 136), as opposed to the space orientation of the “sedentary” landscapes of for example contemporary Euro-Western agriculturalists. This place-orienting in Pedersen’s view connects to their nomadism and to “the field” as a recurring theme in Dukha animist thought: “The idea of a focal point out of which beams of spiritual ownership ‘radiate’ so as to produce a gradient halo-effect of non-human agency” (ibid, p. 139). “Places” are, in contrast to spaces, the parts of landscapes that sees and remembers. The connection between Dukha and Sámi animist thought is foremost the narratives that explain the prominence of a “place”: In Dukha cosmology it is shamans’ actions in the past, their burial place, or evil or unusual events that make places remember, thus resembling the narratives here that deal with detecting a place of unrest, while the stories of badagshiin have an equivalent in the end of the road story. The idea that spiritual ownership radiates from a focal point is interesting especially concerning the story from Trollvalleypond, as it suggests a certain range of the disturbance as the dog relaxed around 50 metres from the pond, acting as if it did not know what had happened.
Of course, the bear is the animal in these areas that has been most intensely narrated as having spiritual powers (Myrstad, Reference Myrstad1996, Sommerseth, Reference Sommerseth2023). Myrstad (Reference Myrstad1996) connects the elaborate rituals in the Sámi bear cult to a fear of spirit revenge. The fear and secrecy surrounding the bear cult is a possible source of unrest: it was kept secret because of the foul play of killing an almost godlike creature in its den. It is a possibility that this is relevant for the billygoat in the stone narrative, as the disappearance of the goat coincides with a hibernation period of a bear.
The bear cult probably disappeared in its original form in the 17th century, but remnants of the culture and thinking clearly remain, also possibly through narratives of places of unrest. When having killed a bear, the Sámi, the Finns, the Nenets, and other indigenous peoples such as Siberian and Mongolian people like the Dukha, tried to trick its spirit to believe that someone else was the perpetrator. This was usually done by speaking the language of a neighbouring people or by talking about how the Russians, Norwegians, Swedish had killed the bear (e.g. Myrstad, Reference Myrstad1996).
Sámi hunters would clearly know the characteristics of a bad bear, such as being old, skinny, and often with bad teeth. But why would it attack this exact people in this exact place? Was it because they had killed a bear in the near past? Was this the spirit revenge?
In an article in the Norwegian archaeological journal “Viking” (Reference Petersen1940), Th. Petersen references Jakob Nursfjeld, a Sámi informant, who claims that the reindeer will not graze at night near the bear grave by Østervatnet in Overhalla, mid-Norway, thus making a possible connection between the unrest and the secrecy of the bear killing, even if Nursfjeld suggests that Sámi people were also buried there in the past and connects the reindeer’s behaviour to this.
An animist interpretation
The narration and attentiveness towards the places of unrest presented here represent a paradox. When connected to the anthropological truism of cosmologies as establishing an ordered universe (e.g. Douglas Reference Douglas1966, Lévi-Strauss, Reference Lévi-Strauss1978), they are cosmological anomalies because they are not explained or even claimed to be fully understood. In one way, this is in line with what Nergård claims to be the Sámi narrative tradition (2022), where stories are told without explanations, as raw material for anyone’s interpretation. For Nergård (ibid.), the narratives concern spiritual or unknown aspects of a nature that is not fully understood or mastered. The spiritual world is a continuum of the limits of knowledge. It starts at the point when you cannot know for sure: from knowing to hoping. In the conceptualisation of such places of unrest, this traditional Sámi perception of nature is central. Some of the understandings are especially fragile, as the narratives are based on world views now eclipsed by Christianity.Footnote 3
A place of unrest implies a view of nature as having a kind of memory, though this memory corresponds with human experience. Humans know that nature remembers and have access to its memory in the narratives. It was humans who carried out what nature remembers for them. The idea is present in many indigenous cosmologies, like Bruce Chatwins (Reference Chatwin1988) account of Australian aboriginal understandings of a nature that remembers. Moreover, the understanding that places have a memory, undoubtedly connects the places of unrest to an animistic ontology (see for example Gillou, Reference Gillou2017 and Swancut, Reference Swancut2019). It is also worth remembering that the Sámi word used for physical surroundings; luondo, originally described the personality of a place, an animal, or a human (Joks, Reference Joks2015, Reference Joks2022), as Sámi language originally had no word for “nature.”
More than my prayers: the noaidi secrets
For a long time, I did not speak about my own experience at TrollRiver. I felt that it was too personal to share, and it was not until I got to know Bjørn that I told someone outside of my close family what had happened. At the time we worked together as masons and had talked about related topics. Bjørn was not surprised by the strange story and asked a very precise question: “Did he have a black beard, the one you followed in the forest?” I had to admit that “he” had that. “I know who it was,” Bjørn continued: “His name is Anders (stating also his sir’s name)”:
“One day I found him when he had shot an otter, in May! I got angry, as he could not know if it had cubs in the den. I know more than my prayers, but you can use my Gammi, he then replied. I said he could go to hell.”
Anders was not the one that had built the goahti (Sá) I had slept in when I had my nightmare. It was possibly one of his brothers. He probably felt arrested by Bjørn, so he exaggerated when he told of his several Goahti. To my knowledge, he only built one. It was placed quite far away from the local community, innermost in the long valley. When asked why, a local resident answered that it was to drink his beer in peace. Anders was unmarried and died when he was in his fifties. It seems that he was a somewhat marginal figure in the local community. One that withdrew to a place where he would not be bothered, supposedly to drink. But what did he mean by the saying that he knew more than his prayers (No: Æ kan mer enn mitt fadervår)? Bjørn obviously took it as a kind of threat, as he had some of this knowledge himself, but he felt strong and not afraid of whatever Anders hinted at.
“More than my prayers” may refer to different kinds of esoteric knowledge in these areas, most often connected to a Sámi cosmology or past. It also means that there are forces in the human world that are not perceived or controlled by humans. It also means that some are closer to these forces and are blessed with the ability to deal with them. Just a few know and are blessed with the force to be able to deal with them like Noaidi. The religious conversion from an old Sámi cosmology and belief system that has evolved through an intimate relationship with this nature through many thousand years (Achilli et al., Reference Achilli, Rengo, Battaglia, Pala, Olivieri, Simona and Torroni2005, Aikio, Reference Aikio2004, Reference Aikio, Grünthal and Kallio2012; Tambets, Reference Tambets, Rootsi, Kivisild, Help, Serk, Loogväli and Villems2004) to Christianity, has left a vast nature-knowledge and connected shamanist and animist traits in a sort of cosmological darkness. This means that “more than my prayers” could refer to some remnants of this nature-knowledge, be it use of plants or knowledge about animals or natural forces. Very often, however, it will refer to knowledge about magic.
From 1561 to 1760, around 860 people were put on trial for witchcraft in Norway, and around 277 people executed (Ankarloo & Henningsen, Reference Ankarloo and Henningsen1987). In the witch-processes in North Norway, many Norwegian women were executed as witches, on the accusation they had worshipped the devil, or that they used forbidden drugs like henbane which was associated with so-called satanic rituals. Sámi noaidis were also prosecuted and executed because they practised a pagan religion. The colonisation of Sápmi entailed an attempt to eradicate sámi language, cosmology, and “paganism,” which only partially failed, as the notion of the place of unrest reminds us. Especially a vast knowledge about animals, plants, and natural forces could not be totally eclipsed by Christianity and was even given a place in the Laestadian congregations (i.e. Outakoski in Kristiansen, Reference Kristiansen2007). Nor was cosmology, beliefs, or ethics that differed from the Christian tradition, eradicated. On the surface, the Sámi culture and language are gone in some places, but in partly hidden practices, in memories and relationships with animals and esoteric use of plants, it lives on, showing itself through the cracks of the Christian religion like the notion of the place of unrest. We may say that Christianity weakened the tradition by replacing the expert Gods dealing with nature and human practices with a God who did not.
It is also worth noting that Sámi ritual and magic practices are esoteric knowledge that should be kept secret. I have myself grown up in an environment where some of my near relatives knew of magic practices like blood stopping but never talked about it or admitted to ever using it. When my mother’s aunt, that for a while was my nanny, promised to teach me the magic of blood stopping, I doubted her skills as I thought she talked too much about something that should be a secret, not to lose the power or grace. I was five years old at the time.
In her PHD dissertation, Barbara Miller investigates the importance of secrecy in Sámi healing in her portrait of Nanna, a healer from Porsanger:
“Silence will yield more knowledge, speaking entails loss of knowledge. Nanna related:
What I now tell you, you must not tell anyone, not to your sisters or brothers, and not to anyone with whom you will live together with. It is your secret. You shall keep it for yourself – sealed like a bottle. It is no use that you have learned it. If you see something in other people, don’t tell it. Then you will also see if you have seen correctly. In that way you start to grow. But if you tell, ‘I saw and I saw, this and that’, it is like throwing it out in the garbage when it is spoken about. Do you understand? And sure that you do? To help people in this way is very valuable. A lot of people just complain and have nothing to give – no help to give” (Miller, Reference Miller2007: 183).
As much as the secrecy involved in past Sámi practices is an inseparable part of the tradition, it is a methodological problem for any research into it. If the power to heal grows with secrecy, as Nanna claims, this probably goes for other practices, like my relatives’ blood stopping. To analyse secrecy as just a means to power for the noaidi or healer would imply not recognising that Nanna understands it to work from within, affecting the power to heal itself. The secrecy that governs Sámi magical practices may mean that the depth of the knowledge and practices will never be fully understood. For one thing, because the old noaidi kept it for himself to make his magical powers grow, or because no worthy novice was found. Then comes colonisation and the Christening of the Sámi, with the witch trial processes where many Sámi noaidis were executed for some anticipated paganism or devil worship (e.g. Hagen, Reference Hagen, Gustavsson, Henningsen and Klintberg2006, Reference Hagen2015). The incentives for keeping the secrets came from several concerns, which have buried them under layers of esoteric knowledge, colonisation, religious conversion, persecution, and Norwegianisation. As a result, the healer is not a direct incarnation of the old noaidi. The healer may be a new age fantasist but also a Laestadian healer. None of them shares the spiritual reference of the noaidi. Some knowledge and beliefs from the tradition are known and upheld, while others are lost. The contemporary healers are “not quite noaidis,” to borrow from Morten Pedersen’s “not quite shamans” (Pedersen, Reference Pedersen2011).
Conclusion
It is hard to believe that a place in nature can be feared, avoided, rediscovered, and intensely narrated for no reason. A major point here is that the knowledge and stories about places of unrest do not grow out of a specific cosmology alone. There must be something real to fear to motivate the intensity of the warnings and darkness of the narratives. The stories of the murders maybe a sort of translation where the worst and darkest of acts one can imagine in the aftermath of something explains an anticipated evil. The rediscovering of places is harder to explain.
The stories of the Gufihtar and the relative proximity to settlements suggest that the place of unrest connects to a kind of liminality, a sort of negotiation of the relationship between humans and spirits. The human-like appearance of the bear makes it the most human-like animal in nature here, and a liminal being that suggests a connection. Event comes before explanation and is most often soberly expressed in local narratives (Nergård, Reference Nergård2022). Explanations on the other hand can be quite creative, as we have seen. The widespread notion in North Norway about leaving babies in nature as a cause for the disruption of places, can be seen as something added in hindsight, as some of the stories are obviously false (one little baby was said to wear a Sami dress, but such traditional dresses are never made for small babies), added to translate, or hide something else.
The narratives are open, elastic, and changeable. One of Nergårds examples (Reference Nergård2006, Reference Nergård2019) is the narratives on eahpáraš focusing on children left behind. They can easily be “moved” to new contexts like children forced into boarding schools separated from their family, language, tradition, etc. These tragedies fit perfectly into the narratives on eahpáraš. The children were stolen by law and forced into an eahpáraš universe. From a Sámi point of view, there is probably not a more precise account for the boarding school trauma than the narratives on the stolen baby. Is this why these narratives had a very strong position in Sámi communities long time after the poor girls left their babies behind?
The Christening of the North Norwegian population, today almost eclipsing old relationships with landscapes and places, connects to places of unrest in a quite sinister way. We have seen how old Norwegian law and Sámi practices defined rules for when a child was marked, probably also with little life chances, to be given back to nature. In the Christian north, another concern was added: The baby should be legitimate, which means that the parents should be married. If not, the future of the child could be bleak. It would not be baptised, and when dead, it would be buried outside the churchyard. For the young single mother this must have worked as a terrible curse, especially if she was a believer. There was no life in sight for the child and leaving it to die could have been a merciful act, out of despair, as likely as an evil one.
The place of unrest can be contrasted to other nature in at least two different ways: first to the surrounding nature in general and second to the place of a shrine. In the case of Trollvalleypond, the shrine is located just around a kilometre from the place of unrest. The narrative of the alleged kill and the history of the shrine however separates the two as connected to different adaptions to nature and different patterns of settlement and nomadism. The shrine is connected to a nomadic reindeer-herding culture, that was denied access to the Norwegian side of the border, while the place of unrest is connected to a local narrative. Further the place of unrest is wet, located around the pond and swamp, while the shrine is dry, on a chalk-rich elevated place with a small spring to the south. The birch trees are big and healthy with beautiful, white bark and bear no mark of abuse like they often do in other old camps.
The place of unrest, on the other hand, challenges and reminds us of something bad in the past. This past also keep the secrets of the sensitivity of what we could call its victims. This is not for everyone. People regularly pass and maybe stop at places of unrest without noticing anything. To experience you must have “strong blood,” a repeating local narrative goes: you need both the sensibility, but also a harsh side to stand in it.
In the areas I have investigated, most people with Sámi background have moved away, been rendered marginal because of immigration of Norwegians, or have been made invisible through Norwegianisation.
The unrest itself, together with an anticipated moral order of places in nature, connects the narratives presented here to a judicial and spiritual Sámi tradition of fairness and respect for other species and your natural surroundings.
For some of us who have grown up regarding ourselves as Norwegian, a meeting with a place of unrest works as a sort of wake-up call that points to an upbringing that is Norwegian-speaking, still heavily influenced by a Sámi cosmology of human/nature connectedness.
The cosmology that facilitated this connectedness and intimacy in the first place is still not fully eclipsed by Christianity. Animism and Christianity represent almost opposite views of human connectedness and relationship to nature. The places of unrest are remembered and are thus points of entry to remnants of a different relationship to nature. The feeling of being separated from a nature you ought to be close to is an echo of a lost animism that is pointing to the place of unrest. The rock walls are still here, but no one is rock-taken anymore. The domesticated animals can still warn of invisible disruption or danger, but an including ontology is fractured, leaving the places to remember.
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