Lapp shamans

One of the stalls at a Christmas market in downtown Oslo featured Sami (Lapp) handicrafts – shamanic drums among other things. As far as I know, very few original shamanic drums of this type are in existence, since Christian missionaries zealously destroyed all traces of the pagan rites. Presumably, somebody is making a nice bundle by producing modern-day copies. A bit ironic that these drums are offered for sale as Christmas presents – the persecuted Lapps getting their own back, as it were.

A letter from Jeffrey Vallance concerning Lapp shamanic drums [ FT245:73] is full of interesting information. However, even when taking paranormal and supernatural phenomena at face value, a certain rational distance should be kept. He writes that “…when it was determined that a Lapp shaman was blowing a ship off its course, the curse could be annulled by smearing fresh fæces from a virgin into the vessel’s inner seams”. Surely an appealing scenario for seamen with a coprophile bent. But how probable is it that they’d have a suitable virgin handy at the right moment? Old-time sailors generally frowned on having women on board, and I doubt the Sami were any different. And if they did have any female crew, would they necessarily be virgins? On the other hand, they couldn’t very well load up with maiden poo before setting out, since it was supposed to be fresh at the point of use. This could of course be an example of the ‘impossible’ conditions one sometimes meets in folklore (a Norwegian tale specifies that a certain maiden should be “not naked and not clad, not hungry and not fed”). Or it could be that Jeffrey’s informant was kidding him.

Nils Erik Grande

Oslo, Norway