By the Fire: Sami Folktales and Legends by Emilie Demant Hatt (review)

With this translation of Emilie Demant Hatt's 1922 collection of Sámi folktales, Barbara Sjoholm has provided an English-language audience with a valuable resource for incorporating Sámi folklore into research and teaching and has added a unique collection to the small body of Sámi folktales currently available in English.

By the Fire consists of 72 tales collected by the Danish artist and ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt during her travels in Sápmi (the Sámi homelands) between 1907 and 1916. Black-and-white linocuts by Demant Hatt herself illustrate the collection. The tales are organized into six thematic sections such as "Sickness Spirits," "Animals," and "Russian Chudes and Other Enemies," the last of which features the marauding Chudes (modern North Sámi orthography čuđit), made famous internationally by Nils Gaup's 1987 North Sámi-language film Ofelaš (Pathfinder [1987]).

The tales are followed by field notes and commentary, which provide useful contextual information and explanations of Sámi words left untranslated in the text and should be read alongside the corresponding tales. While Sjoholm's translation has omitted most of the sentences and some specific words in Sámi, the few culturally specific Sámi words retained will be unfamiliar to many readers and are usually only explained in the field notes at their first occurrence. While the field notes will work well to explain Sámi-language terms to those reading the collection from cover to cover, a glossary would have been useful for readers interested in a particular subset of the tales or for students reading excerpts from the collection.

In addition to the tales collected by Demant Hatt, Sjoholm has written a short translator's note and a substantial (55-page) afterword. Sjoholm has also gone through Demant Hatt's personal field journals to match the individual tale-tellers to as many of the tales as possible. (Demant Hatt had identified the tales in the original collection only by the community where she had been told them.) Sjoholm's attention to the individual tale-tellers also carries through the afterword, much of which she devotes to discussing Demant Hatt's relationships with individual tale-tellers, the kinds of tales each individual had in their repertoire, and how their personal histories and politics may have influenced the tales they told. The afterword paints Demant Hatt as cultivating a much more personal and friendly relationship with the tale-tellers than many other collectors of Sámi folklore, such as the Norwegian Just Qvigstad or the Finn August Koskimies; after all, Demant Hatt had not set out to become a collector of folktales, but rather had decided to travel to Sápmi on account of her personal fascination with Sámi culture, only later deciding to put together a collection of folktales from the ethnographic material she had collected.

The special circumstances of this collection's creation distinguish it from other Sámi folktales available in English translation. Demant Hatt during her travels was able to collect stories from a wide geographic area, and her personal connection with the tale-tellers apparently made them feel comfortable sharing tales of settler aggression that are absent from other collections. Demant Hatt quite pointedly places these tales of colonialism alongside the tales of the murderous Chudes in the last grouping of tales, and the corresponding section in the field notes records how the demeanor of the tale-tellers was always serious when telling tales of the settlers or Chudes, whereas tales of other villains (such as the ogre Stallo) were more humorous.

Demant Hatt was particularly interested in the lives of Sámi women and children, and her collection prominently features tales told by women. While there is scholarship available in English on tales told by Sámi women, and a few tales told by Sámi women are available in existing English-language...