Lapponia – one of the first written documents about Sami people

Lapponia is the oldest document about Sami spirituality. It was written by Johannes Schefferus in 1673.

The Chancellor Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie wanted to present a document about the Samis to the world to counter act for Swedens negative propaganda, questioning the swedish honour, claiming that the swedish victorys where won with the help of Sami magic. According to the thesis of Ragnhild Myrstad called “Bjørnegraver i Nord- Norge – spor etter den samiske bjørnekulten” (freely translated: Bear graves in Northern Norway – traces of the Sami bearkult) 1996, De la Gardie therefore ordered Schefferus to write the document that became Lapponia.

Like all of the earliest documents about Samis, it is written by foreigners, mainly from the church that had a very limited understanding of the Sami religion/spirituality. They mainly saw it as devil worship and tried to make parallels to their own religion, mainly the old testament and old Jewish traditions including animal sacrifices to understand it better.

Read and introduction to shamanism here.

Then of course there was the language barrier. Although some of the missionaries learned Sami language, its hard to know now how well they learned it.

So everything in the documents written by missionaries should be taken with a pinch of salt. Still it can provide some information, especially about how the foreign colonizers saw us Samis.         

When Elin was in elementary shcool in Karasjok, the teachers would teach some Sami history. They mentioned Lapponia, because it was the first document about Sami spirituality, but at the same time they would say that it was no point in trying to learn anything about sami people from this document, because it was written by missionaries. Elin asked the teacher why sami people themselves didnt write anything, so that we could know how things really used to be. The teacher answered that only people connected to the church knew how to read and write in those times, thats why there are no writings about the sami people before christianity.

This link will bring you to the document Lapponia which is Transcribed, Compiled and Annotated by William P. Reaves. We thank him for his work to get this on the world wide web.

http://www.germanicmythology.com/MISCELLANEOUS/Lapponia.html