Lifestyle of the Sami
From Through Lapland With Skis and Reindeer by Frank Hedges Butler, 1917.
From: 1917 C.E. To: 1917 C.E.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Through Lapland With Skis and Reindeer by Frank Hedges Butler, 1917.
When the Lapp pitches his tent it is generally by a lake where water can be obtained, and sheltered from the winds. The tent is a mere rag of coarse cloth about 6 ft. high to 20 ft. in circumference. In this confined space, with a hole at the top to let out the smoke, the Laplander, his wife, children, and dogs sleep. Many times have I slept in these tents, sometimes seeing the stars and the Northern Lights shining above.
At other times it has been snowing, the snow melting by the heat of the wood fire as it descends. The only entrance to the tent is by a small slit on one side covered by a flap, which lifts or falls and prevents the external air coming in. The erection of a tent takes half an hour. Three forked branches are stuck into the ground in a triangle, joined at the top, and a few branches tied round to strengthen it.
The existence of these people is subject to constant change. During their wandering they see the greatest variety of scenery and witness Nature in her wildest and most beautiful garb. Their lives are passed sometimes in inactivity and sometimes in great bodily fatigue and hard-ship, and in undergoing the extremes of plenty and want.
When hungry, the Lapp gratifies his appetite without restraint, and is perfectly ravenous; the quantity he devours at a meal is astonishing, and sufficient to last him some days should he be exposed to any sudden extremity.
In all parts of Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian Lapland there is a numerous class of poorer Lapps, whose herds of deer are too small to enable them to live in the mountains, or to trust to them entirely for subsistence. These are called Wood Lapps, and they live in the large woods and forests that abound in the country. There are also the Fishing or Coast Lapps.
Near the coast potatoes grow and a little corn, but the greater part of the soil is covered with moss, on which the 200,000 reindeer feed. The Lapps themselves live mostly in the winter on reindeer meat and dried salt fish.
The Laplanders are generally of low stature, but many of the young men and women are handsome and strong. Near the coast the people are dark and their eyes are brown, but in the interior fair people are met with light blue eyes, a clear skin, and beautiful white teeth. Some have thick heads, short flat noses, wide mouths, and straggling beards, and resemble the Mongolian type. They are very superstitious and are frightened of a stranger if he tries to photograph them.
Honesty is one of the great virtues of the Lapp, who abhors theft: the merchants only cover their goods to secure them against the weather in their wooden buildings, and on their return from long journeys find them safe and untouched.
The Lapps are charitable to the poor and hospitable to strangers. They are clean and industrious, making tools, implements for fishing, clothes, and ornaments.
To travel in comfort in Lapland it is necessary to dress like the natives. In winter the dress is the same for men and women, both wearing breeches made of reindeer skins—the skins of the young calf—which they call muddas or paesks. The feet are covered with shoes of reindeer skin filled with dry grass; the hands with gloves, also made of reindeer skin and filled with dry hay. Women generally wear a white reindeer coat and red cap with yellow or blue embroidery. The men's caps are filled with eiderdown and feathers from different birds. The winter costume of the Laplanders is the same throughout the country.
For the fairs and for weddings and feasts the dress is very picturesque. The women have many-coloured shawls over their shoulders and silver ornaments, and at weddings they generally don white shoes and red gloves. The men wear on such occasions a red leather belt—sometimes richly ornamented and covered with small squares of solid silver—from which they suspend their knives, tobacco-pouches, etc. Silver rings are worn by both sexes, and in all my travels, whether in the frozen North or in Central Africa by the Victoria Nyanza, where the Kavirondo tribes go nude, I have always observed that the ladies like ornaments.
For driving in pulkas, a driving paesk is put over the ordinary paesk, and is made of the best and thickest skins. Over the shoulders a broad bear-skin tippet is worn which entirely covers them, reaching nearly to the waist; the claws of the animal are sometimes left on the ends hanging down in front. I bought a very nice bear tippet for thirty roubles from a Lapp in Enare, Finland. The tippets are a great protection during a heavy fall of snow and generally in bad weather.
From the belt of the paesk is suspended the knife, tobacco-pouch, and shooting apparatus when hunting. The knife is long, and is used for cutting wood, eating, clearing the snow off the bottom of the pulka, or killing the reindeer.
Reindeer leggings slip on and come above the knee; they are sometimes fastened to the knicker breeches, and prevent the snow or cold coming near the legs. They are secured at the bottom by long, narrow yellow or red bands round and round the high shoe, to keep the cold from ascending and the snow from getting in. The Laplanders wear no stockings or socks, the shoes being stuffed with soft dried grass. The gloves, made of reindeer skin, are also stuffed with grass, and there are no fingers to these gloves. Drying the grass before the fire in the morning is a great business. Sometimes twenty Lapps—men, women, and children—with their feet bare and spotlessly clean owing to the rubbing of the grass, perform this operation.
Grass keeps the feet warm, and means comfort for the whole of the body for the rest of the day, for as there is no dust or dirt in the snow and ice, the body is kept clean. In fact, washing the hands and face is all that is necessary when travelling north during a journey; a vapour bath is obtained later on at a village.
Almost every part of the reindeer skin goes to the making of clothes. The paesk is made from the whole hide of the deer killed in the winter; the leggings and gloves, of the skin covering the legs and thighs of the animal, and the shoes are taken from the skin between the horns and covering the top of the head. The fur is worn outside, and the closeness and thickness of it make it impossible for the cold to penetrate.
To preserve the free circulation of the blood every article of clothing is made loose and easy. The sleeves of the paesk are very large, which makes the coat easy to get out of, as it is drawn over the head. This is very useful when the cold is severe, as the Lapps are continually obliged to sleep on the snow without any further shelter for their bodies than their clothes. But it should be observed that the author put on twenty-five separate articles of clothing, the only one of no use being the handkerchief, because in the dry air colds are unknown. Laplanders owe to the dry air the great blessing of health. Like the Northern Esquimaux, they are almost entirely immune from disease. Colds from exposure are nearly unknown to the Laplanders, and I have often seen the winter paesk more open in front than with others who live in warmer districts. They never seem to feel the cold, and are always most careful never to remove their gloves and to have plenty of dry hay in their shoes.
Butler, Frank Hedges. Through Lapland with Skis and Reindeer. T. Fisher Unwin LTD., 1917.
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