Despite her ethnographic career spanning only a decade (1907-1916), Danish ethnographer and artist Emelie Demant Hatt (1873-1958) helped produce many of the most important Sámi ethnographic and literary works of the early twentieth century. These include her collaborations with Johan Turi in the production of Muitalus Sámiid Birra (An Account of the Sámi) and Sámi Deavsttat (Lappish Texts), along with her own Med Lapperne i Højfjeldet (With the Lapps in the High Mountains). Barbara Sjoholm’s new translation and edition of Demant Hatt’s Ved Ilden: Eventyr og Historier fra Lapland (By the Fire: Sami Folktales and Legends) brings yet another significant work of Demant Hatt into English for the first time. With the collection, Sjoholm centers long-underrepresented Sámi women’s voices in historical ethnographic work, establishes Demant Hatt’s extraordinary contributions as an early feminist ethnographer, and offers a complex and valuable portrait of Sámi folklife in the early twentieth century.

Sjoholm’s translation builds upon her previous work with Demant Hatt—including her translation of the ethnography With the Lapps in the High Mountains and Sjoholm’s biography of Demant Hatt Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, Artist and Ethnographer—and also works in tandem with more recent translations of Sámi-authored ethnographies and folklore anthologies (Thomas DuBois’s translation of Johan Turi’s An Account of the Sámi and Travel Accounts and Other Accounts; Tim Frandy’s translation of Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar). In this regard, Sjoholm’s translation participates in a broader project of re-centering Sámi voices in Sámi scholarship, in re-issuing out-of-print ethnographic materials to help mitigate the disruptive impacts of settler colonialism, and in translating works to research languages to improve access for the international scholarly community. This community includes Sámi scholars, whose traditional homelands are divided across four nations and four dominant languages. Collectively, these kinds of projects work intertextually to re-voice diverse Sámi perspectives through restorative and polyvocal ethnographies. What emerges is not some monolithic representation of culture, but rather a nuanced dialogue between Sámi people about Sámi life.

Demant Hatt’s collection includes seventy-two stories from thirteen named storytellers (and a few unnamed ones), across several Sámi districts and languages (South Sámi, Pite Sámi, Lule Sámi, North Sámi) spanning a geographical range of nearly 1000 kilometers in Sweden (from Härjedalen to Karesuando). Structurally, it is loosely grouped by an emic categorization of stories, with sections as follows: Moose, Lucky Reindeer, Reindeer Luck, and Wizardry; Sickness Spirits; Murdered Children; Animals; Folktales; Russian Chudes and Other Enemies. The book also contains Demant Hatt’s lithograph illustrations of the tales; her field notes about the stories, which offer additional context for many of the tales; and a thoughtful and well-researched afterword by Sjoholm. The afterword addresses several important matters, including a brief history of Sámi people, a survey of historical ethnographic work on Sámi people, biographical information and repertoire analysis on the collection’s four most significant storytellers, a discussion of feminist perspectives present in the women’s tales, and biographical information about Demant Hatt and a visual analysis of her lithographs.

One of the most significant dimensions of this book is the centrality of women storytellers and women’s experiences throughout the work—a stark contrast to historical works compiled by male ethnographers who dramatically underrepresented women in their collections. The androcentric collection techniques of these ethnographies has created a problematic and flawed rendering of gender roles in Sámi communities—tropes which continue to circulate among outsiders today. Demant Hatt’s collection highlights a greater number of stories that feature women protagonists and that tell of clever women besting adversaries, strong women demonstrating resiliency in crises, and bold women embarking on adventures. Sjoholm highlights some of these feminist motifs in her afterword. For instance, in most Chude stories of bands of roaming marauders told by men, a vulnerable Sámi person (commonly a teenager or older woman) bests their adversaries through a superior knowledge of the environment. Demant Hatt’s collection, however, shows how women defeat Chude invaders by using women’s tools, or by running across a marsh that men are too heavy to walk upon. These gendered aspects of tricking invaders are frequently obscured and lost in countless variants told by men that populate better-known volumes. This translation is an immediate and significant contribution to Sámi feminist folklore studies, and a critical resource to understanding gendered patterns of folklife and storytelling a century ago.

Another significant inclusion in this volume is that of Pite and South Sámi storytellers, who have tended to be overlooked by collectors, who favored North Sámi communities. The accounts in this collection detail the kinds of threats and acts of vigilante violence sometimes perpetrated by settler communities, which were largely ignored at the time by Swedes, and which remain conveniently absent in the contemporary histories of colonial states. These recollections depict the mood of Sámi-Swedish relations in the early twentieth century and highlight the systemic way settler colonialism relies upon individual acts of violence and intimidation to subvert Indigenous sovereignty.

Additionally, Sjoholm’s translation brings into English important tales that are largely underrepresented in other recent translations: a number of significant and distinct belief legends involving reindeer, death, disease, and the noaidi (shaman); several mythological and etiological tales explaining the origins of animals, such as the loon, mosquitoes, and lice; and a collection of regional stories about the good and wicked sisters Njavisjædne and Atsisjædne.

Sjoholm’s translation is up to her usual masterful standards. Without losing sight of Demant Hatt’s voice (she appears to have made minor edits to translate oral stories to written form), the stories are extremely readable, vivid, precise, and enjoyable. Drawing from Demant Hatt’s original fieldnotes, Sjoholm has also worked to bring Sámi storytellers to the center with this project. Her biographical section in the afterword with its repertoire analysis is brilliantly reconstructed and proves to be as captivating as the stories themselves. For those in Sámi studies who cannot read Danish, By the Fire is useful in both research and classrooms for engaging directly with primary texts in Sámi oral tradition. It is of particular value for those who work with Sámi belief, settler colonialism, and Indigenous feminist studies.

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[Review length: 1005 words • Review posted on December 10, 2020]