Saernieprieve – Dávvirat Duiskkas – njoktjen/ voerhtjen 2024
The twelve participants on Dávvirat Duiskkas’s[1] fourth fact finding trip was given a foretaste of spring – even summer, the second week of April. When we arrived at our hotel for the week in Frankfurt am Main, the temperature was 25 degrees Celsius. The nice weather was going to be merited. During the following three days we would cover more than 1600 km by bus on the German autobahn. On Tuesday April 9 we visited the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum Kulturen der Welt in Cologne in Nordrhein-Westfalen, on Wednesday April 10 we visited Museum Naturalienkabinett Waldenburg in Sachsen, and on Thursday April 11 we visited the Naturkundemuseum Kassel in Hessen. It was of special importance that at all museums we able to visit some of Sápmi’s sacred ceremonial drums.
Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum – Cultures of the World in Cologne
Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum – Cultures of the World[2] in Cologne has the fifth largest Sámi collection in Germany. The collections include a ceremonial drum. Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (RJM) was therefore this trip’s top priority, and we were profoundly grateful that the staff was able to receive us. A large delegation awaited DD with the museum’s managing director, Michael Lohaus, in the lead. In addition to museum staff, people from the Mayor’s Office, Cologne’s Provenance Research Office and Lara Michalke, a student from Cologne University had taken time out of their schedules.
After a short introduction, we were escorted to the storing facilities to see the Sámi collection. Stephanie Lueerssens from Conservation and Restoration accommodated this part of the visit. DD’s program was tight as usual, but we were able to do a quick tour of the museum’s exhibitions guided by Mr. Lohaus. RJM has long placed great value on not concealing its colonial past, according to Director Nanette Snoep.[3] Moreover, the museum works in an interdisciplinary manner to build bridges to the present in its exhibitions. This became evident on the tour. Once again, we were inspired by a German museum’s decolonial efforts.
Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum of Ethnology was founded in 1901, opened in 1906, and reopened in a new building in 2010 with the new name “Cultures of the World” to its title. The museum is based on the private collections of the ethnographer and world traveler Wilhelm Joest who left them to his sister, Adele Rautenstrauch, after his death in 1897. Today the collection comprises more than 60 000 ethnographic objects, the library holds approximately 40 000 volumes, and the Historic Photo Archive almost 100 000 photographs.[4]
The Sámi collection at RJM consists of 143 objects and 15 photographs (158 numbers). The collection consists mostly of clothing, household items, fishing and hunting utensils, and souvenirs. An object of special interest is the ceremonial frame drum or gievrie of South Sámi type (RJM 15327)[5]. The drum’s provenance is unknown, but it is “old as the hills” as the Sámi author and playwright Rawdna Carita Eira has written in her poignant text about the Freavnantjahke gievrie (“the drum from Frøyning Mountain”).[6] In 1869 the Swedish professor of architecture Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander in Stockholm was reported as the owner of the gievrie.[7]
Thirty-six years later, in May 1905, the gievrie was purchased for the museum by W. Fusbahn in Bonn, perhaps as an addition to the museum’s already significant drum collection (two hundred in 1910) and at first incorrectly explained as a tambourine from Sudan.[8] Fusbahn seems to have been an employee of the Prussian Boden-Credit-Aktien-Bank zu Berlin and a resident of the city of Bonn, nearby Cologne. In 1905 he contacted the RJM’s director, Wilhelm Foy, and offered him to buy his private collection of ethnographic objects.[9]
The museum’s first Sámi objects were acquired in 1904: A small knife with a carved handle made of reindeer horn or bone (RJM 12374) that was bought along with other ethnographic objects from the London based dealer William Oldman[10], and a rigid heddle loom, njuikun in North Sámi (RJM 11639), made of reindeer horn. The loom was given to the museum by a man named Otto Weiler. The most recent Sámi object in the collection is a woven (shoe) ribbon (RJM 66507) from Luleå in Sweden that the museum received as a gift in 2013.
The Sámi collections at Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum has been bigger. At least 100 objects were exchanged with Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde in 1937. These objects probably form part of the Museum of European Cultures’ (MEK’s) Sámi collection today. The objects exchanged with the Berlin Museum were all part of the same set acquired by RJM in 1921 from Arthur Johannes Speyer I (File 1921/01).[11]
The large majority of RJM’s Sámi collection (81 numbers) however, was purchased from the Hamburg based ethnographica dealer and collector Julius Konietzko (1886-1952)[12]. The purchase took place in 1925. Accompanying the collection the museum received a catalogue with detailed drawings of many of the objects [13].
Another significant contributor (14 numbers, purchased in 1912) is Johann Friedrich Gustav Umlauff, a well-known Hamburg based dealer and the brother-in-law of the zoo owner Carl Hagenbeck. The Umlauff objects are all everyday articles typical of nomadic reindeer herding Sámi culture, such as wooden bowls for milking (náhpit in North Sámi), pack baskets for reindeer (bægkah in South Sámi) and a cradle board (gierkav or gierkam in Lule Sámi).
It would come as no surprise if the Umlauff objects were related to Hagenbeck’s exhibitions of peoples and animals. Indeed, Umlauff’s son, Heinrich, was one of the organizers of the “Nordland Exhibition” (Ausstellung Nordland) in Luna Park in Berlin in 1911 along with Carl Hagenbeck and Wilhelm Lippman.[14] The exhibition consisted of 125 people of Sámi, Inuit, Nenets, and Swedish ethnicity (folk dancers from Skansen in Stockholm) as well as 150 “Nordland” animals. The Sámi were mostly from the Talma reindeer herding community in northern Sweden.[15]
The Talma community’s all-year grazing land is within the municipality of Kiruna while the summer grazing land is on the Norwegian side of the border.[16] That same year, Wilhelm Chramer (1884-1936) at Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde (now MEK) had visited the Talma community to collect information for his dissertation and to assemble material and recruit people for the Nordland exhibition.[17]
Apart from the shoe ribbon and the objects assembled by Konietzko, the provenance of the Sámi collection at Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum is unknown beyond nation state. The origin of the Konietzko collection is stated as Jukkasjärvi (Čohkkiras), a church village, parish center, and a lake on the Torne River in the before mentioned Kiruna municipality in northern Sweden. DD and Museum Europäischer Kulturen in Berlin are both investigating the travels Konietzko made to Sámi areas between 1911-1916, based on archivalia provided by Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt in Hamburg.[18]
To Dávvirat Duiskkas’s knowledge however, Konietzko does not seem to have been in Jukkasjärvi himself. [19] This does of course not rule out that he has been in touch with people affiliated to this area or ordered objects from there, but the contact may very well have taken place in Germany. Could the objects purchased by RJM in 1925 be from the Nordland exhibition or perhaps Konietzko bought them from Chramer and his colleague Planert who also visited Jukkasjärvi in 1912?
Museum Naturalienkabinett Waldenburg
Museum Naturalienkabinett is a rare gem the museum world.[20] Situated across the road from Schönburg Castle in the small town of Waldenburg, the museum was founded in 1840 by Otto Viktor I, Prince of Schönburg-Waldenburg. The museum is one of the few remaining cabinets of curiosity in Europe and one of the oldest natural history museums in Germany where the original furnishings have been preserved. Two Sami ceremonial drums with drum hammers have been in Waldenburg since 1839 and they were the cause of our visit. The museum manager, Fanny Stoye, was quick to respond when we sent her an email. It soon became apparent that she had written an article about the drums investigating their German provenance research.[21]
Museum Naturalienkabinett Waldenburg is based on a collection of natural objects and curiosities from the Linck family of pharmacists in Leipzig, including the collection of Johann Henrich Linck the elder (1674-1734) who went to Copenhagen to study in 1690,[22] but who may have made a trip to Sweden too.[23] The Linck collection in Waldenburg was later supplemented with other collections.
Ripped, smashed, and buried in bonfires, hundreds of Sámi ceremonial drums vanished over a period of about hundred years, from the early seventeenth to the first decades of the eighteenth century and longer. Those that survived were confiscated by magistrates and missionaries and drums from the Kingdom of Denmark (which included Norway until 1814) typically ended up in Copenhagen, while drums from the Kingdom of Sweden (which until 1809 included Finland) typically ended up in Stockholm. From there many were sent to kings and collectors in larger cities.[24]
In Waldenburg Dávvirat Duiskkas was received by Fanny Stoye, Jörg Götze, the mayor of the city of Waldenburg, Christoph Lohmann, the leader of the museum’s sodality, and Anne Krzyminiewski, museum educator. Both the drums in Waldenburg are a bowl drums as opposed to the bentwood drum in Cologne and both the drums come from the Linck collection. A catalog of the collection, “Musæi Linckiani”, was published in three parts in the years 1783–87. In the last part the two drums were included as: “Tympanum Laponum exorcisticum. A Lapland magic drum with symbols and all accessories. Worm. M. p. 386. (reg. No. 129.) The same with hieroglyphics. (reg. No. 130.)”[25].
The drums in Waldenburg were re-discovered by the Swedish ethnographer Ernst Manker in 1932. During the years 1932 – 1934, Manker traveled to museums and collections in Europe on behalf of Professor K. B. Wiklund in Uppsala to make a survey of the Sámi ceremonial drums – or “lapska trolltrummorna” as they were referred to by Wiklund and his peers.[26] The expression “and all accessories” indicates that in addition to the hammer some kind of pointer – vuorbi in North Sámi (meaning also fate or destiny) or vuorbbe in Lule Sámi (meaning happiness, fortune, luck, or success), must have existed too, Manker writes.[27]
While the Sámi drums were used by the community’s spiritual authority (the noaidi in North Sámi), both men and women, who acted as intermediaries between the physical and spirit worlds, households also possessed drums for purposes of divination and general consultation. The method was to hold the drum parallel to the ground and beat the drumskin with a hammer of reindeer antler or wood. This caused a small object or pointer placed on the drumskin to vibrate and bounce. When the hammer stopped, the pointer lay on one symbol or another of the painted realm(s) and it could be interpreted. The drums offered a way of teaching and a way of understanding; it was a solace and a compass, author Barbara Sjoholm writes.[28] Many drums were passed down through generations and were treated as the precious and powerful heirlooms they were.
Manker considered one of the drums in Waldenburg (nr. 49) to be from the Rana type area, referring to a landscape in the southern part of Nordland in Norway, or north of the Ume River in Sweden, [29] in Ume- or Pite Sámi area. As is the case with most Sami areas, they cross national borders. Manker considered the other drum (nr. 74) to be a model of a Pite or Lule Sámi type drum with an authentic basis but with an inauthentic drumskin.[30] Manker’s classification refers to the Pite- and Lule Sámi areas within the counties of Nordland (central and northern part) in Norway and Norrbotten in Sweden. The hammer (nr. 35 in Manker) is made of reindeer antler with finely incised lines and symbols. The handle has a leather sheath “which shows traces of a wide belt of pewter embroidery at the top”.[31]
Prince Günther of Schönburg-Waldenburg gave both the Sámi drums a place in the Linck room: A historical photograph from 1935 or 1936 shows them in wooden stands with the two hammers hanging next to them. The glass cabinet that they are surrounded by today was probably produced at a later time. After having inspected the drums and the hammers, eaten lunch at the café in Schönburg Castle, museum leader, Fanny Stoye, gave us a tour of the Naturalienkabinett.
Naturkundemuseum Kassel
Naturkundemuseum Kassel is a natural history museum and a popular excursion destination in Central Germany. The museum is housed in the first permanent theater building in Germany in the early seventeenth century, the Ottoneum which again is situated close to the Fridericianum (1789), one of the first buildings in Germany built as a museum. Today, the museum also serves as a platform for discussions of the protection and preservation of the environment under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Kai Füldner who gave us a tour of the house and the new exhibition “Wald” (Forest).
Shortly before our fact-finding trip Naturkundemuseum Kassel had received two Sámi drums that had been stored by the state museums. Before that, the drums had been stored at the Völkerkundliches Museum in Witzenhausen, a small-town northeast of Kassel, but still in the property of the Naturkundemuseum. Manker stated that “Städtisches Naturkunde-Museum (Museum Fridericianum)” was both the owner and the storage location for the drums in the 1930s. What Dávvirat Duiskkas did not know was that the Naturkundemuseum also had received other Sámi objects from the state museums. This caused great enthusiasm!
There is no information on the provenance of the drums, but they seem to have been given as gifts to the court of Kassel by order of King Charles XII who ruled Sweden from 1697-1718, Manker writes with reference to an article by the Swedish bishop Edgar Reuterskiöld.[32] The sister of Charles XII, Ulrika Eleonore, married Frederick of Hesse-Kassel in 1715. She reigned as Queen of Sweden from 1718 until her abdication in 1720 in favor of her husband.
As always, our trip ended in a summary discussion at the hotel. We found that we had once again benefited greatly from visiting the German museums and their Sámi collections. Our fifth and last factfinding trip is scheduled to take place the first week of December 2024. We hope to be able to visit Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen in Mannheim, Museum Natur und Mensch in Freiburg, and Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden. Please stay tuned!
Jïjnjh heelsegh
Cathrine Baglo
(Projectmanager)
[1] Dávvirat Duiskkas (DD) means “artifacts in/from Germany” in the North Sámi language. Please read more about the five-year project here: https://museumsforbundet.no/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/EN_Prosjektplan-Tysklandsprosjektet-okt-2021.pdf
[2] https://rautenstrauch-joest-museum.de/museum_en
[3] “3 questions for Nanette Snoep”. https://rautenstrauch-joest-museum.de/About-us. Accessed May 2024.
[4] Jutta Engelhard and Klaus Schneider (ed.). People in their Worlds. The New Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum Cultures of the World. Ethnologica. New Series. Vol. 28. Wienand, 6-8.
[5] Manker, Ernst.1938, Die lappische Zaubertrommel: Eine ethnologische Monographie: 1: Die Trommel als Denkmal materieller Kultur, 639-645 (drum Nr. 36).
[6] “Jeg er gammel. Eldgammel er jeg”. Eira in an exhibition text about Freavnantjahkegievrie in “Gïejide goerebe” (Following the tracks) at Saemien Sijte. The drum was returned to Saemien Sijte from Meininger Museen in 2023. See: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/historic-repatriation-german-museum-returns-sacred-drum-norways-sami-people.
[7] “Lapptrumma eges af Professor Scholander i Stockholm» Letter to Prof. J. A Friis in Oslo from N.M Mandelgren at Lund University, dated 12/9 1869. Manker 1938, 639.
[8] Manker 1938, 639.
[9] Michalke, Lara. 2024. “The Sámi Collection at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, Germany. Summary.” Unpublished manuscript.
[10] Michalke, 2024; “People in their Worlds, 70; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ockleford_Oldman.
[11] Michalke, 2024.
[12] https://museumsforbundet.no/nyheter/den-tyske-samleren-julius-konietzko/
[13] Michalke, 2024.
[14] Flemming, Johs. 1911. Ausstellung «Nordland». Führer dürch die Astellung.
[15] Baglo, Cathrine. 2017. På ville veger? Levende utstillinger av samer i Europa og USA. Stamsund: Orkana Akademisk Forlag, 135-140.
[16] Talma – Sametinget. Accessed May 2024.
[17] Weißmann, Michaela. 2010. Bilder der Sámi. PhD dissertation. Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 113, 235. See also Baglo 2017 and Troxler and Opitz 2018. In 1912, the year after the Nordland Exhibition, Wilhelm Chramer and his colleague Wilhelm Planert were able to get funding for an expedition to Inari and Jukkasjärvi where they collected 105 objects. However, Berlin Ethnological Museum were not happy with their work, and both were dismissed upon their return. Maria Looks, “Provenance Research on the Collection Chramer and Planert”, Workshop MEK, June 2024.
[18] May 2023. See also: https://museumsforbundet.no/nyheter/arkivundersokelse-i-hamburg/
[19] See google map on Konietzko’s itineraries assembled and created for Dávvirat Duiskkas by Swantje Opitz, Feb 2024: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1RC-ffZAz88OfR7OGQfQ3lG9XxFtQsek&usp=sharing. Konietzko seems to have been geographically closest to Jukkasjärvi/Čohkkiras in 1912 when he visited Kittilä/Gihttel, Enontekiö/Eanodat and other villages in Finland, but still 240-270 km away.
[20] https://www.museum-waldenburg.de/.
[21] Stoye, Fanny. 2023. Mission, Glaube und Gewalt. Die zweifache Entdeckung von Sámi-Trommeln in Waldenburg. Fanny Stoye and Margarethe Mieth (ed.). Wunderkammer Waldenburg. Die Ganze Welt im Kleinen. Sandstein Verlag, Dresden.
[22] Stoye 2023.
[23] Johann Heinrich Linck – Wikipedia. Accessed May 2024.
[24] For the history of the drums in English, see for example Barbara Sjoholm, 2023. From Lapland to Sápmi. Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture. University of Minnesota Press.
[25] Musæi Linckiani 1783–87. The catalogue is also quoted in Manker 1938, Die lappische Zaubertrommel. Eine ethnologische Monographie 1. Die Trommel als Denkmal materieller Kultur, 719. «Worm. M», refers to a drum in another famous museum collection and catalogue, Ole Worm’s (1588-1654) Museum Wormianum in Copenhagen (nr. 50 in Manker).
[26] Silvén, Eva. 2021. Friktion: Ernst Manker, Nordiska museet och det samiska kulturarvet, Nordic Academic Press, 92. The survey resulted in the two volume work Die lappische Zaubertrommel (1938 and 1950).
[27] Manker 1938, 723.
[28] Sjoholm 2023, 9-11. Several scholars have written about the Sámi drums. Most influential in recent time is perhaps the works of professor of the history of religions, Håkan Rydving. See for example, The end of drum-time: Religious change among the Lule Saami, 1670s-1740s (3rd rev. ed., Vol. 12, p. 213). Uppsala universitet (2004) and Saami responses to Christianity: Resistance and change. In Beyond primitivism: Indigenous religious traditions and modernity (Jacob K. Olupona ed.) Routledge, 2004, 99–107.
[29] «Origin: probably the Ranen type area north of Ume River”. Manker 1938, 718-723.
[30] Manker 1938, 824-828.
[31] Manker 1938, 337.
[32] Reuterskiöld, Edgar. 1927. «Bevarade lapptrummor». In Religionshistoriska studier tillägnade Edvard Lehmann. Gleerup, Lund, 9–30.
