Abstract

Prior to Christianization, initiated by the Swedish Crown and Church during the seventeenth century, the religion of the native Sami people of northern Scandinavia included animistic beliefs centered on animal ceremonialism. The Sami religion evolved in the framework of hunter-gatherer subsistence, and landscapes were laden with religious significance. The authors of this essay seek to highlight the significance of sacrificial sites as ethnic and religious demarcations in times of conflict between Swedish society and the Sami. We focus especially on sacrificial wooden objects as representations of religious space, discussing three sacrificial sites from different periods and representing a geographical gradient. We conclude that wooden sacrificial sites were still frequent and prominent features of the Sami landscape during the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century in northern Sweden. However, in the following century, the indigenous religion was forced into secrecy. Today, elements of indigenous religious space, as indicated by place names and oral traditions, reflect but fragments of a landscape that was once a coherent whole.

Published in

Ethnohistory
2008, Volume: 55, number: 1, pages: 1-28

SLU Authors

• Östlund, Lars

  • Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

• Zackrisson, Olle

  • Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Ethnology
History of Religions


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2007-044

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/19469