“I will yoik my beloved”
– looking into a lost Sea Sami yoik tradition

     North in Finnmark, directly west of the North Cape, lies Måsøy Municipality, which includes the village of Snefjord.  The fjords in Måsøy have been populated almost entirely by Sea Sami since far back in time.  The Sea Sami regions have been exposed to prolonged Norwegianizing and have had a form of culture that was less exotic and less visible than that of e.g. the reindeer herding Sami. Neither road maps, road signs nor buildings reveal that these are places with old Sea Sami settlements.  Secretly, however, there lived here a local, indigenous yoiking. 

Vorren and Manker, two leading scholars on Sami culture, believed already in 1958 that the chances for documenting more of old Sea Sami culture were small.  In 1975, however, a cassette recording was made from Snefjorden which contained two Sea Sami yoiks.  The informant said that this was from a local tradition that died out in the late 1800s.

A few years passed, and the man who yoiked on the cassette died.  It turned out that his wife also knew some local yoiks.  She said that these were yoiks she learned when she was young, but that yoiking disappeared as she grew up.  This was in 1984.

In the years that followed, this author visited the region on several occasions to interview people.  It became apparent that a lot of older Sami-speaking people could tell about yoiking from their childhood and youth. 

The region got its first permanent teacher in the 1870s.  The Norwegian authorities wanted the Sami children to learn Norwegian language, Norwegian culture and Norwegian songs.  There were only a few weeks of teaching per year, but this quickly increased.  In 1907, this increased to 12 weeks per year, in 1916, it reached 17 weeks.  In 1908 a boarding school was built in Snefjorden, and the children had to live at school during their schooling.

 In 1902, a law was enacted stating that in order to buy land, a person had to speak Norwegian, also for everyday use.  The development progressed in the direction that if a person wanted to hold one’s own, he or she had to be Norwegian.  People gradually began speaking more and more Norwegian.  The Pomor Trade from czarist Russia stopped in 1917.  In the 1920, the mechanization of the fishing fleet began.

The 1920s saw the arrival of the gramophone with Norwegian music.  People started playing and singing Norwegian songs and melodies.  There was an end to creating new yoiks.  People knew the old yoiks and used them from time to time.  But yoiks stopped as a productive genre, i.e. people no longer made new melodies or texts.  Youth who grew up after this no longer had their own yoiks.  Some of them still learned old yoiks that existed in the local communities. 

Fragments of the yoiks can be heard on http://uit.no/tmu/5609/  Type in the password snefjordjoik.  The yoiks that have been collected originate from about 1885-1920. 

 Yoik melodies are constructed of small motifs that are combined and varied, normally four in number.  The melodies are constructed with different contrasts in the melodic and the rhythmic progression.  Melodically, the yoiks demonstrate great refinement.  Musically, old Sami yoiking is largely characterized by using a pentatonic scale (a five-tone scale, or the black keys on a piano.)  Yoiking is also characterized by a special way of using the voice, with a more guttural sound. 

 The yoik texts in this material are distinctive.  It seems as though the yoiks had fairly fixed texts that belonged to the melodies, text that everyone knew.  This is quite unusual for yoiks.  The way in which the texts were rhythmized is also unusual.  Often, the rhythmics were what is called a runometer, or a variation of the runometer.  The runometer consists of four two-syllable words after each other that form a line of text.  This is how the Finnish Kalevala is constructed.  We sometimes find this construction in yoiks, but more rarely.  Some scientists have claimed that Sami tradition is unfamiliar to the Kalevala rhythm, while others have seen a possible common Finnish-Ugric origin.

The Snefjord yoiks seem to be special in that several forms of rhyme are used.  Alliteration is used, i.e. two or more words have the same beginning sound.  There are a number of examples of rhyme between neighboring words, that two neighboring words resemble each other.  There are also several examples of end rhymes, i.e. that the last word in two sentences rhyme with each other.  A closer review of these formulation methods shows that there is probably no borrowing from either Finnish or Norwegian poetry.

It appears that the distinctive use of rhyme and rhythm may be old Sami tradition.  The book Lapponia was published in 1674, wherein the oldest yoiks we know of were printed, written down by the Sami student Olaus Sirma from Kemi Lappmark.  Sirma personally wrote down one of these yoiks, “Guldnasaš,” a beautiful love poem.  The poem was written using many of the same formulation methods that are used in the Snefjord yoiks: alliteration, rhyme between neighboring words and end rhymes.  The rhythmics can also largely be interpreted as runometers or variations of the runometer.  Some people believe that Sirma’s end rhymes in particular must mean that he was familiar with Swedish poetry and adapted his poem according to the poem requirements in this culture.  But the Snefjord yoiks indicate that these means of expression nevertheless represent a genuine Sami tradition. 

This opens the way for a re-evaluation of the Sami epic, the yoik poem Son of the Sun, which was written down in the 1800s by the Swedish-Sami minister Anders Fjellner.  This poem is unusually perfect in form and has for this reason been rejected by some scientists as falsification.  But among other things, the yoiks from the Snefjord Region show that such poetic perfection really may have been Sami tradition.