You Could Name It "Hammered"

Question: How much is known about the Sami gods?

Less than we should know, unfortunately. The Sami, thanks to being nomadic in behavior and shamanistic in their beliefs, were seldom paid much attention to by folklorists studying the area, and most tales recorded about them are low-level spirits-and-monsters kinds of stuff. Early southern Europeans bothering them didn't even figure out that they had gods at all for a while, assuming that their religion was a generalized animism that venerated all life, and once people did figure them out it was all Christian proselytizing all the time. Very few of their myths have been recorded from their largely oral traditions and written down, and even fewer of those have been translated into English (why aren't you interested in neat stuff, English-speaking world, huh?).

Alas, what do those of us who don't speak Norwegian, Swedish or Finnish do? Well, we cry, mostly, but we can also go hunt up the only two real English sources on the subject: Laestadius' Fragments of Lappish Mythology, a nineteenth-century collection by a Christian writer with all the problems you would expect it to have, and Van Cleef's much more modern but also more poetry- and art-oriented God Wears Many Skins. If you happen to speak one of the three languages above, you're likely to have a whole lot better luck looking there than in the English arena. Past those, you'll find bits and pieces on Sami belief, shamanism and deities scattered throughout other books, as footnotes in books on their near neighbors the Norse, Finnish or Baltic people or as usually isolated mentions in general mythology books.

The Sami have a large cast of deities, but we don't know a great deal about many of them other than their names and general area of specialty, and others are identifiably borrowed from nearby cultures that they probably had a lot of contact with. The most obvious is their thunder-god, a big old badass named Diermmes/Thiermmes, who is also called Thoragalles and uses a giant hammer to smash giant trolls in the face. The parallels to Thor are obvious - but he's also sometimes referred to with the epithet Ukko, who happens to be the thunder-god of the Finnish pantheon (who also wields a hammer, and let's not forget Perun nearby with his axe - thunder gods). And yet Diermmes also has unique mythology of his own, most notably the story in which he is constantly pursuing a great golden reindeer around the world, which will end when he succeeds in killing it. He's obviously borrowing from other religions in the area, but the Sami stories about him don't always match up to the attributes he's borrowed from elsewhere.

Most mythographers, when they bother with the Sami at all, tend to lump them in with the Finnish pantheon; it's not really the worst decision anyone could be making, since the religions clearly influence each other and share gods, and its probable that they grew from the same root and simply went in different directions for the settled Finnish farmers and the wandering Sami herders. It's a similar situation to, say, Japanese mythology versus the beliefs of the indigenous Ryukyuan people of Okinawa, who do have their own unique concepts but who also share more than a little of the folklore of their northern neighbors.

To be honest, I think the Sami are very neat and I really wish there was more source material on their gods available (in a language I can read!). But I'm not sure we'll ever see them in Scion - definitely not in the official line, which doesn't have much to gain from a religion most players have no clue exists, and probably not from us, either, as I can't imagine there being enough demand for them and the better-known Finnish gods. But, like many other small pantheons, they are certainly possibilities to be used in games and more than excellent choices as NPCs to flummox Scions who spend their time up in the frozen north.

I think what I got out of this post most is that I really want to see Thor, Diemmas, Ukko, Perun and Perkunas get together and start a band or something.