Flying Reindeer? Only in Siberia!

Our friends deliver “reindeer food” (oats mixed with glitter) to us every year so that the kids can sprinkle it on the lawn on Christmas Eve.  The people down the street have decorations out front that say “Santa, Land Here,” with red and green pseudo-landing-strip lights along their front walk. But where does the idea of flying reindeer really come from?

A while back I read Piers Vitebsky’s The Reindeer People (see my review). Vitebsky writes from an anthropological, historical and personal perspective about the Eveny and Evenki people of Siberia.

Probably the most important aspect of their traditional culture is their relationship with reindeer. They rely on this partially domesticated animal for food, of course, but also for transportation.  Thousands of years ago the ancestors of the Eveny and Evenki trained reindeer to carry them and pull their sleighs.  During the winters, when the land was frozen “from Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, from the Pacific almost to the Urals,” reindeer could travel great distances.  Vitebsky testifies that their speed, especially when traveling over frozen bodies of water, is amazing, almost like flying.

But how does this connect with Christmas and Santa’s flying reindeer?

Vitebsky describes a traditional Midsummer ritual among the Eveny, in which people rode reindeer through a symbolic “gateway to the sky” between two larch trees.  He continues:

As the sun rose high above the horizon in the early dawn, this gateway was filled with the purifying smoke of the aromatic mountain rhododendron, which drifted over the area from two separate bonfires.  Each person passed around the first fire anti-clockwise, against the direction of the sun, to symbolize the death of the old year and to burn away its illnesses.  They then moved around the second fire in a clockwise direction, following the sun’s own motion, to symbolize the birth of the new year.

Prayers were offered to the sun. Then, in a ritual that would bring renewal, each person rode a reindeer through the gateway up to a land near the sun. The reindeer were thus not only valued for transport and sustenance here on earth, but also as a way of reaching the source of life itself, and a way of attaining the blessings of life. Vitebsky explains that at the highest point in their flight, “the reindeer turned for a while into a crane, a bird of extreme sacredness.”

That these ideas are very, very old is proven by the existence of ‘reindeer stones.”  These standing stones date from the Bronze Age (about 3,000 years ago) and can be found from western Mongolia to Manchuria.  Other animals are represented, but reindeer predominate and they are clearly portrayed as flying:  “…neck outstretched and [its] legs flung out fore and aft…the antlers have grown fantastically till they reach right back to the tail, and sometimes hold the disc of the sun or a human figure with the sun as its head.” 

Interestingly, even after the area’s climate dried out, making it unsuitable for reindeer, its inhabitants still looked upon the animal as a mythical link with the supernatural: reindeer figured in legends and their imagery showed up in grave goods and in the tattoos of the Pazyryk people, where “the branching of the reindeers’ antlers sometimes looks like the feathering of birds’ wings, and on some of them each tine of the antler ends in a tiny bird’s head.”  Reindeer have also been associated with shamanic voyages.

Somehow along the way, though, it seems they got mixed up with Germanic pagan traditions of Odin, himself linked with shamanism, who was said to ride an eight-legged, flying horse and lead hunting parties through the northern sky in the winter, evidenced by the aurora borealis. Later came Christian traditions of St. Nicholas, whose feast day, December 6, is near to the winter solstice and who, like Odin, had a along beard and rode a flying horse. British legends of Father Christmas (a later incarnation of the gift-giving St. Nicholas) has him living in Lapland, a land of reindeer with a strong cultural connection to Siberia. How this all came to be is mysterious; it is a demonstration of the amazing way that traditions and legends are woven over time.

It also leaves us free to choose the strands that are most meaningful to us.

Winter solstice celebrations in northern countries have everything to do with renewal and rebirth, with the petitioning of the sun to return and once again bestow its blessings on the earth and its people. Last night, the longest night of the year, we attended a solstice party where a bonfire, good food and the conversation of friends served as symbols of the return of light and life to the earth.

I hope that your version of flying reindeer will bring you to a state of renewal during this dark season which, as of yesterday’s solstice, grows lighter and brighter every day.

'Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town' by Laurie Hovell McMillin: A Review

American society is heterogeneous and, these days, more often than not, divided. Although this is a young nation, roots go more than deep enough to impact present relationships. This book is one woman’s attempt to untangle some of these relationships in her own Mississippi-river hometown of Trempeauleau, Wisconsin.

This summer we camped about 75 miles south of Trempeauleau, at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. The Upper Mississippi is a beautiful, lush area, featuring bluff-top views of the river and its swampy backwaters, laced with quiet bayous that are great for canoeing. It is also rich with the histories of Native American cultures (most visibly the Ho-Chunk, formerly known as Winnebago), (largely) French fur traders, and (mostly) northern European farmers. The fur traders are gone (though it’s interesting to think about what of their culture may have survived) but the two other groups remain.

Buried Indians is both a memoir and an exploration of the issues surrounding past and present relationships among whites and Indians in Trempeauleau. The author is a member of the former group by birth, her forbears going back a couple of hundred years in that town. She is set apart, however, because she has moved away and chosen to become an anthropologist, specializing in the culture of Tibet. The theme of the academic as separate from the surrounding culture permeates her account as she attempts to negotiate not only her dueling identities, but also her sympathies, which extend not only to the undoubtedly wronged Native cultures and people whom she encounters, but also to her archaeologist colleagues and to her own white, working class/farmer father, family and compatriots.

The impetus for the book is a local controversy involving an approximately 1,000 year-old platform mound on Trempeauleau mountain, a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, within the town limits. The controversy ensues when an archaeologist from the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center indicates his intention/desire to preserve the mound as a tourist site, for possible inclusion in a regional heritage trail.

Although the state of Wisconsin and this particular area of the Upper Mississippi has been and is the site of thousands of other mounds - conical, linear, and effigy mounds - the existence of this particular mound, although surveyed and photographed during an early period of white settlement, had been largely overlooked by whites in the area. While the conical, linear and effigy mounds (many preserved at Effigy Mound National Monument) are believed to have been created for burial and other purposes by ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Indians who live in the area today, the platform mound was probably created as a ceremonial mound for sun-worship and other ceremonies by members of what is now called the Middle Mississippian culture. (As presented in this book, present-day Native groups seem to agree with the archaeologists’ assessment.) This culture was based further south, in Cahokia, Illinois, and Trempeauleau may have been an outpost of that civilization.

Buried Indians, though, becomes much more than a book about an archaeological controversy. As she pursues the topic through interviews, casual conversations, personal reflections and archival research, McMillin bumps up against many other issues.

Among them is the controversy over the town’s high school mascot. (This is, of course, an issue that surfaces intermittently on the national stage as well.) McMillin explores the paradox that, although historically whites were intent on removing Native people, they have deliberately retained the memory of Indians through mascot names (Redmen, Braves, Redskins, and so forth) and place names (there must be tens of thousands of them, including the names of states from Massachusetts to Alaska). McMillin concludes that what whites really want to obliterate at this point (now that we have killed and/or removed so many Indian people and destroyed so much of Indian culture) is not the memory of the Indians themselves, but rather the memory of the role we played in their decimation. She uncovers a paper trail of reimagined history that, for example, portrays Native people “disappearing into the mist” rather than being rounded up and shipped away on cattle cars as was actually the case in this area. Meanwhile, whites appropriated selected aspects of Indian culture, often in stereotype – i.e. the brave or savage Indian warrior - casting themselves as legitimate heirs to Native ways and, through Indian place names, to the land and its bounty.

Their feelings of remorse and guilt show up clearly in McMillin’s account, sometimes, though not always, spilling over into defensiveness. It’s clear that the whites of the town – small farmers who are proud of their hard work and survival through hard times – also feel somewhat victimized or belittled by people they view as elites from the outside, personified in this book by archaeologists, who don’t understand them and don’t know the land as they do. (Says one town father: “If there was [a mound] up there we would’ve known about it.”)

And so it goes in a heterogeneous, mobile society. These stories of conflict and removal – though on a much smaller and considerably less gruesome scale than the Indian removals - are apparent all over these days, from the immigration conflicts in Prince William County, Virginia, to gentrification/integration in places like Harlem. As people grouped according to various identities, we all too often place ourselves in opposition to other groups, to the ultimate detriment of all. In this regard McMillin’s sincere attempt to hear all sides of the story stands out as exemplary.

By the end of the book, the platform mound itself remains officially unpreserved, although today (in 2008) I found it listed as a federally protected mound by the group Protect Sacred Sites Indigenous People, One Nation. The author, through her investigations and her family’s involvement with them, manages to foster a slow recognition of some of these issues among her family members– including some of the older “town fathers” and a sister, a schoolteacher who ultimately incorporates some Indian history into her curriculum.

McMillin, Laurie Hovell. Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town is part of The University of Wisconsin Press' "Wisconsin Land and Life" series. It was published in 2006.

Here's an interesting twist on this issue, a group of Sioux in North Dakota who would like to see the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux retain its nickname. The original article is from the New York Times, December 9, 2009: In Twist, Tribe Fights for College Nickname.

And another update: Fighting Sioux Nickname Issue Remains Unsettled, this one from January 16, 2010.

Wikipedia has a summary of the University of North Dakota nickname controversy; as of November, 2015, the new nickname is the "Fighting Hawks."

Vestibular neuronitis, My Judas Iscariot

So I woke up a week ago Friday, opened my eyes, and closed them again. Then I tried again. Yup, everything in the room – the pictures on the wall, the curtains, the piles of books and other assorted clutter – was spinning around and around.

After a quick mental inventory, I concluded that there was nothing wrong with me - I knew where I was, remembered my name, my responsibilities.

It was just that something had released me, set me free from the bonds that normally keep me in a close and easy interface with the world around me.

Because of my son’s sensory integration issues I’ve learned a few things about how such things work. My difficulty in getting up to walk to the bathroom pinpointed a faulty vestibular function as the culprit.

I then postulated that, overnight, a golfball-sized tumor had grown in my brain, pressing on the inner ear/vestibular nerve area, and that I would be dead within the month. The only other option might be some exotic disease picked up…well, sitting at my desk? or perhaps at the grocery store or on Metro?

In any case, I figured, I was clearly going to die, so I’d better get myself downstairs and let my husband know before he left for work.

Somehow I managed to do just that. But within a few hours I couldn’t sit up without retching horribly. In fact, I really couldn’t even open my eyes without feeling the most intense nausea. For the first few days watching someone speak was pure torture; there was simply too much unmediated sensory information entering my brain and no way for the brain to exert any organizing or integrating control.

As it turns out, I don’t have a tumor or an exotic disease. I have vestibular neuronitis, in which some virus, medievally speaking, shoots its little iron arrows at my vestibular nerve, causing an inflammation. The treatment involves a tapering dose of steroids and an awesome shaman-drum-style depiction of the "virus vs steroid" battle drawn by my seven-year-old nephew. Hopefully within a few weeks this illness will be nothing more than a nauseating memory.


But it begs the question, especially for the author of the spindlewhorl blog: Why the spinning? What causes us, when our fragile hardware becomes damaged, to perceive our world as spinning? Why don’t we perceive it as bouncing up and down, or going wavey like things do when cartoon characters reminisce?

You know me, I’d like to believe that there’s some cosmic reason. It would be cool if, when I was released from my neurological moorings I was, in addition to barfing, entering some purer state, in tune with the spinning of the cosmos. But that’s probably not the case, and even if it is, I’m here to tell you that it’s hardly worth it.

The day before this happened to me I went to hear a talk by religious historian Elaine Pagels. Her latest book, with Karen L. King, is Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. In it she suggests that Jesus chose Judas to “betray” him so that, through his crucifixion, he could demonstrate for humanity that the suffering of the flesh is transitory and insignificant. Well, sure it’s insignificant if you happen to be Jesus!

But seriously, folks, any illness which allows you to be back on your feet, however unsteadily, and on the mend within a week, is not that bad.

But if you know, or care to theorize, why the spinning, please do share! I’m still way too dizzy to google it.

The Joy of Snow

It’s really winter now! A couple of days ago we had our first December snow, and my children were unbelievably excited. Rosy cheeks, bright eyes, the whole bit. My son even wrecked my daughter’s snowman with a snowball! Right on target!

If you have some snow to work with, try making one of these snölyktor (snow lanterns). Simply build a dome out of snowballs, leaving an opening through which you can install a votive candle or tea light. Then wait until dusk and behold!

There’s a lovely depiction of a snow lantern in Astrid Lindgren’s Jul i Bullerbyn, illustrated by Ilon Wikland. (The American version is called Christmas in Noisy Village.)

Astrid Lindgren, of course, was one of Sweden’s most beloved children’s authors. She also wrote the Pippi Longstocking books, among many others. She died in 2002 at age 94.

There are a number of books featuring The Children of Noisy Village. In them Lindgren portrays the traditional rural life of Småland, her home-province, and captures brilliantly the simple joys and whimsy of childhood. Last year I read Springtime in Noisy Village to my son’s second-grade class. I was worried that kids accustomed to Star Wars and Sponge Bob Squarepants might find Noisy Village too childlike, but they loved it.

True, it is a cliché, but this is the time of year for everyone to play at being a child again. Now get out there and—oh no! duck! Incoming snowball!

'The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia' by Neil S. Price: Some thoughts

A long, dark, cold Scandinavian winter, 1000 years or more ago: the sun barely, if at all, makes an appearance. In the northern, inland areas, all signs of life are completely covered in snow for months at a time. Only the reindeer manage to scrape below the snow to find sustenance. As a human being, you are just about totally dependent on this animal for food and clothing. In the southern and coastal areas of Scandinavia, you may not be buried in snow, but icy cold rain, driven by an unrelenting wind, pelts you mercilessly. In the dark sky you see the dramatic, frightening Aurora Borealis. Who are those spirits in the sky? Will summer ever return? Will warmth come? Will new animals be born? Will crops grow? How can I be sure?

And what of your own life? How can you be assured that you will enjoy health, good fortune, and life rather than their opposites? Why do some enjoy the former while others are doomed to the latter? Indeed, we all must die eventually: Why?

In the The Viking Way Neil S. Price allies archaeology with anthropology, folklore, literature, sociology, and psychology, to begin to illuminate the unrecorded beliefs of our Viking ancestors. Some of the conclusions that he reaches are familiar to me. Others are very new, and having just finished his book a couple of days ago, I'm still reaching for them, trying to integrate them into my view of how things must have been on the Swedish west coast 1000 years ago.

At stake is this pressing question: How did those people address the twin mysteries of life and death? Clearly in those northern climates (not only Scandinavia proper but also Iceland, Greenland, Orkney, the Faeroes, Shetland) there is not an overabundance of sustenance for all; survival was touch-and-go at best in certain places, perhaps slightly more assured in others. Famine, sickness and injury were probably never far removed from any of them. But it's very interesting to me that these people addressed life and death as a holistic totality, not as two irreconcilable things (i.e. life/good vs. death/evil) as in "we're going to eradicate evil." They knew better.

In fact, they saw very clearly that in a very literal way, death is necessary for the continuation of life. If no one dies, there simply won't be enough to go around. Perhaps the custom of exposing infants gained some legitimacy from this view. (It is known to have been a bone of contention in the Icelandic conversion to Christianity.) There is also a suggestion that the earliest Scandinavian kings were subject to death in order to secure the fertility and prosperity of their realms. And of course, animal and human sacrifice were also performed with, presumably, the same goals.

But how to make these sacrifices work? For that it is necessary to have some access to the gods or the spirit world, the agents who keep the machinery of the life/death cycle humming. It is here that Dr. Price places sei∂r, a complex of magical/religious practice that encompasses sorcery and ritual. He puts sei∂r in the context of circumpolar religious belief and practice, analogous to shamanism as it exists among the Saami, and more broadly in Siberia and North America.

My understanding of shamanism is limited, at best, though Dr. Price does an admirable job of providing an overview. I think it's safe for me to say that one aspect of shamanism has a connection to fertility: those dependent on the reindeer and on the hunting of other animals felt an urgent need to see that the animals who provided them sustenance were in turn replenished. This need for assurance regarding the continuation of life is definitely a concern echoed in the literary depictions of sei∂r.

But as Dr. Price points out, the twist here is in the translation of the above necessity to the Nordic context. How does this idea (understandable to us today in the concept of "sustainability") become useful for the support of a warrior society, in the context of the organization of warfare and larger fighting forces?

There clearly remains a link to fertility here, albeit a link that at first seems odd and elusive. Dead souls go both to Odin (the war god) and to Freyja (the fertility goddess). Dead bodies on the battlefield, however, become, as it says on runestones, "food for the ravens/wolves." In the past I always thought that this was either a simple statement of fact or a more poetic (and gruesome) way of saying that those guys were goners, but now I realize I was being both too literal and too figurative. It seems that those corpses were actually thought of as sacrificial victims dedicated to Odin (ravens and wolves being his animal helpers). This makes perfect sense in the context of fertility and rebirth, because those fallen soldiers were brought to Valhalla by Odin's valkyries so that they could live and fight again at Ragnarök.

In the sparse environment of the north, where kings and chieftains needed portable wealth to sustain their warrior bands, raids and battles became a way of life. Did what was essentially a fertility cult provide the underlying structure for the beliefs and more importantly, the rituals (in the form of sei∂r) needed to sustain these kings or chieftains and their culture? And how in the world did this all fit together?

I took the above photo in the summer, believe it or not, in Varberg, on the Swedish west coast, in between rain storms. It was a summer that made you wonder if Ragnarök was at hand. Click on photo to enlarge.

What will you take with you?

In one burial a spear had been hurled over the head of the deceased and lodged in the wall of the grave chamber. In another the deceased is a male Sámi wearing typical Norse women's clothing. Another is a double cremation where, after the fire, the man's and woman's remains and effects were carefully separated out and buried apart from each other, in contrasting fashion, again with some normally female-associated goods placed with the man and vice versa. These burials are among those discussed in Neil Price's The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.

Thanks to the wonderful people at my local library, I finally got my hands on a copy of this book--the first edition, that is, not the second, although I suspect I may have to purchase the latter at some point. It's a big, big book, with lots of information that's new to me. I appreciate Price’s introduction to scholarship on the noaidi - the "Sámi shaman." I'm still 100 pages shy of the finish, and I feel like I'm reading a detective novel, trying to make some guesses of my own in advance of the thrilling conclusion. I just read about the Sámi view of the Northern Lights and it kind of blew my mind. I woke up this morning with it all spinning around in my head.

In the meantime, though, the burials have really captured my imagination. Archaeologist Dr. Price discusses several Norse and Sámi graves in connection with his topic. They include intriguing assemblages of grave goods, and show evidence of what must have been profound, meaningful funerary rites.

He has singled out graves that he believes may house the remains of sorcerers or spiritual specialists, and as these people operated toward the outer limits of human society, their graves are bound to be extraordinary. Still, it seems to me that graves in general represent a category that is fair game for both religious symbolism and intimate associations.

Even within the general body of Norse graves that I've read about from this period there exist enormously varied burial practices - aside from clothing, grave goods, and their arrangement within the graves there are differences in topographical situation, shape, lining, markers, etc. And, of course, there are both inhumation and cremation graves.

The lack of standardizaton has posed problems for those trying to "make sense of" these graves in the light of known mythologies. Ellis-Davidson simply wrote that differences indicate the presence of strong family traditions. Some contemporary scholars look at regional patterns in burial preferences as one way of trying to delineate different political/social/religious spheres of influence within Scandinavia of the period. I don’t have enormous experience in this area, but in reading accounts of graves here and there, exact parallels among them seem to be relatively rare. Perhaps the more "run-of-the-mill" graves simply don't get written about. The ones on the farther reaches of the bell curve, however, seem to be numerous and remarkable.

An acquaintance back here in the 21st century recently encountered numerous deposition options for a relative’s ashes, including the possibility of housing them within the structure of a birdbath! I guess I've been lucky so far – I haven’t had to delve into this subject in a personal way - but I was very surprised to hear that the birdbath option is a standardized one available through a local funeral home! 

If, however, most of our burials today seem unremarkable when compared with those of the past, it is perhaps partly because we entrust them to corporate entities. What if, instead (and I’m not suggesting that we actually do this), we buried our own loved ones ourselves? Not only would we be forced to plan every aspect of the disposal of their physical being, but we would also have a more intimate, tactile, and perhaps, profound, association with death itself. How would this impact our view of death? How would this be manifested in our choices of grave types, sites, or grave goods (or lack thereof)? Would our final resting situations remain as uniform as they are today? Or would our choices be as baffling to future archaeologists as those of our ancestors are to us?

References

Ellis Davidson, Hilda. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Price, Neil S. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Uppsala, 2002.

Söderberg, Bengt. Aristokratiskt rum och gränsöverskridande. Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetets förlag, 2005.


Photos: A Viking-age grave at Li, Fjärås, Sweden; A Bronze-age stenhög (stone burial cairn) overlooks the sea from the Swedish west coast; More Viking-age graves at Li; A kyrkogård (churchyard), Kungsbacka, Sweden. Click the photos to enlarge.

Lofty Thoughts/Summer Laborlore

It's been so long since I've posted that I couldn't even remember my password. I had to look it up in my folder of passwords, usernames, and answers to security questions, which, thank goodness, I was able to find wedged into an overflowing drawer of the messy desk that is nominally mine.

My time in Sweden was truly fantastic, and I'm sure that I'll have lots to write about, assuming I can endure until my little lovelies are back in school. If you're a stay-at-home parent by trade (or by default), perhaps you know what I mean.

This summer is better than previous ones, though, in that I have had some actual thoughts in my head, like air in an otherwise deflated balloon. However, when it comes to the point where I'm ready to tie it and hang it up for display, motherhood obliges me to let go--for just a second--and with a long, farty noise (which, if it wasn't purely metaphorical, would delight the little ones) my balloon/head shoots erratically around the office and lands flaccid and empty on the long-unvacuumed floor.

But if truth be told I did have the opportunity one morning this week to visit the Library of Congress to hear the keynote speaker at the Laborlore symposium: none other than my former colleague Nick Spitzer. His talk was called "In Katrina's Wake: The Building Trades in New Orleans."

Nick is, of course, the host and creator of the American Routes radio program, in which capacity he delves into the vernacular music of the U.S. To a great extent this music retains its links to roots music and to the people who combine night time and weekend music-making with ordinary day jobs. This has been the practice in New Orleans as well, going back at least a century, where the same largely Creole community that created jazz in response to the tightening talons of Jim Crow also built, ornamented, and maintained that beautiful city's homes and public buildings. Those New Orleans families still practice the building trades, having passed them down through the generations along with the music, which, though one may be led to believe otherwise, is not the drunken excess of libertines but rather a remarkable commentary and elaboration by the working people themselves on their city, their place within it, and their lives. Rebuilding New Orleans--body and soul--is about bringing these families back, letting them do their thing (actually, things) and insuring that the city continues to be a fertile place for people to work and play.

Because the music, the architecture, and other creative expressions come out of both work and play, of course. Work and play and life give meaning to each other. And if this seems a far-fetched idea, difficult to apply to one's own humdrum life and job, then let Nick be an example. His own career, even when I first knew him (way back when) as an agent of the government bureaucracy (!), has epitomized experimentation, creativity, play--as well as care for the nuts and bolts-- as clearly as Louis Armstrong's banjo player/plasterer Johnny St. Cyr, or any of those other gentlemen he spoke of at the symposium.

Nick can speak on any topic but when you get him going on something he really cares about, it's preaching. At the LOC, in front of an audience of colleagues and friends, Nick may have been preaching to the converted. But that's largely what preachers do, I suppose. In any case I sensed strongly that this particular crowd was both inspired and spurred to further action in the field of documenting and explicating labor lore.

How inspired I am to continue on with my summer labor is another issue altogether. In any case my audience is a captive one, even as I am captive to it. With two weeks still remaining, I'm going to fill up some balloons, of the literal variety. Up, up and away! Farty noises, ahoy!