The Drum of the North Wind, Sámi Folk Stories

Before the written word found its way to the fells and frozen shores of the far north, the Sámi people kept their world alive through story. Tales were spoken aloud by firelight, carried on the wind between the birch trees, beaten into the hide of the shaman's drum, passed from elder to child, season after season, through the long blue darkness of the Arctic winter. The Drum of the North Wind gathers a treasury of these stories: voices from the tundra, the lake shores, the open sea ice, and the sacred high fells. Here are the fishermen's yarns and the shaman's visions, the cunning of ordinary folk and the terror of beings older than memory. Together they form a portrait of a people whose lives were threaded through with the uncanny, the sacred, and the wild. These are stories in which the natural world is never merely background. The north wind carries intent. The lake harbours memory. The drum does not just make sound, it opens a door. The Sámi storytelling tradition understands that the boundary between the living and the spirit-world is thin as ice in spring, and just as treacherous to ignore.Whether you come to these pages as a lover of folklore, a student of northern cultures, or simply someone seeking tales that feel older and stranger than the world you know, The Drum of the North Wind offers stories that do not fade when you close the book. They stay with you, like frost on the window glass, like the green fire of the aurora moving silently overhead, beautiful, ancient, and utterly alive.