Featured on PDR in the collection Etching of a Sámi Drum from the Dutch Edition of Johannes Schefferus’ Lapponia (1682)

For decades after Sweden’s participation in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), a rumor persisted in Europe: that the monarch Gustavus Adolphus had contracted Sámi shamans to magically vanquish his Catholic foes. This likely wasn’t true, but the story may have fed on a lingering fear of the Finnish hakkapeliitta — ruthlessly efficient cavalry named for their battle cry of hakkaa päälle (roughly, “chop them down”) — who fought on behalf of Adolphus and were sometimes mistaken for Sámi. Fact or fiction, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, the Swedish Lord High Chancellor, took action in 1671, requesting that the Swedish College of Antiquities appoint a scholar to study the ways of the Sámi people, their territories, and to ascertain what role they had played in the…