The Trial of Anders Poulsen

The Drum on the Court Table

First attested
1692The trial record survives as The Regional State Archives of Tromsø, Archives of the Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 25, in the hand of the district recorder Niels Knag. Willumsen describes the confession itself as sixteen pages; the record also carries the interrogation of 8 December 1691, the sessions of 9 and 10 February 1692, and at fol. 15r the ruling of 22 February 1692 on Poulsen's killing. A court interpreter stood between Poulsen and the bench, so the text is already at one remove. It is printed in Willumsen, Trolldomsprosessene i Finnmark: Et kildeskrift (Bergen: Skald, 2010), and in English in her The Witchcraft Trials in Finnmark, Northern Norway (Bergen: Skald, 2010), 377-95. Every folio reference in this entry is taken at second hand from Willumsen's 2020 article; neither the manuscript nor either source edition was consulted directly.

One of the very few explanations of a Sámi drum by its owner was made under a capital charge — and Willumsen argued in 2020 that, naming no deity and no sacrificial site, it is not a record of Sámi religion.

The fullest account of a Sámi drum exists because the court prosecuting its owner wrote it down.

Anders Poulsen, a Sámi from Torne Lappmark living in Varanger, nearly a hundred by his own reckoning, was seized with his drum at Nesseby on 7 December 1691. The court sat at Vadsø on 9 and 10 February 1692 with the drum on its table, and the recorder Niels Knag wrote down his account of all twenty-five figures in five rows and his demonstration of playing it. No statute named the offence, so the governor Hans Hansen Lilienskiold sent the case to Copenhagen unjudged. On 11 February a servant, Villum Gundersen, killed him in custody with an axe; on 22 February the court spared Gundersen as out of his senses and set the full fine for a man's life instead. The drum reached the royal Kunstkammer around 1694, Karasjok on loan in 1979, and Sámi ownership only in 2022.

Light

One of very few drums whose owner explains his figures — Peive the sun, Diermis the thunder, the wild reindeer Gvodde — and demonstrates the antler hammer and brass ring. It survives; the drums Thomas von Westen's mission gathered mostly burned in Copenhagen in 1728.

Shadow

The explanation exists because the man was prosecuted. Manker judged in 1950 that Poulsen glossed the figures as Christian as possible and probably held their older sense back; Willumsen, finding no deity or sacrificial site named, denies it records Sámi religion. Niemi and Hagen disagree.

Sources and verification10 sources · 5 links

Primary source

  • Niels Knag (district recorder, Finnmark), Court records of the witchcraft trial of Anders Poulsen, Vadsø, 1692, The Regional State Archives of Tromsø, Archives of the Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 25, fols. 1r-8r; the ruling on the killing at fol. 15rThe charge as laid — that he owned and used an instrument called a rune drum; Poulsen's explanation of the twenty-five figures across the drum's five rows, among them Peive the sun, Diermis the thunder and the wild reindeer Gvodde; his demonstration in court with an antler hammer and a brass ring; the court's statement that the acts he confessed are not named in the statutes and its deferral of the case to Copenhagen with Poulsen kept in custody; and the ruling of 22 February 1692 that Villum Gundersen, having taken leave of his senses, should not be punished with loss of life but should pay, out of any belongings he possesses or may yet possess, the full fine for a man's life. Cited here at second hand: every folio reference comes from Willumsen 2020.

Scholarship

  • Ernst Manker, Die lappische Zaubertrommel: Eine ethnologische Monographie, vol. 2: Die Trommel als Urkunde geistigen Lebens, 1950, Stockholm: Gebers, p. 43; quoted with this page by Willumsen 2020Manker's judgement, in 1950, that the conspicuously Christian elements in Poulsen's interpretation show he wanted to explain the figures as Christian as possible, and that he probably kept much of their original meaning back. This is the pre-1970 statement of the entry's correction, and it is a probability in Manker's own wording, not a certainty.
  • Einar Niemi, Hans Hansen Lilienskiold — embetsmann, vitenskapsmann og opprører, in Portretter fra norsk historie, 1993, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 43-72, at p. 61; quoted by Willumsen 2020The claim on the other side of the argument: Niemi's statement that the court records from this trial are the most comprehensive first-hand contemporary source available on traditional Sámi religious practices, and on the use of the drum in particular. Cited for what Niemi asserted, which Willumsen disputes.
  • Rune Blix Hagen, The Sami — Sorcerers in Norwegian History, 2012, Karasjok: Calliid Lagadus, p. 16; quoted by Willumsen 2020Hagen's position that Poulsen's explanation is credible, and his narrower and better-founded claim that this is one of a very small number of drums for which the owner's own explanation of the symbols and figures survives — the formulation the entry's Light panel adopts in place of the superlative.
  • Liv Helene Willumsen, Anders Poulsen—Sámi Shaman Accused of Witchcraft, 1692, Folklore, 2020, vol. 131, no. 2, pp. 135-158; DOI 10.1080/0015587X.2019.1690243; open PDF at livhelenewillumsen.noThe dateline and the argument together: that Poulsen was relieved of his drum on 7 December 1691 and interrogated the following day; that the court sat on 9 and 10 February 1692 with Niels Knag as scribe and an interpreter in between; that the confession is intact at sixteen pages; that the case was deferred to Copenhagen and he was murdered with an axe by a mentally unstable person the day after proceedings closed; that the court reconvened on 22 February on the killing and fined rather than executed Villum Gundersen; and her contention, against Niemi and Hagen, that the record cannot be read as a description of Sámi shamanism, since no Sámi deity and no sacrificial site appears in it and the courtroom shaped every answer.

Further reading

  • Rune Blix Hagen, En runebomme på rettens bord, Norgeshistorie (University of Oslo), norgeshistorie.no, article 1238That the sorenskriver Niels Knag and the amtmann Hans Hansen Lilienskiold together postponed final judgment as an unusual case (u-sædvanlig casus) needing a ruling from Copenhagen, and that Poulsen was killed in custody with axe blows by a servant who held that he deserved it as a sorcerer. This is where the governor is named.
  • Anders Paulsen, Store norske leksikon, snl.no/Anders_Paulsen; the fuller Norsk biografisk leksikon article is by Einar Niemi, at nbl.snl.no/Anders_Paulsen; and snl.no/runebomme_-_samiske_trommer for the drums and the fireHis birth in Torne Lappmark around 1600, his origin as a reindeer-herding Sámi and his later support of himself in Varanger like other sea Sámi, his arrest at Nesseby on 7 December 1691, his killing on 11 February 1692 by an unaccountable man with an axe, and the drum's route: confiscated, sent to the king's Kunstkammer in Copenhagen, later held by the Nationalmuseet, deposited at De samiske samlinger in Karasjok from 1979, ownership transferred in 2022. The companion runebomme article carries the destruction of about a hundred drums in the Copenhagen fire of 1728, which struck the Mission College.
  • Håkan Rydving, The End of Drum-Time: Religious Change among the Lule Saami, 1670s-1740s, 1993, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. Willumsen 2020 cites it in her text as 1993 and in her bibliography as 1995; the edition was not resolved hereThe wider campaign against the drum in the mission decades that the trial record itself does not supply. Willumsen 2020 cites this book as describing significant elements of Sámi shamanism and referring to numerous male and female deities — the contrast she draws with Poulsen's silence. The three goddesses she names as the ones a drum of this kind might have carried, Maderakka, Uksakka and Juksakka, she sources not to Rydving but to Reuterskiöld 1910, 88-98, Pollan 2002, xxii, and Skjelmo and Willumsen 2017, 208. Cited here at second hand; Rydving was not consulted.
  • Denmark Gives up Ownership of Rare Sami Drum to Norway, High North News, and the DR report of 26 January 2022, 2022, en.highnorthnews.com, 27 January 2022; dr.dk, 26 January 2022That the Danish culture minister Ane Halsboe-Jørgensen gave the National Museum of Denmark permission on 24 January 2022 to give up ownership of the drum to RiddoDuottarMuseat — Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat in Karasjok, citing the drum's long-term loan there and its connection to the area; and that the loan agreement had expired on 1 December 2021. That Aili Keskitalo, then president of the Norwegian Sámi Parliament, had written to Queen Margrethe II asking for the drum is reported by Nationen, 30 September 2021, not by either item cited here.
  • Kulturministeriet (Denmark), Kulturministeren giver tilladelse til udskillelse af samisk tromme, 2022, kum.dk, press release of 24 January 2022The authorising act itself: that the Minister of Culture gave the National Museum of Denmark permission on 24 January 2022, under museumsloven § 11, stk. 2, to deaccession the drum to RiddoDuottarMuseat in Karasjok, on the grounds of its long loan there and its connection to and relevance for the area.

Linked entries

  • Set againstPerunAttested

    Almost everything said about Perun comes from Christian monks compiling a chronicle about a cult their own church had put down; Poulsen's drum is the rarer case where the practitioner speaks for himself, and it is still the suppressor's document, taken down by the court prosecuting him.

  • Set againstYggdrasilAttested

    Snorri set down the world-tree around 1220, a Christian Icelander systematising two centuries after conversion and from outside the practice; Knag set down Poulsen's drum in 1692 from the practitioner's own mouth — and the second witness was the less free of the two, because he was answering a capital charge.

  • Set againstThe KojikiAttested

    Both are a state writing down an indigenous religion, and the purpose decides what the text becomes: the Kojiki was compiled at imperial command in 712 to legitimate a dynasty; Poulsen's drum was written down in 1692 by a Danish-Norwegian court trying him for sorcery.

  • Set againstOghamA modern connection

    Poulsen explained the figures on his own drum to a Finnmark court in 1692, so a practitioner's reading survives in his words; no ogham cutter ever explained the script, which is why the medieval scholars' explanation became the only one there is.

  • Set againstÒgúnAttested

    Two indigenous religions meeting a European-derived court from opposite ends: Poulsen's drum was seized as evidence against him, whereas Nigeria's Oaths Act admits an oath sworn by custom instead of on the Bible.

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