Norwegian Woods (OT)

King Harald Hårfagre made lifelong bonds to Jotner and the Sami people. Representatives of both groups had contributed to educate him as king. When Harald had almost gathered Norway into one kingdom, only the Sami people were missing in the alliance. Then it happened that one year he celebrated Christmas at Tofte farm in Dovre. Here he met the Finn King Svåse and his beautiful daughter Snøfrid. She offered the king a bowl of mead. He drank it all and held her hand and immediately he felt like a fire came into his body and he wanted to go to bed with her right away. Her father Svåse didn’t allow him. First he had to marry her. So he did. He loved her so dearly that he forgot the whole kingdom. Four sons were born; Sigurd Rise, Halvdan Hålegg, Godrød Ljome and Ragnvald Rettelbeine. When Snøfrid later died, Harald was inconsolable and mourned for three years before he was again able to start his work as king. He was now King of Norway because through the marriage with Snøfrid he had gathered Norway into one kingdom.

Europeans are the descendants of at least three major migrations of prehistoric people. First, a group of hunter-gatherers arrived in Europe about 37,000 years ago. Then, farmers began migrating from Anatolia (a region including present-day Turkey) into Europe 9000 years ago, but they initially didn’t intermingle much with the local hunter-gatherers because they brought their own families with them. Finally, 5000 to 4800 years ago, nomadic herders known as the Yamnaya swept into Europe. They were an early Bronze Age culture that came from the grasslands, or steppes, of modern-day Russia and Ukraine, bringing with them metallurgy and animal herding skills and, possibly, Proto-Indo-European, the mysterious ancestral tongue from which all of today’s 400 Indo-European languages spring. They immediately interbred with local Europeans, who were descendants of both the farmers and hunter-gatherers. Within a few hundred years, the Yamnaya contributed to at least half of central Europeans’ genetic ancestry.

Until about 9,000 years ago, Europe was home to a genetically distinct population of hunter-gatherers. Then, 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, the genetic profiles of the inhabitants in some parts of Europe abruptly changed, acquiring DNA from Near Eastern populations.

Archaeologists have long known that farming practices spread into Europe at the time from Turkey. But the new evidence shows that it wasn’t just the ideas that spread — the farmers did, too.

The hunter-gatherers didn’t disappear, however. They managed to survive in pockets across Europe between the farming communities.

“It’s an amazing cultural process,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who led the university’s team. “You have groups which are as genetically distinct as Europeans and East Asians. And they’re living side by side for thousands of years.”

From 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, however, hunter-gatherer DNA began turning up in the genes of European farmers. “There’s a breakdown of these cultural barriers, and they mix,” Dr. Reich said.

About 4,500 years ago, the final piece of Europe’s genetic puzzle fell into place. A new infusion of DNA arrived — one that is still very common in living Europeans, especially in central and northern Europe.

The closest match to this new DNA, both teams of scientists found, comes from skeletons found in Yamnaya graves in western Russia and Ukraine.

Archaeologists have long been fascinated by the Yamnaya, who left behind artifacts on the steppes of western Russia and Ukraine dating from 5,300 to 4,600 years ago. The Yamnaya used horses to manage huge herds of sheep, and followed their livestock across the steppes with wagons full of food and water.

The name Yamnaya was given by the archeologists who discovered the culture. They were Russians and named it in Russian: "yamnaya", which means "pitt-grave", after the burial sites that typified this culture and distinguished it from the otherwise similar neighboring "catacomb" (which is again a reference to the burial rites) culture . Now, one question could be if the Russian word Yamnaya shares its etymology with the Vedic Yama.

And, yes, there's a relation. Yama or Yamarāja is a god of death, the south direction, and the underworld, belonging to an early stratum of Rigvedic Hindu deities. In Sanskrit, his name can be interpreted to mean "twin". In the Zend-Avesta of Zoroastrianism, he is called "Yima".

DNA tests indicate that the Yamnaya-people were the result of admixture between two different hunter-gatherer populations: distinctive "Eastern European hunter-gatherers" with high affinity to the Mal'ta-Buret' culture or other, closely related Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) people from Siberia and to Western Hunter Gatherers (WHG) and a population of "Caucasus hunter-gatherers" who probably arrived from somewhere in the Near East, probably the Caucasus or Iran. Each of those two populations contributed about half the Yamnaya DNA.

According to Dr. Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge they've found that the Yamnaya genetic make-up is a mix of Eastern European hunter-gatherers and a population from a pocket of Caucasus hunter-gatherers who weathered much of the last Ice Age in apparent isolation.

Early Bronze Age men from the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppe swept into Europe about 5000 years ago—and may have left most women behind. This mostly male migration may have persisted for several generations, sending men into the arms of European women who interbred with them, and leaving a lasting impact on the genomes of living Europeans.

“It looks like males migrating in war, with horses and wagons,” says lead author and population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Sweden.

Eastern Europe and Finland
In the Baltic, Jones et al. (2017) found that the Neolithic transition – the passage from a hunter-gatherer economy to a farming-based economy – coincided with the arrival en masse of individuals with Yamnaya-like ancestry. This is different from what happened in Western and Southern Europe, where the Neolithic transition was caused by a population which came from the Near East, with Pontic steppe ancestry only being detected from the late Neolithic onward.

Per Haak et al. (2015), the Yamnaya contribution in the modern populations of Eastern Europe ranges from 46.8–64.9% among Russians to 42.8% in Ukrainians. Finland has one of the highest Yamnaya contributions in all of Europe (50.4–67.8%)

“To cook a bear” sees Niemi return once more to his native Tornedalen in Sweden’s Arctic. The story takes place in 1852, in the village of Kengis, where the consequences of a momentous summer reverberate into a sobering autumn. One of its central figures is the Swedish pastor Lars Levi Laestadius, a prominent revivalist, botanist and teetotaller with Sami roots whose legacy Niemi touched on in Popular Music, the novel which brought him fame. Although there are allusions to Milla Clementsdotter, Laestadius’ spiritual muse, and to the Kautokeino rebellion, references to the spread of Laestadianism across Arctic Scandinavia end there. The rest is fiction, adeptly conjured up through Niemi’s powerful, spellbinding writing.

The nexus of the story is the relationship between Laestadius and a Sami foundling boy, barely able to talk, whom he discovers neglected and abused at the wayside. Laestadius names the boy Jussi, and enters his birth retrospectively in the parish register, thereby symbolically bringing him into existence. Over the years the pastor teaches him the power of letters, reading and language, and respect for indigenous Arctic flora. Jussi grows into a young man whose childhood scars and mental demons set him apart. Many villagers fear this otherness, believing him to be a Noaidi, a Sami shaman capable of sorcery.

The prejudices are great, the local establishment strong and hostile. The brandy is a dividing line. The brandy generates income for the Swedish-speaking upper class and keeps the service people in place. But the evil forces do not only fit into a bottle.

At the same time as the highly appreciated priest, yes the master, must appear to be strong and wise, he wrestles constantly with faith and doubt. At last, Jussi does too. The ambush devil always lurks around the corner, self-righteousness, pride, affectation and selfishness. Niemi's novel is a lesson in social and human knowledge.

One day Laestadius makes a discovery that will unleash a series of fatal events. While out walking, he discovers a pole poking out of the black water on the springy marshland. Shaking it, he realises that the glinting in the sludge is blond human hair. A young maid has gone missing. The villagers are convinced she is the victim of a killer bear, and a bounty is promised to whoever can deliver the beast’s skull. Prejudices surface. Swedish-speaking local powers among the poorer Finnish and Sami-speaking villagers become hostile, wanting to maintain the status quo. Brahe, the local bailiff and Michelsson, his petit constable, are among them. But Laestadius will have none of it; his knowledge of the lie of the land and what grows in it tells him that the killer is two-footed. As the number of suspicious deaths that summer grows, despite the sacrificial slaughter of a pregnant bear, the pastor disregards Brahe and Michelsson’s theories of natural causes, accident or misadventure. Instead, he uses contemporary science in the form of daguerreotypy, fingerprints and botanical knowledge to collect evidence for his own theories. In contrast, the bailiff and constable continue to proffer their out-of-date, evidence-scant verdicts with increasing menace.

What of the bear? Niemi’s titles are inventive, and the bear is a metaphor here. Its body represents evil, one of the novel’s subtexts being how evil arises, how it is manifested and feared. The skull houses the soul. An abhorrent analogy is drawn later when two academics visiting Karesuando during Laestadius’ time there look for Sami crania for research purposes. Boiling a stew is how the drunken bear hunters envisage tasting the meat, while boiling the she-bear’s head is the pastor’s strange instruction to Jussi.

Niemi’s narrative technique is beguiling. The novel falls into four sections, each beginning with a verse. You naturally seek to deduce the author of the verses and whether they are written by the same hand. The first-person narrative is shared by Jussi and, as the book progresses, the pastor. However, an omniscient narrator appears in places to intrigue you further. Whose is this voice, and how are they privy to such information?

More than historical crime fiction, “To Cook a Bear” is a literary novel with crossover points. Niemi’s characterisations are vivid, sharp and credible: these people inhabit your mind long after you have finished the book. A skilled wordsmith and natural writer, Niemi juxtaposes lyrical pastoral beauty with the grotesque and the hideous. He is able to enchant, lull and repulse in equal measure. This is writing that will make you think. The story doesn’t end on the last page...