Goahti
Beaivi
In sources describing the South Sámi region, the divinity appears as a female figure. In the Skolt and Kola Sámi tradition, on the other hand, the Sun is depicted as a man driving around the world in his sledge, and he is supposed to have taken a Sámi maiden as his wife, thus forging familial bonds with people on earth.
Throughout Sápmi the Sun was associated with fertility.
On the skin of the shaman's drum, the symbol of the Sun god is usually interpreted as being a circle (in the North Sámi area) or a square (among the South Sámi) with lines pointing out at each corner to indicate the power of the Sun extending to the four points of the compass. The name of these lines was nealja beaiwe labikje (the four straps of the Sun).
According to eighteenth-century sources describing the Norwegian Sámi, gruel was ritually eaten at Midsummer as an offering to the Sun. It is also known that at the beginning of the twentieth century the Sámi of Enontekiö still baked a cake of flour and reindeer blood and hung it on a birch tree in the late winter and early spring as an offering to the Sun.
Legends about the children of the Sun are common throughout Sápmi. A myth which tells that the Sámi were descended from the sons of the Sun became known through the epic juoiggus chant called Beaivebártni soagnomátki Jiehtanasaid máilmmis (The Son of the Sun Goes a-Wooing in the Land of the Giants), which was recorded by a Sámi clergyman called Ander Fjellner in the middle of the nineteenth century in Jullasjärvi and Hárgedalen in Sweden. According to the chant, the son of the Sun journeyed to the Land of the Giants beyond the seas and married a daughter of a giant. The sons of this union, Gállábártnit, invented skis and engendered the human race. It is to this myth that the eponym for the Sámi, 'the children of the Sun,' refers.
Gustav von Duben describes the myth of men called Njáveš and Háhčeš who were the first people of the world. Njáveš took the daughter of the Sun, Njávešeatne as his wife and Háhčeš the daughter of the Moon, Áhčešeatne, Njávešeatne tamed wild reindeer for mankind and gave her reindeer to them. Áhčešeatne, on the other hand, neglected her reindeer, which became wild. In the North Sámi area there was a legend according to which the maiden of the Sun taught the Sámi to herd reindeer. In the eastern Sámi tradition, the Sun himself owned reindeer, and his daughter Piejjv niijja (the Maiden of the Sun) received a large herd as a dowry when she married a reindeer herder. After that the reindeer herds on earth increased and thrived. The livelihood of reindeer herding is thus explained in both the eastern and the western Sámi tradition as beginning with a woman, the daughter of the Sun. The myths reflect different phases in the society of the Sámi. The events of the Njávešeatne legend are located in the age when the wind reindeer were domesticated, while the eastern tradition describes a later cultural stage, when the size of the herds grew and reindeer herding was further developed.
Source courtesy of: The Saami. A Cultural Encyclopaedia. Ed. Kulonen, Seurujärvi & Pulkkinen (2005)
