Where the Old Religion Survived Long Enough to Be Written Down

The value of this family to the study of religion is a matter of timing. Across most of Europe pre-Christian practice was suppressed or absorbed before anyone recorded it in detail, and what survives is fragmentary and filtered through hostile or much later sources. In the Uralic-speaking north that happened late and unevenly. Finnish oral poetry in the ancient metre was still being sung in Karelia in the nineteenth century when Elias Lonnrot collected it, and the Kalevala he assembled from that material became the national epic of Finland and the principal source for the reconstructed practice now called Suomenusko.

The Sami drum religion, with its noaidi and its painted drums, was recorded in detail by the missionaries who set out to destroy it, and many of the drums themselves survive in museums, which raises questions about custody that the communities concerned are still pressing. The Khanty and Mansi of western Siberia maintained bear ceremonialism into the twentieth century. None of this makes Uralic speakers more archaic than anyone else, which is the error the older literature made repeatedly. It makes the documentation better, and the difference between those two statements is the whole point.

Sources The Uralic LanguagesDaniel Abondolo (ed.) with The KalevalaElias Lonnrot (compiler), Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on the Norwegianisation policy and injustice against the Sami, Kvens and Forest FinnsNorwegian Parliament Truth and Reconciliation Commission