Sigbjørn Skåden

In Planterhaug (Backwoods Fable, not translated into English), we meet Police Commissioner Huuva, who travels from Oslo back to the Sámi village of Planterhaug to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of the old drunkard Nilsen. Although the murder case serves as the novel’s outward focus, in Planterhaug nothing is as it first appears. 

Through the wanderings of the Norwegianised Sámi, Huuva, the reader is led into a world that is both estranged and mythological. The days at the boarding house are marked by warm meals consisting of offal and traditional home cooking, before he sets out on his slow and hesitant investigations. Everywhere he turns, he is met with silence, evasive answers, and enigmatic statements. 

The novel raises question after question: What kind of village is Planterhaug? What happened here when Huuva was a child? Why has he really been sent here? Why do the pigs scream all the time? The investigation develops into a story about knowledge, language and power, in which Huuva is forced to confront both the village’s and his own past. 

Planterhaug is a deeply poetic and melancholic novel, rich in detail and with a literary force rarely seen in contemporary Norwegian literature. Skåden alternates between Nynorsk, Bokmål and Sámi. These linguistic shifts distinguish the characters’ sense of belonging, their distances from one another, and their positions of power. The novel’s play with language, family history, and symbols gives the text a clear historical gravity. Huuva’s investigation both looks back at the policies of Norwegianisation and ahead to questions of Sámi identity in present-day Norway. In Planterhaug, power relations are reversed: it is Huuva’s outsider status and limited understanding of the Sámi community that emerge most clearly. 

Although the novel is marked by an overall heavy and sombre atmosphere, it is rich in unexpected turns. This unpredictability drives the reader onwards in the search for answers – not only to who died, but to what Planterhaug is, and what the village conceals. Taken as a whole, Planterhaug emerges as a highly original novel with strong linguistic and formal qualities that set it apart within contemporary Norwegian literature.

The novel Láŋtdievvá is a force field condensed into 185 pages. You are drawn into this field by the very first sentence of the book: “From the Tower a wind blows, a current that creeps down the mountainside on its way towards the coast, glides over the Storelva and the Jonne meadows on the valley floor before it caresses Huuva’s cheek as he stands in the yard watching the taxi disappear behind the dwarf birches at Gáváhássu on its way back to where it came from.” (p. 7). 

Nature is always close at hand as the story of the small Sámi village of Láŋtdievvá unfolds – a village where a 25-metre concrete block towers over the houses and surrounding landscape like a monument to modernisation and Norwegianisation, while the flock of sheep on the sixth floor hints at an unfinished process. The novel’s plot is full of abrupt turns, enigmatic scenes, meals of blood and offal, threatening beings from Sámi oral tradition, situational comedy, and a language that is a feast for all of your senses in one fell swoop. The author has also seasoned the novel with a wealth of allusions to literature and music. 

Detective Inspector John Edgar Huuva travels from Oslo to Láŋtdievvá to investigate the death of the old alcoholic Nilsen. Huuva’s late father often visited his home village of Láŋtdievvá during summers together with his son, hence why Huuva has some familiarity with the place and its people. These childhood experiences have, by all accounts, left their mark on his soul, as in adulthood he took the step of changing his surname to Huuva, after his father’s family. 

As he walks around observing and asking questions, a series of painful human destinies, the history of two families, and the recent history of the entire community are revealed. Yet he never gets to the bottom of what happened when Nilsen died, or when his cousin Rakel disappeared several decades earlier. Huuva fails as a police investigator, but functions effectively as a catalyst for uncovering life in Láŋtdievvá, past and present. His primary aim is to discover more about himself and his own background. Although Huuva feels a sense of belonging to the village, he’s regarded as an outsider, even by his aunt, the only remaining member of the family. 

How do the inhabitants of Láŋtdievvá relate to their Sámi identity? Huuva’s aunt describes the situation this way: “On Planterhaugen, both history and the future have been polished away from the sight of those who still live here. All we have left is now. But we have nowhere to go. All we’re capable of is disappearing.” (p. 172). They don’t feel at home within the Sámi community. At the same time, a revitalisation of Sámi identity is underway in large parts of Sápmi. Huuva poses an important question: “Does the unified really exist at all? Has there ever been a smoothly polished core that one can say is right and true?” (p. 180). In Sámi, this is formulated as: «Leago ovdal leahkán čoahkis?» (p. 179, in English: “Have we ever been united before?”) Who is Sámi, really, and in what ways can one manage or practise one’s Sámi identity? 

Although pessimism prevails with regard to a Sámi future, people live with a closeness to nature and a perception of reality which, despite Christianity and Norwegianisation, still reflects elements of a traditional Sámi worldview. The mythical elements of the text – among them Čuoppomáddu and the six-fingered girl – create a field of tension in relation to the realistic story of Láŋtdievvá. These mythical elements do not blend seamlessly into the text – instead, they challenge the rational understanding of reality characteristic of the Western world, slow down the reading process, and encourage the reader to complete the story themselves. The author has also woven in narratives written by missionaries in the eighteenth century, creating a contrast between the familiar and the estranged. This does not mean that the text is inaccessible to non-Sámi readers, but it does possess a dimension that those unfamiliar with the culture may struggle to grasp. The novel Láŋtdievvá thus offers substantial intellectual nourishment, though you are unlikely to find answers to everything, regardless of your cultural background.

Sigbjørn Skåden (b. 1976) is a Sámi author who has previously published several poetry collections and novels. He writes in both Norwegian and Tornedalian Sámi, and Planterhaug has been published simultaneously in both languages. Láŋtdievvá is the book’s title in Tornedalian Sámi.