The Bullroarer Atlas

SAMI2024-001 - ethnographic attestation

Bieve Niila at the Basseuk'sa/Ganiiuk'sa bird-stone and cave sacred place

Sweden - BASSEUK'SA - GANIIUK'SA, Small Lule River - Tarrekaise sacred-site narrative - Europe - Arctic Scandinavia

Sacred / spirit

A notched wooden board with a leaf-shaped incised spine and a hole at one end, photographed against a museum scale card: an English bullroarer...
Representative image. A notched wooden board with a leaf-shaped incised spine and a hole at one end, photographed against a museum scale card: an English bullroarer standing in for the general European form, not the Sámi sacred-site narrative documented here. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1902.51.5) Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

At the cave the Sámi called Basseuk'sa, "Holy Doorway," and Ganiiuk'sa, "Spirit Doorway" — a 25-metre-wide opening on the Tarrekaise mountain above the Small Lule River, one of the most renowned sacred places of the Sámi — a man remembered as Biei've ("Sun") Niila would go to the left side of the entrance and whirl a bull-roarer around his head. The sound, Lars Pirak told the ethnographer Bo Sommarström in 1986, was "similar to bird wings," and it came back as an echo "after two hours" from the unknown depths of the interior; a relative of Pirak's had inherited the instrument. The cave's principal deity was described in the seventeenth century as a stone in the shape of a "large bird," and other sieidi stones here were offered fat, bones, and reindeer antlers. It may have been the gadnihah, "the small people below," who answered the questions Niila put into the dark.

A certain Biei've ("Sun") Niila ... also used to go to the left side of the opening and there whirl a bull-roarer around his head; the sound was "similar to bird wings" and returned as an echoe "after two hours" from the unknown depths of the interior

Sommarström 1987:214 (caption to Fig. 2), citing Lars Pirak, personal communication 1986
Function
Sacred-site bull-roarer narrative connected with a bird-shaped sieidi stone, cave, echo, and the mythic saivo world.
Map confidence
low_medium - Small Lule River / Tarrekaise regional anchor from Sommarström's figure caption; not a precise cave coordinate.
Source location
Sommarström 1987 p. 214; JEF 18(2), p. 56; IUCN/UNEP-WCMC 2000 p. 73

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