Old Icelandic and Sami Ancestor Mountains: A Comparison

Abstract

From thirteenth-century Iceland, we have texts that tell us about a belief in local mountains where people could go after death. In mainland Scandinavia, the eighteenth-century sources for Sami religion tell us about a similar tradition. In this chapter, I will compare these traditions and argue that they overlapped both in content and geographically, and that they constituted a partly shared tradition. I will compare the textual information about the two traditions, and I will compare the relevant places in the context of the surrounding landscapes. In Sami tradition, the places are in a few cases lakes and rivers rather than mountains.