Traditional Singing Style of the Lapps

Extract

During the month of June, 1966, I undertook a folksong collecting trip among the nomadic Lapps, visiting among others the village Nunnanen in northern Finland situated more than two hundred kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle. The well-to-do Lapps of the village, all of whom have completed four to six forms of Finnish primary school, own three thousand reindeer. Throughout the summer they live with their families in tents and follow the herd, whereas in the winter they live in villages in log houses, which were rebuilt after the Second World War. Thanks to the Finnish Ministry of Culture, I was provided with an interpreter and a battery-operated tape recorder, with which we were able to collect two-hundred-and-fifty Lapp folksongs, the so-called yoiks, among reindeer farmers and shepherds. An additional twenty-six folksongs were collected orally.