This lyrical and ambitious verse novel won the August prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award, and has now been translated into English by Saskia Vogel. It tells the story of two Sami families across three generations of the 20th century. The Sami are the EU’s only Indigenous people, and they live in lands north of the Arctic Circle, which are now part of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
Ædnan contains echoes of epic poems and Norse sagas but also feels contemporary and accessible. There are no gods or heroes but, instead, a polyphonic chorus of storytellers who jointly narrate the lineage and history of their people. The central hero of the old texts is replaced by Ædnan itself – a Sami word meaning land, ground or earth.
Linnea Axelsson employs a free verse form, with no punctuation. Stanzas are divided by dashes, the lines often extremely brief. Consequently, every page offers expanses of white space, reminding the reader that this is a narrative of absence, fracture, silence, erasure. This sparse form mirrors the landscape itself: harsh, thinly populated, often snowbound.
The story begins in 1913 at a time when the Sami are setting out for their summer pastures in Norway. A young couple, Ber-Joná and Ristin, are celebrating the arrival of twin boys, Aslat and Nila. This was a time “When words were not enough / for the lives / we lived.” Instead, the Sami are “Singing forth / the world around us.” Ber-Joná says of her son that “we spread out the / landscape of our kin / in his body.”
It is a harsh life. Nila is found to be a weakling. “Never will he / be of use / in the reindeer forest.” Aslat is injured in an accident. In addition, the Norwegians are closing the borders and so the couple are separated from each other. They will not be able to return to the summer pastures. “Migration paths and songs / had to be stifled / stricken from memory.”
The narrative thread passes to a family who, in the 1950s, occupy the flat in Porjus in Sweden where Ristin’s life ended. The mother, Lise, tells how doctors arrived to document the Sami people: “In Royal ink / that racial animal / was drawn.” Soon Lise’s children are sent away to the Nomad Residential School. “The instinct to adapt was strong.”
The Sami are under threat in other ways. A power company is damming the land to create hydroelectricity. This brings flooding and soon most of the Sami are employed as “switchboard, cleaner or cook”. Few continue to keep their reindeer. However, by the 1970s Lise’s children are beginning to see how their traditional life has been undervalued and destroyed.
Sandra, Lise’s daughter, is “a confident brazen Sami queen” who wants to reassemble every “cracked branch / of the family tree”. Soon the Sami are taking the Swedish government to court. They want the Swedes to acknowledge how their own history is linked to the Sami.
The fight for Sami rights is hard, relying on oral stories, archaeology and “the ground’s sources”. The older Sami often don’t want to speak about their past. Sandra asks, “How do you heal a language / I suppose you have to start somewhere.”
Towards the end of the book, a priest officiates at a Sami funeral and, as the family walks away, she wonders who these people are. Axelsson’s novel is a bold and original attempt to answer that question and to return the Sami to their rightful place in history.
• Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson, translated by Saskia Vogel, is published by Pushkin (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
