The rune drum was seized by the authorities on 7 December 1691, it was created to help a noaidi, or shaman, to enter a trance and walk among spirits. The owner was tried for witchcraft the next year.
According to official records, he told the court that his mother taught him how to use the rune drum because he wanted to help people in distress and he wanted to do good with his art.
He was murdered with an axe by a man who had taken leave of his senses.
The National Museum ofDenmark is now the property of the drum that entered the royal collection. The drum was handed back to the Sevi people by the director of the Sevi Museum in Karasjok.
It is a precious object for us that we are an indigenous people of northern Europe.
The drum has been on loan to the museum since 1979. The president of Norway appealed to Queen Margrethe of Danes over the issue, hoping she would act as the conscience of the Danes.
These objects are not about collections or historical periods. We think of them as people.
It is the first drum to be returned from abroad and the only one in the collection. The centerpiece of the new exhibition will be the drum.
Silja Somby, the film-maker who is making a film about rune drums, says that the formal handover of the object is an important event. She said they are like bibles for us. Each has its own meaning and symbolism.
The largest collection of more than 30 is held at the Nordiska Museet, Stockholm, as well as in Berlin, Leipzig, Rome, and the British Museum and Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
The population of the Sámi is between 60,000 and 70,000, of which about 25,000 speak any one of the nine surviving Sámi languages.
Their nature-based religious life used to include drums. A brass ring would move across its surface when a noaidi struck a reindeer-skin and Birchwood rune drum with a reindeer-antler hammer. The noaidi would divine future events depending on how the ring moved in relation to the symbols on the drum. The drumming would help the noaidi travel in different realities, for example among the spirits of the dead.
He was brought to trial in February 1692 on the grounds that he has owned and used an instrument they call a rune, because at the time his drum was seized, he was being aggressively Christianised. The drum was sent to Copenhagen because Norway was ruled from there at the time of the union.
The evidence is still there, and he demonstrated the use of the drum to the court. According to recent scholars, the framing of his account in broadly Christian terms may have been an attempt to tell the court what it wanted to hear.
He said that when God is prayed to, Diermis is helpful in that when there are floods and a lot of rain, he will call back the weather.
He said that when God is prayed to, Gvodde gives good fortune in the hunt for wild reindeer. If the rune drum is beaten, the ring will not dance for this reindeer, the one who asks for good hunting will not get any reindeer, no matter how hard he tries.
The Karasjok Sámi Museum is too small and lacks adequate storage facilities to house a large number of objects.
She said that the museum has no further requests for repatriation of drums, but that they would love to share their stories with other museums. The last owner of items collected by Sir Arthur Evans is the one who visited northern Finland in 1873.
Somby wants to return items from Sweden and Germany.
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