The End of Drum-Time
In the austere reaches of mid-19th-century northern Scandinavia, two ways of life collide. The native Sámi, or Lapps, as the Swedish and Finnish settlers call them, have herded reindeer on long-established routes over the fragile ecosystem of the tundra for millennia. The settlers are claiming land to farm, plowing away the reindeer’s main food source, a thick layer of lichen that takes decades to grow. When reindeer trample the fields and devour the crop of hay, a distant crown ordains that the herders follow impossibly restrictive migration routes, threatening their way of life.
Religious repression, alcoholism, culture clashes, and political ends tangle into the territorial strife. Exemplifying and dramatizing the conflict are two lovers: a Sami herdsman and shaman’s son, and the daughter of a charismatic Lutheran preacher.
Passion and jealousy, greed and kindness, piety and power, tradition and change, a longing for freedom and a longing for stability, and lust and love, pull and push not only the lovers, but the other characters of The End of Drum-Time. Hanna Pylväinen’s many-threaded story weaves a fascinating and gorgeous tapestry of a world ruled by cold, the arctic extremes of dark and light, impersonal political forces, and, above all, the timeless forces of human nature.
