Andrew Berquist

= Division III =

This article is part of a Climax Div III Issue. By Yonatan Schechter, Staff Writer.

Have you ever thought that shamans and poets were an integral part of culture? Andy Berquist did. His Div III, Shamans and Poets: Connecting Norse Mythology and the Kalevala, explores two ancient and apparently dissimilar mythologies. The Kalevala is a Finnish national epic with a number of characters that go on all sorts of interesting adventures. Andy got this idea for a Division III project when a professor stated in class that the two mythologies, Norse and Finnish, were not connected. This was based on an anthropological assumption that lan-guage, myth, and culture are co-dependent. They evolve together. This alone is not so hard to grasp, the inference made is that if a language is not related, then the mythology is not related. Finnish is a very distinct language, not a member of the Indo-European language family, the family that every other European language falls under. Andy realized that the indigenous shamans of Scandinavia, the Sami, were a connecting factor of these two sets of mythologies.

It turns out that the magic invoked in both cultures’ mythologies is done in very similar fashions. This was Andy’s starting point for seeing connections between the two stories. It appears that both Odin, the Norse high-god, and one of the main characters of the Kalevala were similar types shaman. They both have magical horses that can carry them to the underworld, and it is thought that these steeds might actually be the drums used in shamanism to carry a shaman on a Journey.

Andy’s hypothesis for the spread of the Norse myths to Finland is that the bi-lingual poets of Finland encountered these stories in their travels. They were translated to Finnish and, using names of al-ready existing heroes and legends, added elements relevant to Finnish culture. For one of Andy’s advanced learning activities, he taught an EPEC on Norse myth during Jan term. He tried to facilitate it in the traditional way: around a campfire. He even had a reindeer skin in case anyone got too cold.