The Sámi noaidi's drum skin was untanned reindeer hide, often from a calf's neck for its thickness, and its figures were painted with a paste of alder bark. The pictures were the owner's world: reindeer wild and herded and the predators that threatened them, hunting, fishing, the camp with its tent and storehouse, the neighbours' church, the gods and the dead. Ernst Manker's survey knew seventy-one drums: forty-two Southern Sámi with a rhombus Sun at the centre, twenty-two Central Sámi with the skin halved by a line, seven Northern Sámi divided into three or five levels for the heavens, the living and the underworld. For divination the noaidi laid a pointer, the vuorbi, of brass, horn or bone on the skin and struck the drum with a hammer of horn; where the pointer danced and came to rest among the figures was the answer.
The oldest accounts watched more than the resting place. Ole Worm, describing a drum in 1655, has the brass rhombus “jump here and there” as the drum is beaten and sung to, and the figure it rests on when the singing stops is the answer. Schefferus's History of Lapland (1674) says the rings were set “on the picture of the Sun”, and that if they went round “towards the right hand, according to the Sun's course” the owner looked for health and good fortune, “if contrary, towards the left”, for sickness; and before a hunt they watched which way the pointer turned, east, west, north or south, to learn where the game lay. That is why this ring starts on the Sun, why the reading tells you which way it went round and where it rests, and why those are offered as what the old accounts looked at, not as rules for you.
Reading the figures is harder than it looks. When Olov Graan explained his own drum to a Swedish vicar in the 1670s he spoke of snowy weather, a ship, rain and squirrels in the trees; Manker, three centuries later, read the same marks as gods and spirits. Rydving and Kjellström showed how much of the “spiritual” reading is the scholar's. The lesson for a drum of your own is the one this tool keeps: nobody can read your signs but you, so write down what they mean.
What this tool borrows from the Sámi is the method — a skin of signs and a pointer that dances to the drum. What it does not borrow is their images. The Sámi have asked that their drums' figures not be copied, and the Borrowing and Respect lesson says why; the signs here are plain ones, and the best are the ones you draw yourself. Read The Noaidi and the Sámi Drum and The Coat, the Mirror and the Rattle for the drums themselves.
The pointer here moves by chance. Kept in this browser only. To paint a real drum, save the PNG and the key to the signs and scale them to your skin; alder bark, boiled, still makes a red-brown paint. Sources: Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford, 1674), p. 57; Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum (1655), on the drum described at old.no/samidrum; Manker, Die lappische Zaubertrommel (1938–50).