Tilly Smith

Hreinn dýr (Old Norse: Reindeer Animal)
Review of The History Press hardcover edition (2019), an expanded & enhanced edition of the original [book:The Real Rudolph: A Natural History of the Reindeer|4840034] (2006).

With my Estonian heritage I'm always on the lookout for the arts and culture of the greater family of Finno-Ugric & Samoyedic peoples. Sometimes this means coming across international films at the annual TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival). These are often off the beaten show more track and will only play on the Festival circuit without having a general theatrical release. Several that I've seen in the past have been Seven Songs from the Tundra (1999), A Bride of the Seventh Heaven (2004), Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari (2012) and Sami Blood (2016). Often the films deal with the various tribal mythologies and the issues of preserving ancient indigenous cultures in the modern world.

With the current Buffy Sainte-Marie controversy here in Canada, I like to remember that we were all indigenous once in our ancestral roots. I also remember Canadian indigenous actor Gary Farmer introducing Sami singer Mari Boine back at a WOMAD Festival concert here in Toronto (probably it was in 1989 as her Gula Gula album had just come out) by commenting that it was also "the first time he had ever met a blond, blue-eyed aboriginal person."

So, anyway, back to the reindeer. At TIFF 2023 I saw the Sami/Norwegian reindeer herding film The Tundra Within Me directed by Sara Margrethe Oskal, who was herself once a reindeer herder and now works to promote the Sami reindeer culture through the arts. Shortly after that I read a terrific 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review by my GR friend SportyRod about Tilly Smith's book, so of course I had to read it as well.

See photograph at https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1674D/production/_104718919_small-no...
The author Tilly Smith photographed with some of her Cairngorm Reindeer Herd. Image sourced from a BBC photo series The Reindeer that call Scotland's Cairngorms home. (December 14, 2018).

The book is mainly about the Cairngorm Reindeer Herd in Scotland. Smith and her family have been looking after the herd for 40 years, having inherited it from its 1952 founders, the Sami herder Mikel Utsi and his wife Dr. Ethel Lindgren. Smith details the history of the Cairngorm herd (which is a modest 150 animals) but also details the history of various reindeer herding cultures worldwide and goes into the life cycles of those same reindeer (known as caribou in North America). There are some rather incredible statistics, such as the 5,000 km. migratory pattern of some Alaskan caribou, the longest annual migration of any land-dwelling animal on earth. All in all, this book has everything you ever wanted to know about reindeer. It only lacks in photographs, but is instead supplemented with reindeer artistic graphics. There are plentiful Cairngorm Reindeer Herd photographs on the web though to remind you how cute the animals can be.

See photograph at https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/169...;
A close-up photograph of a Cairngorm reindeer.

Soundtrack
As mentioned above, I enjoyed revisiting Mari Boine's Gula Gula (1989) album.
See album cover at https://i.discogs.com/7MYOExjuUJiEkt1XefcYqS5cij9ObiMAJacgoPdFtms/rs:fit/g:sm/q:...

Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek did a jazz-fusion version of the Gula Gula title track on his "I Took Up the Runes" (1990) album.
See album cover at https://i.discogs.com/nPIKZ6N0BVHYP6nRipuiaJD9WNsTAc1TQOUynOYUzxs/rs:fit/g:sm/q:... show less