Rogier Blokland
Uppsala university
Among the holdings of the National Library of Sweden there is a manuscript titled Pater noſter: Varijs Linguis‘ Lord’s Prayer: in various languages’; it contains 20 translations of the Lord’s Prayer, of which 19 can be identified. The last page of this manuscript, however, is very defective, and it had not previously been known in what language it had been written. However, in 2024 the Lithuanian Baltologist Ernesta Kazakėnaitė discovered that it was written a southern variety of Saami. We assume the manuscript can be dated to the very end of the 16th century, which would make it the oldest known Saami text in manuscript form that has survived to the present day; earlier manuscripts of the Lord’s Prayer in Saami are unknown.
In this talk I will present the manuscript and its history.