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ages. Just as Emperor Penguins remain behind to endure the Arctic winter, when all other warm-blooded creatures flee southwards, so the Saami had stubbornly retained a toehold on their demesne throughout the period of the last glacial.
    Genetic science still has questions to answer but it seems the Saami are a separate people. They are closely linked by culture and language to the natives of Finland and of the Arctic regions of Russia, but appear to be genetically different from both, and they are certainly not related to their southern neighbours in Norway and Sweden.
    The Saami stayed put during the Ice Age, perhaps by clinging to the coastal zones and finding ways to survive around the unfrozen rim of the northern ocean. In any event it seems they developed independently of any other European groups for thousands of years. Cut off from all the human populations that had moved south – and kept from them by the ice for as much as 15,000 years – they became a folk apart. The debate about their origins is ongoing. Some ethnologists believe that the ancestors of the Saami must have come once upon a time from some part of Asia. Many of the modern Saami living there now have physical characteristics – darker skin and hair, wide Mongoloid facial features – that make them appear similar to populations further to the east. But there are also those with paler complexions and more Caucasian faces. There is a strong argument that says the Saami developed their unique andseparate personality and characteristics in the very territories they still occupy today.
    Their isolation was such that even when the incomers arrived the resident population remained apart. While the ancestors of the Vikings continued upon their own path – one that would lead eventually to a life of farming, and of ocean-going adventure – their northern neighbours were already set in their ways. There was always contact between the two – mostly cordial, judging by the written sources – and the Vikings, and their ancestors before them, would come to rely upon the skills of the Saami hunters when it came to acquiring the most sought-after pelts.
    Sometime around AD 890 a Viking chief called Ottar – or Othere – arrived in the court of King Alfred the Great, of Wessex, with tales to tell of his homeland. Among other things he said the Saami (in his own tongue, the Finnas ) lived on the borders of his own realm, mixing and trading with his own folk. It seems the wealth and prestige of men like Ottar depended, to a great extent, upon the furs obtained by the hunters and handed over in the form of ‘tribute’.
    According to the account recorded by Alfred’s scribes, each of the Saami chiefs paid Ottar ‘according to his rank’, ‘The highest in rank has to pay fifteen marten skins, five reindeer skins, one bear skin, ten measures of feathers, a jacket of bear skin or otter skin and two skip-ropes, 60 ells long.’
    The Romans were the first people to write about the Saami, during the centuries either side of the birth of Christ, and it is clear their ways seemed primitive and alien to outsiders even then. In his work Germania , completed in AD 98, Tacitus made the very first written observations of the tribes living at the top of the world. He labelled them the Fenni , and his amazement and fascination are apparent even now:
    In wonderful savageness live the nation of the Fenni, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones. Their common support they have from the chase, women as well as men; for with these the former wander up and down, and crave a portion of the prey. Nor other shelter have they even for their babes, against the violence of tempests and ravening beasts, than to cover them with the branches of trees twisted together; this a reception for the old men, and hither