Dr. Ernesta Kazakėnaitė, a researcher at the Department of Baltic Studies at the Faculty of Philology, says that her recent article on a Sami manuscript, co-authored with her colleague from Uppsala University Prof. Rogier Blokland, is only "a little bit special," but the manuscript's watermarks suggest that it is from the end of the sixteenth century or the first part of the seventeenth century, which means that she has found the oldest surviving Sami manuscript.
"A manuscript booklet in the collections of the National Library of Sweden entitled "Pater noſter: Varijs Linguis" came to my attention when I was working on a book about Latvian prayer in the 16th century and its spread around the world, because it contains 20 prayers, including a Latvian one described by H. Biezais in 1955. The last page of the manuscript is very defective and difficult to read, but I did not want to leave a sentence in the book saying that the text was illegible, so I tried to read it with the methods and technologies I knew. It was not easy because the spelling was very different and I was already losing the use of my hands. When I identified it as Sami, I could not find anything earlier. It was hard to believe that it could be the oldest, so I contacted several Finno-Ugric scholars and they all confirmed it. Together with a specialist in the Sami language, Professor Rogier Blokland from Uppsala University, we then began almost a year of research. Its existence in the collection is very unexpected and puzzling, and raises many new scientific questions for both Finougrists and historians of the region, which will hopefully be answered in the future." - said researcher Ernesta Kazakėnaitė.