A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words 1367 entries

dálvi

DAHL-vee
Dálvi is winter in Sámi, the language of the Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, and it is the longest of the eight seasons in that calendar. It runs roughly from December through February. The sun does not clear the horizon for weeks at the northern end of the range. Reindeer are on winter pasture, digging feeding craters down through the snow to reach the lichen underneath, and the work of the season is watching snow conditions to make sure they can still get through.
Etymology
The word is Sámi, and its close relatives are in Finnish and Estonian rather than in Norwegian or Swedish. It is the anchor of the eight-season calendar, since three of the other seven are named against it: čakčadálvi is autumn-winter and giđđadálvi is spring-winter, which leaves dálvi as the winter that is winter and nothing else.
Notes
The danger in dálvi is not cold but a thaw followed by a freeze, which puts a hard lid of ice over the lichen and shuts the herd out of its own pasture. Sámi has a large working vocabulary for exactly these conditions and the words are tools rather than poetry. See čakča for autumn.
 ice/snow animals Indigenous Sámi
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