A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
skábma
Skábma is the dark season in Sámi, the stretch of the northern winter when the sun does not clear the horizon at all. In the far north, it runs for weeks or months. It is not black: The snow holds and returns whatever light there is from the moon, the stars, the aurora, and the long blue twilight in the middle of the day, and the whole landscape reads in shades of blue.
Etymology
The word is Sámi and it names the season rather than the astronomical event, which is the difference between it and the English polar night. Sámi divides the year into eight seasons rather than four, and skábma sits inside the winter portion of that scheme, alongside dálvi.
Notes
The return of the sun after skábma is marked in the communities of the far north, and in several places the day the disc first shows above a particular ridge has a name and a gathering attached. The Sámi film Skábmagovat, meaning images of the dark season, gave its name to an annual Indigenous film festival held at Inari in Finnish Lapland during exactly this stretch of the year.