been their alpha and omega. And I really do mean the whole alphabet. Reindeer have given them everything they need. Clothes, for a start: in winter they used skaller, footwear made of reindeer hide, fur side out. And in summer, they used komager, also made of reindeer hide, but without fur—or hide boots known as bieksoer, which were also popular among Norway’s “alternative” people in the 1970s. When it got really cold outside, people would wear a pesk, a kind of fur coat. Also tools such as needles and combs used to be made of reindeer antler and bone.
The diet was dominated by reindeer meat, too, generally dried and dipped in boiled black coffee to make it easier to chew. Party food was boiled bone marrow or a reindeer soup known as bidos. Reindeer meat was also a source of income. Previously, the reindeer owners slaughtered their animals themselves, but nowadays they deliver them to the abattoir, other than those the herders retain for their own use.
Last but not least, reindeer were also the Sami’s draft animals, harnessed to sleighs or sleds known as pulks—when there was snow, that is. In summertime, the reindeer were pretty much free, although people might sometimes use them as pack animals. In winter, the reindeer offered the ideal means of transport, reliant on neither roads nor bridges. The whole plateau lay open to those able to use them.
Snow was also the reindeer’s element in another way. Beneath the snow, properly insulated and therefore not frozen regardless of how far below zero temperatures lay, the reindeer could dig down to their main winter food: reindeer lichen. They were, in fact, dependent on the snow and its unique insulating properties: if not for the snow, the reindeer lichen would have frozen and the reindeer would have starved—as can happen in winters where snow is scarce. Then a layer of ice forms over the lichen and the reindeer cannot reach it.
Frozen reindeer lichen also brought a TV series to a temporary halt. When the Norwegian state broadcaster, NRK, was about to launch a “slow TV” series following the spring migration of a family of flyttsamer and their reindeer herd, the reindeer didn’t want to leave. The reason was that the snow had first melted in a period of mild weather and then frozen again into ice. This made it difficult for the reindeer to find reindeer lichen and they responded by postponing their migration, staying where they were until the ice began to thaw again and the reindeer lichen became accessible. The leader does were the ones that decided when the migration should start, and the TV people just had to wait patiently.
For reindeer, snow is a gift from the gods, and that has also been true for the humans on the plateau. The snow has made it easy to travel, independently of roads, using either reindeer or skis. The Sami people were probably Norway’s first skiers, as Sami director Nils Gaup suggested in his film Pathfinder: the Sami can travel on skis, whereas the Tjudes, a marauding people, have to struggle through the snow on foot. Rock carvings of skiers dating back several thousands of years have been found in Alstadhaug and Alta—the images that inspired the distinctive icons of skiers used at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.
The Sami people’s skiing skills were also well known to Fridtjof Nansen, who took two Sami men with him when he skied across Greenland: Ole Nilsen Ravna and Samuel Balto. The same went for the Finnish-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld when he crossed the Greenland ice in 1883, as well as Carsten E. Borchgrevink when he went to the Antarctic in 1900. The two Sami men he took with him, Per Savio and Ole Must from Finnmark, were the first people to spend a night on that continent. And they didn’t do this because they were adventure seekers, by the way, but because they were abandoned there temporarily after bad weather forced the ship to put away from the shore.
That the Sami people had mastered snow, whether traveling by ski, reindeer, or snowmobile—the option most of them use now—was something I learned as a child on the Finnmarksvidda. I had trouble keeping up even with those who used traditional equipment—skis with simple leather straps into which they slipped their skaller (today, of course, they use modern gear). What I didn’t know then, but have since learned, is that the Sami people also have an incredibly rich vocabulary for all things snow related. Even their language is adapted to life in the Kingdom of Frost.
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MORE THAN A HUNDRED WORDS FOR SNOW
MANY PEOPLE HAVE probably heard about the discussion of whether Inuit really do have a hundred words for snow. Anthropologists and linguists have cast doubt on the idea, regarding it as a romantic perception of Indigenous people’s traditional knowledge. I don’t know the truth about the Inuit vocabulary for snow, but I reckon that people living in such close contact with snow and ice actually do need a detailed vocabulary for it. What I do know for sure, though, is that there is one people with many more than a hundred words for snow: the people I grew up with on the Finnmarksvidda.
Language experts like Nils Jernsletten,17 professor of languages; Ole Henrik Magga,18 better known as an Indigenous politician and the first president of the Sami parliament; and associate professor Inger Marie Gaup Eira19 have collected and analyzed Sami snow terminology. According to Magga, the North Sami language (the most widespread form of Sami) contains 175 to 180 root words for “snow” and “ice.” Once you factor in derivations, inflections, and variants of these roots—for example, the noun njeadgga means “drifting snow,” while the verb njeadgat means “to drift” and the adjective njeadgi refers to a type of weather involving snowdrifts—the number of words for snow and ice adds up to around a thousand.
This finding also applies in other Sami languages, such as Lule Sami (named for the Lule river valley in Sweden). The reindeer herder Johan Rassa was born in a lavvu in the mountains of northern Sweden in 1921 and was one of the last bearers of a rich tradition of knowledge about snow in the Sápmi region, known as Sábme in Lule Sami. The author Yngve Ryd spent five winters speaking to Rassa about snow and the Lule Sami terminology. His book, based on Rassa’s knowledge, explains more than three hundred words related to snow and ice, together with the context in which they were used. This rich terminology was one aspect of the reindeer-herding Sami people’s adaptation to snow, which dominated the landscape for seven to eight months of the year: “A highly detailed knowledge of snow and ice previously went hand in hand with the business of reindeer herding. Weather, wind, and snow used to be everyday topics of conversation.”20
One reason why knowledge of snow was so vital, as reflected in this compendious vocabulary, was that snow—how much snow, what kind of snow, and so on—could drastically alter living conditions for humans and animals: “People’s reliance on snow and ice shifts between extremes, and this may have contributed to the rich vocabulary. It might snow in such a way that it is a struggle to move even a few hundred meters, and yet snow can also provide such good skiing conditions that one can easily whizz along for a couple of dozen kilometers.”21 People used so many words about snow and snow conditions because they were talking about snow from different points of view, in different situations. The topic was never snow as an “objective,” physical entity but snow as one approached it, used it, and had to adapt to it. It was how snow fell in autumn, in winter; how it remained on the ground from winter through to spring. It was how snow behaved in relation to people and animals, restricting their movements or grazing possibilities—a vocabulary about snow that grew through practice.
There are many reasons why snow conditions are extremely important for reindeer and their herders. First of all, as mentioned earlier, for much of the year the reindeer must find their food—reindeer lichen—by digging beneath the snow. So it is vital for them to do this where it is possible to dig through the snow, which is difficult if it has previously thawed and then refrozen. And while snow is a unique insulating material when it is light, owing to the air inside and between the snow crystals, both ice and snow that is more akin to ice are a different matter entirely. The snow also determines how reindeer and people can travel. In some kinds of snow, movement can be almost impossible, while
