The lovely Icelandic word for “ground fog,” dalalæða, comes from dalur, meaning “valley” and læða which is variously translated as “sneak up” or “female cat.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Dalalæða, Icelandic Ground Fog”
Grant, you remember our phone call with Jacob from Kentucky, who was talking about that poetic expression from Appalachia, the groundhogs are making coffee.
Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s when there’s a mist in the trees, in the low hills, just kind of, you can’t really see. It’s the early morning mist. It’s so beautiful. It’s just kind of lying in there heavy on the ground.
Yeah. Well, it reminds me of a lovely Icelandic term that I just came across, Dalalaitha, which literally translates as valley and sneak up. The verb there, letha, means both to sneak up and it also means a female cat. So I get this wonderful picture of a valley where the fog is creeping in on little cat feet.
Oh, I love it. That is gorgeous.
Yeah, I can imagine Iceland is a strange and mysterious place with the lore, the, you know, a thousand years of lore and legend and the volcanoes and the strange geography and the northern temperatures. And it must be a crazy place with just the deep history that seems to permeate the whole place.
Right.
And the Dalai Laita permeates in the mornings. I really love that term. We’ve got to put Iceland on our bucket list. I’m imagining little trolls riding those cats down from the hills, creeping along the snow.
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