A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
fjeld
A fjeld is a high, bare, rounded plateau above the treeline in Scandinavia, more a raised open country than a peak. Fjelds carry lichen, dwarf birch, and low heath, standing water in summer, and snow patches that may not clear at all. They are the ground reindeer are moved onto and the ground long-distance ski routes cross, and they can run for many miles without a single tree.
Etymology
The word is Danish and Norwegian, and it is the same word as the English fell, the term for the open uplands of northern England and the Lake District. Both descend from a Norse word for a mountain or a stretch of high ground, and English acquired the northern one through settlement and the Scandinavian one much later through mountaineering and travel writing.
Notes
The Norwegian and Swedish forms are fjell and fjäll, and the Finnish is tunturi, borrowed in turn from Sámi. What the word names is not height but exposure: A fjeld is defined by being above the trees, so the same elevation is fjeld in the far north and forest a few hundred miles south.