blævængur (n)

“handheld fan”

This word comes from blær meaning “breeze” and vængur meaning “wing,” taking a simple fan and defining it as a “breeze wing.”

Speaking of blær, I want to note that Iceland has a stunning array of words to describe wind. This may certainly come from the fact that Iceland is all about their sea, and those sea breezes stop at nothing to keep fisherman focused on finding as many words as possible to describe them. Various sources I’ve found insist that there are about 56 different words for wind, others state nearly 100 or more. Here with us are a few examples from a fellow Icelander Jóhannes Benediktsson to get things flowing, from his post Counting Icelandic Words for Wind:

“The Beaufort wind force scale defines 12 different classes of wind, ranging from “calm” to “hurricane force”. Let’s compare Icelandic to English. Other languages return similar results.

The Beaufort scale:

0. Logn (Calm)

1. Andvari (Light air)

2. Kul (Light breeze)

3. Gola (Gentle breeze)

4. Stinningsgola (Moderate breeze)

5. Kaldi (Fresh breeze)

6. Stinningskaldi (Strong breeze)

7. Allhvasst (Moderate gale)

8. Hvassviðri (Gale)

9. Stormur (Strong gale)

10. Rok (Storm)

11. Ofsaveður (Violent storm)

12. Fárviðri (Hurricane force)”

My favorite here is the word gola. I like this word in Icelandic because it means “breeze” but the word “gola” makes me think “gondola” and suddenly I am picturing a light breeze pushing a gondola across the horizon.

Sigur Rós seems to take a strong influence to the wind, since two of their songs take on familiar titles from our list: Andvari and Stormur. It is amazing how well each one embodies it’s title.

Here is the first, Andvari:

And the second, Stormur: