land nam

Hello and welcome to Word of the Week! I’m your host, Liz. This podcast is dedicated to words and phrases that are untranslatable into English. Let’s discover the nuance of the world’s languages, shall we?

This week’s word is land nam. An Icelandic word meaning ‘the sanctification of new land by mythologizing it’. In the old days, before we paved paradise for a parking lot, the Earth was alive with invisible sites of power. From the sacred springs of North America to the nature spirits of India, people developed relationships with the spiritual landscape that coexisted with the external geography of their environment. 

To early peoples, the very features of the land were invested with sacred energies. Such spiritual powers most often did not derive directly from the geography but were a function of a cultural group mind, concentrating its spiritual force on that particular area long enough for the old myths and legends to emerge from the land. Some cultures felt that the process could be expedited. Why wait for the myths to emerge from the neighborhood when you can project them onto it?

As modern communities, we face the task of remythologizing the new landscape that the industrial revolutions created. The world has changed too fast recently, and new myths are needed to encompass new ways of experiencing the universe. Urban legends and new kinds of rituals are part of the process of land nam, in which the new world of skyscrapers and satellites is being integrated with the older power stories. 

Seems like a good word to use to redirect the conversation, especially when the conversation degenerates into long technological arguments about smartphones or AI. You can always stop the dialogue dead in its tracks by saying: “Sometimes I think that nothing less than a global land nam might be the only effective prescription for our spiritual dilemma.” 

Here’s to this week… May you all endeavor to adopt this Word of the Week and see the world a little bit differently. I’ll be back next week with a new word. Thank you for listening!