In Nordic Words, Ingrid Hanssøn explores nineteen ideas from across the Nordic region. In this wide-ranging ATN interview, she discusses the language of resilience, belonging, nature, trust and the limits of translating one culture into another language.
Words as social architecture
Some words name more than an object or an action. They hold habits, values and assumptions that a literal translation can only partly convey. In Nordic Words, Ingrid Hanssøn gathers nineteen concepts from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, moving beyond familiar exports to ideas rooted in collective work, public responsibility, hospitality, perseverance, landscape and weather. The book can accompany real encounters with the region, from everyday culture in Copenhagen and Helsinki to outdoor life around Oslo, Iceland’s changing weather and home hospitality in the Faroe Islands. ATN spoke with Hanssøn about how she selected the words, what translation can preserve and whether concepts born in particular places can travel without becoming lifestyle slogans.
The book and its origins
ATN: What first made you realise that a book about Nordic words could also become a book about Nordic ways of organising life?
Ingrid Hanssøn: I began with the feeling that certain words act like small pieces of social architecture. They do not merely describe what people do; they reveal what a community has learned to notice, reward or expect. Once I placed several Nordic words beside one another, recurring concerns appeared: how to endure difficulty without spectacle, how to share space and responsibility, how to live with weather rather than against it, and how to protect ordinary time. The book grew from that pattern. I wanted readers to see vocabulary not as a cabinet of curiosities, but as evidence of choices societies have made over generations.
ATN: Was there one word that acted as the starting point for the project, or did the idea emerge from seeing a pattern across several languages and societies?
Ingrid Hanssøn: There was no single starting word, although samfundssind helped me understand the scale of the project. It joins individual conduct to the health of society, which is much larger than the usual lifestyle reading of Nordic vocabulary. Then sisu, friluftsliv and róðrarhugur showed me that the same broad questions could be approached through very different histories and environments. The pattern mattered more than any single term: private character, public trust, landscape and cooperation continually speak to one another across the region.
ATN: You chose nineteen concepts from seven parts of the Nordic region. What criteria did a word have to meet before it belonged in the book?
Ingrid Hanssøn: A word needed to do more than resist a tidy English translation. It had to open a door onto a recognisable practice, value, tension or story, and it had to remain alive enough for people to argue about it. I also wanted geographical and emotional range. A book containing only comfort, happiness and tasteful restraint would reproduce a flattering export image of the North. That is why resilience sits beside exhaustion, hospitality beside social pressure, and belonging beside exile. Finally, the selection had to work as a sequence, so that each word altered the reader’s understanding of those that came before it.
ATN: How did you balance linguistic precision with the need to write for readers who may know little about the history, geography or languages of the North?
Ingrid Hanssøn: I treated every concise definition as a beginning rather than a conclusion. A translation gives the reader a handhold, but the surrounding examples must show where that handhold becomes unreliable. I tried to distinguish the word’s literal sense, its everyday use and the larger cultural interpretation often attached to it. I also avoided claiming that every speaker experiences a term in the same way. Languages are full of disagreement, irony and generational change. Accessibility should not require false certainty; it should give the reader enough context to understand why a simple equivalent is useful and why it is never quite sufficient.
ATN: The title promises ideas that shape life, not simply unusual vocabulary. How did you distinguish a genuinely revealing cultural concept from an attractive word that happens to resist neat translation?
Ingrid Hanssøn: I asked whether the word connected to behaviour. Does it influence how people organise a gathering, respond to a crisis, use a landscape, understand effort or judge one another? Could I trace it through ordinary situations rather than relying on an elegant definition? A revealing concept has consequences, including uncomfortable ones. It can be used sincerely, commercially, nostalgically or critically. An attractive lexical curiosity often collapses once the novelty is removed. The words that remained in the book continued to generate questions after their first explanation; they offered a way into institutions, customs, memories and contradictions.
Translation and the danger of simplification
ATN: The phrase “untranslatable word” is appealing, but no word is entirely sealed inside one language. What is really lost when hygge, sisu or lagom is reduced to a one-line English definition?
Ingrid Hanssøn: What disappears is not a secret meaning but a network of associations. “Cosiness” can point towards hygge, yet it does not automatically carry the same expectations of informality, equality, shared attention and freedom from performance. “Grit” approaches sisu, but can sound like an individual productivity virtue detached from Finnish history and restraint. “Just enough” introduces lagom, but misses the negotiation involved in deciding what is proportionate within a group. Translation succeeds when it invites comparison. It fails when the first equivalent is treated as the whole concept.
ATN: Did you encounter disagreements among native speakers about what any of these words truly means? If so, how did those disagreements change the book?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Constantly, and those disagreements were among the most valuable parts of the work. One person’s beloved tradition can be another person’s cliché or instrument of social control. Age, region, class, family history and language community all matter. Instead of searching for a final authorised definition, I learned to show the centre of meaning and the contested edges around it. Disagreement demonstrates that a word is alive. It also protects the reader from the idea that a national character can be compressed into a slogan. The book became more cautious, but also more interesting, whenever several plausible readings had to remain in view.
ATN: Several Nordic terms have become global lifestyle brands. When does translation create genuine curiosity, and when does it turn a living idea into a marketable stereotype?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Curiosity asks what conditions allow a practice to exist. Branding removes those conditions and sells the surface. Candles can be bought anywhere; the deeper question is whether people have time, security and social permission to be present with one another. Outdoor equipment can be sold as friluftsliv, even though the concept can be practised with almost nothing. I do not object to pleasure or beautiful objects, but consumption should not be mistaken for cultural understanding. A translated concept remains alive when it sends us back towards people, places, history and institutions rather than ending at a shopping list.
ATN: Pronunciation, sound and rhythm also carry meaning. Are there words in the book whose emotional force changes noticeably when they are spoken rather than read?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Yes. Þetta reddast gains much of its character from being said in a particular situation and tone: reassuring, amused, resigned or even mildly reckless. Róðrarhugur has a physical rhythm that suits its image of rowing and coordinated effort. The written page inevitably favours explanation, while speech supplies intimacy, irony and local belonging. That is why pronunciation matters, but tone matters even more. A phrase learned from a glossary can sound solemn, while the same phrase among friends may be playful. Cultural meaning often lives in that shift.
Familiar words seen more closely
ATN: Outside Denmark, hygge is often presented as candles, blankets and domestic comfort. What social or ethical dimension disappears from that picture?
Ingrid Hanssøn: The missing element is attention to other people. A room may look perfectly hyggelig and still fail if someone is made to feel like an audience, a client or an outsider. At its best, hygge lowers the social temperature: status recedes, nobody needs to impress, and the gathering is protected from unnecessary demands. That also means it has boundaries. Comfort for an established group can unintentionally exclude newcomers. The ethical question is therefore not how to decorate a table, but how to create ease without closing the circle too tightly.
ATN: Finland’s sisu is usually translated as courage or endurance. Can it also become a burden?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Any admired virtue can become an accusation. Sisu is powerful because it describes action when the ordinary reserves appear exhausted, but no one should be required to live permanently in that emergency register. If endurance becomes the only honourable response, people may hide pain, delay asking for help or interpret structural problems as private weakness. The concept is healthiest when it names a capacity rather than a compulsory identity. Courage can include continuing, stopping, changing direction or accepting support. The shadow of sisu teaches us that resilience needs care and limits.
ATN: Swedish lagom suggests sufficiency and balance. Is it best understood as a private habit, a social norm, or both?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Both, because sufficiency is always relational. My idea of “enough” affects what remains for someone else, how much space I occupy and what a group considers reasonable. Lagom can guide personal choices, but it also carries the pressure of proportion: do not take too much, display too much or disturb the balance. That can feel liberating in a culture of excess, yet restrictive when individuality is treated as immoderate. I wanted to preserve both readings. Balance is not a fixed point; it is an ongoing social judgement, and therefore a source of harmony as well as friction.
ATN: What does Norwegian friluftsliv tell us about access to nature and the difference between being outdoors and consuming an outdoor experience?
Ingrid Hanssøn: It shifts the emphasis from achievement to relationship. The point need not be speed, distance, specialist equipment or an image brought home as proof. It can be an ordinary walk, repeated through the seasons, in a landscape that becomes familiar rather than conquered. Access is crucial: friluftsliv is not simply a personal preference when paths, transport, working hours and public rights determine who can participate. The concept asks whether nature is treated as a luxury product or as part of everyday life. That distinction is more important than any romantic photograph.
ATN: Why can the Swedish institution of fika carry such social importance in workplaces, friendships and family life?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Because a pause can redistribute attention. During fika, the task is suspended and conversation becomes the activity rather than an interruption. In a workplace, that can soften hierarchy and allow information to move informally; among friends, it creates a modest ritual that does not need a special occasion. The coffee and cake matter, but their greater function is to make time visible and shareable. Of course, even informal rituals can exclude those who cannot attend or do not understand the codes. Still, the idea that social time deserves a place inside the day, rather than after all useful work is finished, is quietly significant.
Community trust and the common good
ATN: Does Danish samfundssind depend on high social trust, or can practising the idea help create that trust?
Ingrid Hanssøn: The relationship moves in both directions. Trust makes collective appeals more credible because people believe that others, institutions and leaders will also carry their share. Yet trust is not a natural resource that simply exists; it is renewed through repeated evidence of reciprocity. Samfundssind becomes meaningful when personal restraint is matched by fair rules and visible public responsibility. Without that reciprocity, the language of solidarity can be used to demand sacrifice from some while protecting others. The concept is therefore less sentimental than it sounds. It asks individuals and institutions to demonstrate that society is a shared undertaking.
ATN: Norwegian dugnad, Finnish talkoot and Faroese róðrarhugur all connect individual effort with a shared task. What differences are hidden by calling them “community spirit”?
Ingrid Hanssøn: “Community spirit” is too smooth. Dugnad often evokes organised voluntary labour for a concrete common purpose. Talkoot has its own Finnish history of neighbours gathering to complete work that would burden one household alone, usually with food and sociability surrounding the task. Róðrarhugur draws its force from coordinated movement: progress depends on people pulling together with timing as well as strength. Their overlap is real, but their images, histories and emotional registers differ. Treating them as synonyms would erase the local knowledge carried by each one.
ATN: Do these traditions still feel organic in contemporary Nordic life, or are they sometimes invoked nostalgically as symbols of a more cohesive past?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Both are true. Collective work remains practical in housing associations, sports clubs, festivals, villages and voluntary organisations. At the same time, these words can become moral stories about an imagined past when everyone supposedly knew their place and contributed without complaint. Nostalgia hides who was excluded, whose unpaid labour was assumed and who had the freedom to refuse. The useful question is not whether the tradition is authentic, but how it changes. A living communal practice must accommodate urban life, mobility, diverse households and unequal time. It survives through adaptation, not by pretending that society has stood still.
ATN: What happens when collective responsibility becomes social pressure? Did you find a tension between belonging and conformity in Janteloven?
Ingrid Hanssøn: That tension is central. Janteloven can criticise vanity and the belief that success places someone above the group, but it can also police ambition, difference and visibility. Communities need norms of reciprocity, yet belonging becomes brittle when acceptance depends on not standing out. The same mechanism that protects equality can punish originality or conceal envy. I included the concept because Nordic cooperation should not be discussed without its possible costs. Social trust is not identical to social sameness, and a mature community needs room for dissent, excellence and unfamiliar identities.
ATN: Can communal ideas such as these be adopted elsewhere, or do they require the institutions and histories that produced them?
Ingrid Hanssøn: They can travel as questions and practices, but not as instant cultural software. A neighbourhood can organise shared work; a workplace can protect informal pauses; a city can improve access to nature. Yet these practices become durable when supported by time, space, fair expectations and trustworthy institutions. Importing the word without creating the conditions risks blaming individuals for failing to reproduce an entire social ecology. The most respectful borrowing begins with local reality: what form of reciprocity is already present, what prevents participation, and which structures would make cooperation easier? Inspiration is useful when it leads to patient construction rather than imitation.
Weather, landscape and the more-than-human world
ATN: In Greenlandic thought, sila can connect weather, air, consciousness and the wider world. How did you approach a concept whose meanings are not easily separated into Western categories?
Ingrid Hanssøn: With caution and a willingness to leave some edges unresolved. A translation that divides sila into weather, atmosphere, intelligence or consciousness may help initially, but the division can also destroy the relationship that makes the concept illuminating. I did not want to present Greenlandic knowledge as a mystical ornament for outsiders. The responsible approach is to acknowledge the limits of the book, show the interconnected meanings, and direct attention back to the language and people from whom the concept comes. Sometimes understanding begins by recognising that our preferred categories are not universal.
ATN: Why was it important to include Greenlandic qivittoq, with its unease, exile and supernatural associations?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Because a region cannot be represented honestly through wellbeing vocabulary alone. Qivittoq carries fear, isolation, social rupture and the power of landscape. It reminds readers that words preserve warnings and wounds as well as ideals. The international appetite for the Nordic world often selects whatever can be converted into self-improvement, leaving aside histories and stories that disturb the image. Including a darker concept changes the emotional weather of the book. It asks what happens beyond the secure community and what a society imagines when someone leaves, is expelled or becomes unrecognisable to those who remain.
ATN: Is Icelandic gluggaveður mainly humorous, or does it reveal something deeper about perception and adaptation?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Its humour is the doorway. The word captures the familiar betrayal of beautiful weather seen through glass that proves bitter, wet or violent outside. But it also expresses a disciplined gap between appearance and experience. In climates where conditions change quickly, looking is not enough; one learns to test, prepare and adjust. Gluggaveður therefore makes a small philosophical point without becoming solemn: the world does not owe us the reality suggested by the view. It is a charming word because the lesson arrives through a moment almost everyone can recognise.
ATN: The Swedish right of public access, allemansrätten, is both cultural practice and legal principle. What responsibilities must accompany that freedom?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Access survives only when freedom and care remain inseparable. Moving through forests and countryside involves respecting homes, crops, wildlife, fire restrictions and the traces we leave. Allemansrätten is sometimes romanticised as unlimited liberty, but its deeper lesson is mutual restraint: many people can enjoy the land because each person accepts obligations towards other users and owners. Increased tourism and environmental pressure make that balance more important, not less. Rights of access are a social achievement. They depend on practical knowledge and behaviour that keep the landscape open for those who come next.
ATN: How do the words challenge a visitor’s tendency to treat Nordic landscapes as spectacular backdrops rather than inhabited and culturally meaningful places?
Ingrid Hanssøn: They restore verbs to the landscape. People row, herd, fish, walk, gather, shelter, remember, fear and cooperate there. Weather shapes timetables and language; access involves rules; hospitality takes place in homes; survival depends on accumulated knowledge. A dramatic view can tempt the visitor to imagine emptiness, especially in the Arctic and North Atlantic, but apparent emptiness may be full of routes, work, stories and responsibilities. The words ask travellers to slow down and notice relationships. A place is not untouched merely because the outsider cannot read the marks upon it.
Resilience, hospitality and everyday life
ATN: Where is the line between the resourceful optimism of Icelandic þetta reddast and avoiding necessary preparation?
Ingrid Hanssøn: The phrase is valuable when it releases people from paralysis and encourages practical improvisation. It becomes risky when confidence substitutes for responsibility. Context and tone decide which version we are hearing. In a small crisis, “it will work out” can mobilise creativity and trust in one another. Applied to preventable danger or long-term policy, it may become an excuse. I like þetta reddast because it refuses the fantasy of total control, but acceptance of uncertainty should not mean indifference to consequences. Optimism earns its place when it helps us act, not when it protects us from acting.
ATN: What can Faroese heimablídni offer that a conventional restaurant or organised tour cannot?
Ingrid Hanssøn: It allows the visitor to encounter hospitality as a relationship rather than a service script. Entering a home changes the scale of travel: food comes with family histories, local questions and the ordinary details through which a place becomes real. Yet it should not be romanticised as access to an “authentic” private world that visitors are entitled to consume. Heimablídni works because hosts choose what to share and guests accept the responsibilities of attention and respect. The encounter is valuable not because commerce disappears, but because exchange becomes personal and situated.
ATN: Does humour make Finnish kalsarikännit easier to export while also making it easier to misunderstand?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Absolutely. The image is immediate, comic and wonderfully specific, so people remember it after one explanation. That portability is part of its charm. But the joke can flatten the word into a novelty about alcohol or antisocial behaviour. Its wider appeal comes from recognising the relief of abandoning performance: no audience, no elaborate plan, no need to turn relaxation into an achievement. Like many humorous words, kalsarikännit succeeds internationally because it names something people already know but had not dignified with a term. The laughter is a form of recognition.
ATN: After working on Danish lykke, do you see Nordic happiness less as a mood and more as a relationship between private life and public structures?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Yes. Happiness is experienced personally, but the range of lives available to us is shaped collectively. Security, healthcare, education, housing, working time, trust and access to shared spaces influence whether ordinary contentment is possible. That does not make Nordic societies uniformly happy or remove grief, inequality and loneliness. It means that wellbeing cannot be explained solely through attitude. Lykke is useful when it leads from the intimate question “what makes life feel good?” to the political question “what enables more people to build a life they have reason to value?”
ATN: Why does the ordinary Icelandic expression að nenna deserve a place beside grander ideas about courage, nature and society?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Because daily life is governed by willingness as much as by principle. Að nenna captures the small negotiation between having the time, energy and inclination to do something and deciding that one simply cannot be bothered. That may sound trivial, but cultures reveal themselves in the ordinary permissions they give to effort and refusal. The expression also punctures the heroic tone that can gather around resilience. People are not always brave, balanced or communally minded. Sometimes they are tired. A vocabulary that admits this feels more human and makes the larger virtues more credible.
What the words can teach us now
ATN: Which of the nineteen words changed most in your own understanding while you were researching and writing the book?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Probably sila, because it challenged the habit of separating inner life, weather and the surrounding world into independent subjects. I began by looking for a definition and ended by paying more attention to relationships. That change also influenced how I read the other words. Friluftsliv became less about an activity and more about repeated contact; samfundssind became less about individual virtue and more about reciprocity. The most valuable concepts did not give me new labels for familiar boxes. They made the boxes themselves look provisional.
ATN: Which word do readers respond to most strongly, and has that response surprised you?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Readers often arrive through the familiar words, but many stay with róðrarhugur. The image of people rowing together is immediately understandable, yet it does not imply that everyone is identical. Coordination requires difference: position, rhythm, judgement and mutual awareness. I think readers recognise a form of cooperation that is neither abstract solidarity nor individual heroism. Its appeal surprised me because it is less internationally known than hygge or sisu, but perhaps unfamiliarity allows people to encounter it without a layer of advertising already attached.
ATN: How can readers learn from these concepts without romanticising the Nordic countries or overlooking inequality, loneliness and exclusion?
Ingrid Hanssøn: By treating every concept as a question rather than proof of Nordic superiority. If a society values equality, ask who still feels outside. If it celebrates nature, ask who has access and whose land-use knowledge is recognised. If it praises endurance, ask who is expected to endure too much. Ideals matter precisely because reality does not perfectly embody them. Romanticism closes the discussion by presenting the region as a finished model. Serious interest keeps the contradictions visible and allows Nordic societies to be ordinary political communities: inventive in some areas, unjust in others and continually changing.
ATN: Has the Italian edition revealed different reactions from those of English-language readers?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Italian readers often recognise more than the conventional north-south contrast suggests. Home hospitality, long meals, intergenerational ties and local forms of mutual help provide points of connection, even when the climate and public institutions differ. The contrast becomes productive when readers ask why similar human needs take different social forms. Some are drawn to restraint and public trust; others challenge the assumption that Nordic reserve is automatically healthier than Mediterranean expressiveness. I welcome that resistance. The book is not asking anyone to become Nordic. It is inviting readers to enlarge the vocabulary with which they examine their own society.
ATN: If a reader could carry only one word from the book into daily life, which would you choose, and what would practising it look like?
Ingrid Hanssøn: I would choose samfundssind, because it connects small decisions with the shared world without demanding heroism. Practising it might mean considering who bears the cost of our convenience, contributing to a common task, protecting public space, following a rule that genuinely safeguards others, or asking whether an institution is reciprocating the responsibility it demands from citizens. It is not self-erasure, and it should never silence criticism. On the contrary, concern for society includes challenging arrangements that distribute burdens unfairly. The word is useful because it places the individual inside a larger field of consequence.
ATN: Are there words you reluctantly left out, or languages and regions you would like to explore in a future volume?
Ingrid Hanssøn: Many. Selection always creates absences, and a future project should not simply collect ever more attractive terms. I would like to work more deeply with Sámi languages and knowledge, but only through appropriate collaboration and with careful attention to the differences among Sámi communities. Åland and the linguistic borderlands of the Nordic region also deserve more space, as do words shaped by migration and contemporary multilingual life. The next step should complicate the map rather than decorate it. The North has never been linguistically or culturally uniform, and its future vocabulary will emerge from contact as well as inheritance.
Nordic Words: The Ideas That Shape Life in Scandinavia, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland by Ingrid Hanssøn is available in English and Italian. Readers can learn more in ATN’s book announcement and coverage of the Italian edition.
Suggested Online Sources
ATN New Book ‘Nordic Words’ by Ingrid Hanssøn
Italian Release of ‘Nordic Words’ Charts on Amazon Italy
Hygge
Finns’ National Character: Sisu
Friluftsliv: The Nordic Philosophy of Living Freely in Nature
