Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

twelfth-century road-works over some of the ravines. I look up the valley at a track winding across the hillside, thinking about a time when people walked these fells every day. As promised by Pétur when we left the damp city, there is sun here, and the shadows of clouds play across the birch scrub. When we stop for a break, the children find the first blueberries ripening on a south-facing slope, and sheep watch as we follow their track down to the river-bank. I think about taking my coat off. Wind rustles through the bushes and ruffles the water where a flotilla of swans rides as though at anchor. Pétur names the mountains for me as we drive: Drápuhlíðarfjall, the ‘Poem Slope Mountain’, Írafell, the Irish mountain (lots of Celtic settlers round here in the ninth century, Pétur says), Helgafell, the Holy Mountain, where Guðrun from Laxdæla saga, the woman Auden quotes in his Iceland poem, is buried. He that I loved the best, to him I was worst. Those lines, Pétur tells me, are already a quote, from an early Irish poem that must have been known to the saga-makers. He found them one day when researching something else, evidence of Norse and Celtic cultural integration at the beginning of Icelandic history. Max repeats the lines, wondering what they mean, as we pass Guðrun’s grave.

Stykkishólmur is visible for miles before we reach the cluster of red-roofed buildings tumbling down the hillside to the harbour, partly because it has a new white church on the prow of its hill, overlooking the dozens of islands dotting the sound between Snæfellsnes and the Westfjords across the water. Pétur’s summer house turns out to be as small as he promised. You can stand in the middle and see out of the windows in all four walls. From the outside, the building seems too small to enclose a kitchen, bedroom, sitting area and shower-room, the essence of domesticity. It’s not possible to make a mess. No-one could expect any serious cooking. The work of family life is reduced to essentials and everything else must happen outside, overlooked by the mountains and in sight of the sea. Maybe this is the point I’ve been missing about summer houses. Where do I play, asks Tobias. Max shows him the turf garden outside, with a slope for rolling and a hillock for jumping and some rocks for clambering. On neighbouring plots, children younger than either of them freewheel down the grass on tricycles and stagger over footballs, but the plots are unfenced, big cars lumber by and I know, now, that there’s no magic force-field keeping Icelandic children safe from the usual perils. I take my crochet outside and sit, keeping an eye on children and traffic and strangers and asteroids that might fall from the sky, until it’s time to make them go inside so I can cook supper. Icelandic children swirl around the gardens and roads, enjoying the kind of neighbourhood play that shaped my childhood. Mine sit at the table and draw while I chop vegetables, continually distracted by the view through all four windows. It feels as if the village, despite being on the sea, is cupped by hills. The harbour is sheltered by a small, conical island, garnished with a lighthouse like the cherry on top of a cake. To one side is the church on its hill, and to the other another hill, topped by a building that reminds me of a paddle-steamer, with a wall of windows curving out over the sea. There are glimpses of sea between the hills, and real mountains appearing over the clouds, higher up the sky than seems probable. When the slow northern sunset begins, long after the children’s bedtime, Max and I walk down through the village and around the harbour, over the bridge to the lighthouse island, where we climb steps cut into the hillside and find the hilltop crowded with people in hiking gear speaking German, French, Spanish and Italian and taking photos as the sun drops behind the Westfjords across Breiðafjörður and the lighthouse begins to scythe the sky. People smile at each other, share multilingual comments about the wind, stand back to let other people up or down the stairs. An un-Icelandic crowd.

It’s raining again in the morning. We go to the pool and laze in a jacuzzi watching the clouds eddy around the mountains and Max running up the stairs, goose-pimpled in the wind, and swooping down the slide, and running up and swooping down, until he’s hungry and we’re hot. It’s still raining. We saunter through the village. Unusually for Iceland, there are few houses built in the last twenty years, and a core of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century buildings, most of which have been meticulously restored, mostly by people who live in Reykjavík and summer here. There are several craft shops and cafés, and three small museums, but the town itself feels like a museum, like some of the villages near my parents’ house in the Peak District that have sold themselves until they turn into self-parodies, where it’s easier to buy a hand-carved wooden Christmas tree ornament in July than a pint of milk. Most of the houses, even around the edges of the village, look like summer houses; Pétur says that in winter, there are days when the entire peninsula is cut off by snow. I think I might prefer it then.

Guy, who is joining us for the rest of the trip, arrives from the airport with a hire car. It’s still raining. We go round the museums, slowly, making the most of each one. Max likes the Volcano Museum, I linger in the Norwegian House, the restored home of a nineteenth-century merchant and scholar who both managed royal Danish estates in the region and campaigned for Icelandic independence. The wooden house is large even by modern Icelandic standards, and must have seemed like a cathedral when surrounded by one-room turf