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

of the buildings have steps up to wooden verandahs in front of plate-glass windows. A few of the shops are still in business – a baker; a fishmonger, with signs in English and German because it’s unlikely that the locals need to buy fish; a menswear shop with grubby plastic mannequins in the window, and at the top of the street a small supermarket. In between, there are shops converted into houses or standing empty. At the harbour end of the street, washing secured to a line across the street between upstairs windows snaps in the wind like the sails of a disordered ship. The top of the street ends in a flight of broad steps leading to a white wooden church that seems too big for the town. There’s a music school – every Icelandic town has a music school – and a Folk Music Centre and a primary school on two storeys that looks big enough to house all the inhabitants of Siglufjörður and Ólafsfjörður and probably Dalvík as well. There’s a swimming pool, and a campsite positioned where the village green would be in England, tenanted only by a Belgian couple shivering over a Primus stove. We’re all cold, and head for a café in a converted fish shed, the size of several barns, on the harbour-front. Icelanders are sitting outside, drinking beer and soup. Inside we find a huge, dim wooden space like an inflated chalet. When we ask for coffee the waitress starts grinding beans, and the bathrooms have beaten copper basins and soap scented with green tea and orange blossom, as if we were in an expensive part of London or New York. The tunnels aren’t big enough for lorries; the marble counters and swan’s-neck taps must have come by boat.

The Herring Era Museum (Iceland’s largest maritime museum, winner of a Luigi Micheletti award for the most innovative museums in Europe) explains Siglufjörður’s Wild West air. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Norwegian fishing fleets, which were bigger and better equipped than those of colonial Iceland, began to appear in Iceland’s northern coastal waters. They were following the herring, and needed local labour to clean and salt the catch on shore before it could be sold internationally, mostly to the poor of northern Europe for whom the cheap protein was a godsend. The herring sheds were built for salting and pressing the fish, and people needing work began to move to Siglufjörður, which has a deep and sheltered natural harbour with immediate access to the open sea. (I begin to recognise parts of this story; fishing towns in the westernmost parts of Cornwall also grew during a late nineteenth-century herring boom, and we sometimes have coffee and cake in converted fish-processing sheds in St Ives and Penzance too.) Icelandic speculators started to buy the new boats and equipment for themselves, and during the First World War, when international fishing was disrupted and Europe’s need for imported foods urgent, Icelandic herring production in Iceland overtook that of the Norwegians. Some people say that the herring boom was the economic foundation of Icelandic independence. It lasted almost a century, with the highest ever catches in the mid-1960s generating half of Iceland’s annual export income. The population of Siglufjörður rose to about 10,000. Herring are migratory, appearing in the North Atlantic in summer, and in 1969, after years of over-fishing, they didn’t come. That was it, the end of the Herring Era. The people and the money left Siglufjörður. Fishing continues, on a much reduced scale, and the harbour is deep enough for cruise ships. The decision to build the tunnel last year was a decision to do whatever was necessary to sustain these remote villages, and it is typically Icelandic that a remote community of barely 1,000 people has an internationally renowned museum and a café where they grind coffee beans. I hope it’s enough.

I want to go on round the headland, partly so we can come back over the mountain pass and avoid the tunnels, but it’s getting late and the children are tired. Just to the tip of the peninsula, says Guy, leaning over to see the map. Look, where that lighthouse is. We pile back in the car and drive along another unfenced ledge until the cliffs bend back to the south. A gravel track leads down to a farmhouse, improbably positioned on a patch of grass below the cliff-top, and to an orange lighthouse. The car bleeps about loss of traction as Guy pilots it down the slope and positions it behind a concrete signalling shed so it can’t slide into the sea. The children, feeling the wind when Guy opens his door, sensibly refuse to leave their seats, so the three of us scurry along the track, laughing in the wind, and stand under the lighthouse at the edge of the north coast, looking back towards Akureyri, Reykyavík and home. I’m still not ready to leave Iceland.

Acknowledgements

Almost everyone we encountered in Iceland has contributed to this book in some way, and I give thanks for Icelanders’ enthusiasm and support for writers and writing.

I am especially grateful to those who gave me their time and their stories:

Brynja Brynjarsdóttir

Guy Griffin

Hulda Kristín Jónsdóttir

Katharine MacDonald and Alec Badenoch

Mads Holm and Mæja Garðarsdóttir

Matthew Whelpton

Mark Andrew Zimmer and Sigrún María Kristinsdóttir

Pétur Knútsson and Messíana Tómasdóttir

Þórunn Kristín Emilsdóttir

Ragnheiður Eiríksdóttir

Theódór Áldar Tómasson

Theódór Ólafsson and Margrét Eirikka Sigurbjörnsdóttir

Tómas Gabríel Benjamin

Vilborg Dagbjartsdóttir

The students in the School of English at Háskóli Íslands taught me at least as much as I taught them, and my colleagues in the academic staff and in the administration there supported me throughout the year. I am especially grateful to Pétur Knútsson, Messíana Tómasdóttir and their family; to Matthew Whelpton; and to Mads Holm and Mæja Garðarsdóttir, who gave their friendship as well as their various expertise. I thank everyone who read drafts of this book and took time to correct my errors; Pétur Knútsson in particular read several drafts