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

beauty of scenery’, and buy a bus ticket that takes me once around Route 1, the one road circling the country. My friend Kathy, fellow lover of northern islands, agrees to come too.

There is a tradition of English travellers to Iceland, mostly nineteenth-century, mostly on the trail of the medieval sagas. I read W. G. Collingwood, who left a trail of watercolours in Iceland’s museums of local history, and William Morris, who went to Iceland in 1871 and again in 1873, and wrote a series of rambling poems inflected by Old Norse, as if thinking of undoing the Norman Conquest’s contribution to the English language:

Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen;

Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea,

And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green:

And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea,

Foursquare from base unto point like the building of Gods that have been,

The last of that waste of the mountains all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey,

And bright with the dawn that began just now at the ending of day.

Ah! What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire?

Is it enough for our rest, the sight of this desolate strand,

And the mountain-waste voiceless as death but for winds that may sleep not nor tire?

Why do we long to wend forth through the length and breadth of a land,

Dreadful with grinding of ice, and record of scarce-hidden fire,

But that there mid the grey grassy dales sore scarred by the ruining streams

Lives the tale of the Northland of old and the undying glory of dreams?

(William Morris, ‘Iceland First Seen’, 1891)

Firth, strand, dale; there’s a self-consciousness about this linguistic re-making that bothers me. It is not necessary, certainly not honest, to pretend that we’re all Vikings really. I am going to Iceland, but not because I have a secret desire to wear a horned helmet or drink mead out of a skull, nor even to wear twisted silver brooches and speak in runes. I dislike Tolkien, another Oxonian Old Norse obsessive, with his war games and made-up languages in a world without women. Whatever I’m looking for in Iceland, it’s not in the tradition of English writing about the place.

In July 1995, Kathy and I board the MS Norröna, the passenger ship linking Scotland with the Faroe Islands and Iceland, following the Viking route at five times Viking speed. We stand on the deck, watching sailors cast off cables, and then watching the coast of Aberdeenshire slipping over the horizon. Other people go inside, but other people have cabins and can afford to eat in the restaurant. As the sky dims, north of Scotland in midsummer, the ship begins to lurch. The last people go inside. We stay on deck, shivering and watching the foam streak dark waves, until I’m so cold and sea-sick that lying on a plastic berth in a communal cabin seems better than retching over the railings. Kathy stays on deck, hood up, stoical.

I wake up hours later. I’m still sick. It’s so dark that opening and closing my eyes makes no difference. Nothing makes any difference. Men lodged in the bunks around me are snoring, and there’s a smell of vomit and sweat. I can’t swallow. I bury my nose in the pink-flowered down sleeping bag I had as a child for camping holidays, which smells of old dust and feels dry as paper against my skin. I want to die. (This thought has been reappearing in my mind like a goldfish coming back round the bowl every few minutes since I left the deck.) The engine throbs and my bunk sways, up and down, up and down. I know I’m not going to be sick again, not really, because there’s nothing left, and I stopped trying to sip water around the same time as I stopped trying to sit up. Up and down – and down – and down. I hope we do sink. I want to die. The cabin is far down inside the hull. There is water up above my head, and if we started to sink the water would come into the cabin and rise and rise and even if I tried to find the door it’s heavy and metal and there’d be a weight of water on the other side, and anyway I’ve seen where the iron doors in the corridors would lock, stabilising the ship but trapping people who can’t afford proper cabins in cold sea that would come up and up, waists and shoulders and – not that it matters, because I want to die.

There is a rip in the darkness. It makes my eyes hurt.

‘Sarah?’ whispers Kathy. ‘Sarah, come outside. You can see it. Iceland. And the sun’s coming up.’

I turn away. I don’t care.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘You’ll feel better on deck. It’s enough to make anyone sick down here. I’m going back out.’

I don’t believe her. I’m beyond fresh air.

‘The sun’s rising,’ she says. ‘And it’s shining on a glacier. It looks like one of those Japanese mountains. I’m going to paint it.’

So I sit up, and it is worse. But I can, just about, imagine that there might be a future in which I would regret not having seen sunrise on a glacier from the sea. I stand up and grab her, and Kathy helps me up the bucking stairs, spattered with vomit, over the metal ledge and out. And she’s right. (Kathy is usually right.) There’s a neon pink sunrise behind us, and a triangular snow-covered mountain coming up over the horizon to the north-west. The sea is still black, the waves foaming white in the new light. I sit down and Kathy wraps my shawl around me and finds a piece of Kendal mint cake for me to contemplate. ‘It’d taste about the same on the way up as