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

‘Skyr contains protein,’ I point out. ‘But it doesn’t solve the vitamin C problem.’

‘Well, it is a bit of a conundrum, why they didn’t all get scurvy. People drank a lot of Iceland moss tea, and they were probably using many more grasses and herbs than is recorded. That knowledge has gone.’

‘The people on the farm were widely read,’ Pétur says. It mattered to his hosts to keep up with new developments in science and literature, and this matches both what I’ve learnt about Icelandic rural life and what I know about the Scottish islands and the Faroes. Mid-century farmers were not ignorant about nutrition and Pétur remembers discussion of vitamins; the old people bought and ate whale-fat (‘it tastes good,’ he adds, teasing me, ‘nice and sour’), but the children didn’t eat it. There were three girls, twelve, eight and six when he arrived, still his friends fifty years later. ‘They were absolute goddesses and they’d walk around the farm like goddesses and milk cows like goddesses, and they would come in and sit down at the table for tea like very hungry children. It would be glasses of milk and those round biscuits, kex, and that was what they ate. No fruit at all, and they all grew up fine.’

Be that as it may, I think, Pétur and Messíana take care of their own family’s diet. The pile of marking on his desk is tall enough to suggest that he might be willing to be distracted from a Sisyphean task.

‘What else was it like?’ I ask. ‘Was Iceland what you were expecting?’

He smiles at me, because we both know how hard it would be to expect Iceland if you hadn’t seen it, if you had no basis for imagining lava fields and simmering earth. ‘No,’ he says, ‘not at all.’ Pétur came to Iceland to see a land without trees, because he’d grown up in the South Downs where the curves and bones of the land were always hidden by hedges and woods. He wanted to live with bareness, to inhabit a place without softness and blurring. But he hadn’t imagined his own presence in this stripped landscape, his own exposure. In Iceland, you can see five times as far as in England, but you can also be seen for miles. Pétur had found a job on the farm in Borgarfjörður, out to the west, and he’d expected remoteness, isolation. He found that wherever he went, not only could he see six or seven farms, widely spaced but unsheltered by any kind of vegetation, but he could be seen from those six or seven farms. It felt more densely populated than rural England, which in fact has a higher population density but more hiding places. ‘I felt naked,’ says Pétur. ‘I felt completely exposed.’

He left at the end of that summer, back to Cambridge, to return to Iceland after his degree with the intention of staying a long time, perhaps not forever but at least until he felt ready to leave. That next autumn was a time of disappointment. During the summer, there had been no need for artificial light in Borgarfjörður, so when darkness fell in September and the lights at all the farms in the valley came on, it was a shock. Everyone knew when everyone else rose and slept, went out and came in. He came for emptiness and absence and found more presences than in an English city.

And then as winter drew on, the community stopped seeming like an insult to the landscape. ‘I would wake up in the morning in heavy frost, completely still weather. I’d go out into the courtyard, onto the front steps, and you could hear – over the river, two miles away – you could hear somebody coming out of their house over there, and you could hear someone talking to someone back in the house. You couldn’t hear what they were saying, but you could hear the talking. And it was lovely. A very intense community but also a very distant community because you didn’t see people so much, you just had contact with them. The old farmer used to tell me that he would go down to the river and shout across, and the guy on the other side would be giving him news, and they would be exchanging the news between the two sveitir, the two parishes, and they had news from further afield, and the news would be shouted across the river, and of course it was a noisy river so you really had to shout. There were distances between people but you were always in contact with the nearest farms, there was always a jeep standing outside from the next farm and somebody drinking coffee. And when the milk lorry came it would give you three books for that week, and you’d give him the three books that he gave you last week, from the library, and he’d take those to the next farm, so there’d be a continual march of books around the sveit with the milk lorry. And my farmer told me to read the books, he said read this and read that, and I did it because I was told to.’

And that, says Pétur, is how he learnt Icelandic, from the farmer’s reading list and from the farmers in Borgarfjörður, and also how he learnt Icelandic manners. Iceland was not, as it first appeared, a simpler place than England. Iceland has complexities so subtle that their existence is invisible to an inattentive foreigner. One of the Icelandic clichés about Icelanders is that, by foreign standards (as if ‘foreigners’ had one standard), they are rude. There is no word for ‘please’ in Icelandic. ‘Thank you’ and ‘sorry’ are used much less than in British and American English. Nevertheless, it has been clear to me from the beginning that Iceland is a place where the most