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

children to eat. The story is more like Beowulf than the Nativity, but when I think about Icelandic farms in winter, about weeks of darkness outside and blizzards pounding the low turf houses, I see why you would want the children to be afraid to go outside. It’s a tradition that goes back centuries, although in 1749 the Danes made it illegal to frighten children with these stories. It was only in the 1970s that the Yule Lads began to bring presents for good children who left a shoe on the window-sill. As one of my (Danish) students comments, the rest of Europe buried these creatures or Disneyfied them beyond recognition a couple of centuries back. Slightly twee versions of these characters appear on the milk cartons from late November, and Max has been asked to cut out these figures and take them into school. He tells me their stories as we open out and wash the cartons, prefacing them by pointing out his own immunity from the last of the Lads, because ‘I’ll be back in England by then and they don’t leave Iceland.’ There is one picture he cannot look at, showing Grýla the mother of the Yule Lads, who comes for children in the night, ties them up in her black bag and takes them away to eat. Cats with sharp teeth slink around her feet. When we come to stick them in his Icelandic Culture Book, I have to handle Grýla and Max insists that we make a fold-down paper cover so he can open the book without having to look at her.

There’s nothing scary at Árbæjarsafn. People huddle in the lee of buildings, wearing Icelandic jumpers, and watching other people hold hands and dance in circles. Inside the houses, candle-lit as the grey afternoon darkens and snow begins to drift, women wearing long woollen dresses cut leaf bread, sheets of pastry, into lace patterns ready to be deep-fried and dredged with sugar. There are blood puddings hanging in the chimneys, and a craft fair in the Visitors’ Centre. Children gather in the courtyard and sing a song that Tobias has learnt at nursery, and when another child takes his hand for the dance he begins a conversation in Icelandic. The other three of us stand in the dusk and watch him dance into the circle of Icelanders, singing.

I finish my pile of Icelandic fiction just before Christmas. The more recent books, mostly detective fiction, are obviously written with translation in mind, giving extraneous detail about Icelandic transport systems and seasons and in some cases including plugs for particular hotels and restaurants, but at least the killers have motives. Some of the more literary novels cause me the same puzzlement as the films. I simply don’t understand why the characters do what they do, can’t see the connection between speech and action. In apparently gentle novels of bourgeois life, characters rape and kill with no warning, no reflection and little reaction from anyone else. I find the violent episodes entirely unpredictable, never know at the beginning of a paragraph if the person coming through the door is bringing coffee or a crowbar to the person sitting at the table. I wonder why a society distinctive for its low crime rate should produce novels and films in which ordinary family life is invariably punctuated by bloodletting. Are Icelanders simmering with rage under their jumpers? Does the tradition of independence and self-containment leave people battling to contain emotions for which they have no vocabulary? (Maybe it is significant that the National Library doesn’t have the complete works of Freud.) I watch people carefully. There are no rude words for sexual or bodily functions in Icelandic. When Icelanders swear, they have to borrow from English. Most parents, as far as I can see, have enough childcare and practical support from extended families that they don’t get particularly angry with their children. I don’t have enough experience to know whether there’s a taboo on expressing anger, whether Icelandic life is arranged not to be infuriating or whether I’m too much of a stranger to see ordinary expressions of feeling, or indeed whether I’d need to go drinking downtown on a Friday night to see a wider range of Icelandic behaviour. I still feel very foreign.

We go home for Christmas, two weeks back in our own house with our own things and friends eager to see us. England’s having a cold winter. Our house is Edwardian and draughty. Even once we turn up the heating, we can’t get the house warmer than 14 degrees, and it’s much colder than that upstairs and at night. One morning, I wake with numb fingers and see that my chilblains have turned aubergine purple. We put on another jumper, and another, and some gloves. We drink a lot of tea. The railways close because of the snow. Pensioners are told to keep one room warm, whatever the cost. People are advised not to drive, and some of those who do drive find themselves snowed in at service stations and church halls. You must be used to this, our friends say. You must think this cold is nothing. They’re wrong; we look forward to going back to Iceland, to be warm again.

But it’s good to be home. I take my credit card out and it makes me feel better. A lot better, about everything. We have no disposable income in Iceland. I know that nobody needs disposable income, that part of the point of going to Iceland was to free ourselves from the stuff we have at home, and indeed that I have missed buying things far less than I expected. Nonetheless, I buy more toys and books for the children than we can possibly take back to Iceland. I buy things I know they don’t particularly want, things made out of plastic which will still be on the planet long after the human species falls into deserved oblivion, and made by children as