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

The connection between the ‘most cultured town’ and its trees isn’t as arbitrary as it sounds. There is a national argument about trees in Iceland. The island was forested when the settlers arrived, but has been bare since medieval Icelanders chopped all the trees down. There is a reforestation programme, regarded by some traditionalists as a bourgeois plan to make Iceland look European, put forward by intellectuals who have spent too much time i útlöndum and don’t value their own country any more. Forest seems un-Icelandic to people whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents down to the twentieth generation have known the naked contours of mountain and plain. Trees are indeed, albeit falsely, associated with being cosmopolitan.

‘So Gauja went all the way there to shop, and when she came back with her parcels she would be tired and she would sit a while on her stone and her name was Gauja so we called it Gaujusteinn, and I would sit there a few minutes myself. My uncle lived up in the rocks and they had twelve children. And the boy who looked after the cows when it wasn’t my turn, he was one of twelve as well. And I am one of twelve. There’s nobody living there now. It’s just grass.’

I can’t – wouldn’t – interrupt Vilborg. It would be like climbing onto the stage to ask an actor to repeat a word you didn’t catch. Later, I ask Pétur about the name ‘Goya’, which I haven’t heard before. Gauja, he says, the nickname for Guðríður and other Guð-prefixed women’s names. Of course.

‘Once when I was driving the cows along there, I saw a woman mowing the grass, a woman in a blue frock with a white apron and very big arms, red from the sun. And she was mowing the grass and the women never did that, because it was men’s work. I had never seen that woman before. I thought she was a giant woman, a skessa, we say, because we believed that in the old days. Icelandic trolls are very big, not small like the Danish ones. Our trolls are huge, as you know. And when I saw that she was there, just by the rock, I was so afraid that I closed my eyes, and hoped she would be gone, but when I opened them she was still there. But I had to keep driving the cows, and so I came to the field and she was still there, mowing, and she didn’t disappear at all and I was so frightened. When I came home I sat in the middle of the kitchen floor and cried. My mother didn’t know what had happened so I told her and she said, “Oh, but this is Bjargey, and she is a woman who lives with another woman and does a man’s work.” Because you see there were these homosexuals in my village and nobody bothered about it in those times. There was Margrét, who was – what do you call it, not a doctor, she was rubbing people – massage, and she lived in a very nice house with Bjargey, just the two of them. And Bjargey always did the man’s work, but I was sure she was a huldukona!

We knew that there were huldufólk, because once my aunt came to stay with us, when she needed to see the doctor in my town. My mother made coffee and she said, “Oh, something awful happened!” My mother had a brauðskeri.’

Vilborg smiles, as if she’s offering something she knows I want, but I’m not sure what it is. She shuffles forwards and begins to stand up.

‘Come upstairs and I will show you what it is, and then I will tell you a brauðskerasaga and you will understand.’

Brauðskeri. Brauð is bread. A story about bread? An awful story about bread? Vilborg puts her coffee down – she has been fitting coffee and chocolate biscuits around her storytelling. I wait while she gets her hands onto the arms of her chair and levers herself upright. We go down the narrow hall and she swings herself up the tight little staircase. She takes me into her bedroom. The bed is made and there are books everywhere, colonising the dressing table and the chair by the bed, creeping along the skirting boards. They are mostly hardbacks, as many in English as in Icelandic. The collected works of D. H. Lawrence lean on each other by the bed. A monograph on Frida Kahlo keeps Jude the Obscure and The Woman in White apart.

‘Here!’ says Vilborg, removing a volume of poetry in Danish, something by Philip Roth and Mrs Dalloway from what looks at first like a small iron bookshelf, the sort of thing I have on my desk at home to hold the books I’m working on. ‘Look, it’s very nice.’ She removes some more books. ‘My mother used to make very good, big rye bread. Everything was baked at home.’

Vilborg holds up the brauðskeri but it’s heavy, built like an old German sewing machine. It’s a kind of guillotine, with a shelf that would hold a loaf the size of George Eliot’s complete works in hardback. ‘Brauðskeri is its name, the bread-cutter, and you see it’s quite a thing! So now I will tell you the story.’

I help her put the books back and we go downstairs again.

‘My mother used to keep her brauðskeri in the pantry, which had a window that opened onto the hillside. The window was small, half the size of that one, narrow as windows were in those days.’ The windows in this house are nineteenth-century, urban, Danish-influenced and probably not, really, ideal for the climate, since they must originally have had the same kind of draughty glazing that makes our Canterbury house so cold. ‘You could open a small part of it, but because the house was built into the slope, the window was just in the ground, and therefore if it