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

Brynja fans out eight large postcards on the table, the ones Messíana showed me. ‘We’ve put up signs, out in the field, to guide people around where these beings are.’ She hands me a card showing the elongated elves, almost as tall as the mountain behind the house. ‘A lot of people tell us that the elves in the mountain here are royal, but they don’t always look very royal because they are so tall, up to a hundred metres tall.’

Alec, who has not heard adults talking about elves before, is entirely composed. ‘So your aunt drew these based on what Erla described? She didn’t see the elves herself?’

Brynja nods. ‘Yes. Erla describes it, my aunt draws it, and then Erla gives her approval. Or not! Some of them took a very long time. It can be very difficult, like the hair on these ones.’ She shows us a card where the elves’ hair stands out around their heads, reaching across the hillside. ‘In some versions it just looked like messy hair, but it’s a mixture of light and sound waves, and they can receive sound with their hair, so if you go out here and sing to them, they’ll sing back. And their houses look like towers, but they give out tones too. Erla came here in the winter once, and she said that she travelled with them in her dream. She said that all the colours get misty in the wintertime and she doesn’t see them so well, so they’re mostly alive in the summer, but she went to visit them inside their house in the mountain. They have big halls, and they make music all the time, and she said they were doing something like working, enjoying making things. They had great windows that opened, and she said she could see right through to the other side of the mountain and it was beautiful. And we could just see it in our minds when she told us. So those Erla calls the Longlegs, but these ones here are really small, maybe only twenty centimetres or so. And Jóhann, my husband, he says I have one of these with me all the time.’

‘So he sees them?’ I ask. The hall in the mountain reminds me of The Lord of the Rings, though the Icelandic palace came first. Tolkien was an Oxford professor of Old Norse.

‘No. But he gets a sense of them.’ She picks up another card, one showing something that looks like a giant hedgehog standing on its hind legs and holding a broom. This, she says, is Hraunsnef’s hermit. We must have driven past his house, a rock sticking out from the hillside where the road bends. The hermit is the family’s protector, and Erla has told them that it’s important to greet him as you pass. When Brynja started to wave as she passed the rock, Erla told her that the hermit began to clean and sweep his house, as if expecting visitors. One day, a man from the Highways Agency called at the house, hoping to arrange to buy the land on either side of Route 1 to lay pipes and cables. The sale would have included the hermit’s rock, and the Agency was planning to move it because at the moment the rock is exactly where a car coming off the road on the bend would hit it. Brynja and Jóhann said no, and explained about the hermit. They protected their protector. The man from the Highways Agency understood. He asked for the hermit’s postcard, and carries it in his wallet.

Alec, who works on European cultural history, though so far as I know with more of an interest in technology than elves, leans forward. ‘What does he protect you from?’ he asks. ‘From weather? Or something else?’

Brynja pauses. ‘I don’t think there’s any one kind of protection. It’s just what’s in his remit. Not bad weather, because we certainly get that, but this is more about emotional – no, not emotional – I don’t know.’

‘Maybe security?’ Alec suggests.

Brynja shakes her head. ‘No. More from bad influences and things like that. Bad thoughts.’ She shows us another card, where the beings are on human scale and of human form. ‘These are typical elves. Guardians. They look like Vikings, and they’ve been here since the time of the Vikings. This is their hill. When we came here it was covered in long, wild grass, so my husband wanted to cut it. But they tried many times, and every time the tractor got near the top of the hill, the belt that keeps the motor running would break. At last he went down and sat on the hill and talked about what he wanted to do and why. And after that, it was amazing, the tractor just went on. They were protecting their sacred place, not exactly a temple, but where they gave sacrifices to the gods.’ I’ve seen museums that have evidence of some fairly comprehensive pre-Christian Viking sacrifices, though not in Iceland. ‘She’s not seeing blood, or anything like that.’ Brynja adds. ‘There’s no killing, just harvest symbols. Erla said that these two guards are moving closer and closer to the road, watching people coming and going, so we built those big watchtowers for them. So now they’re checking out people who come here, and I think they’ll protect us from anyone who shouldn’t be here.’

There’s an established relationship between elves and roads. Route 1 is a recent arrival, at least in the hidden people’s timescale, and yet clearly a focus of elvish (elven? elfin?) interest. Maybe because it constitutes the only major change in land-use in a lot of places, since many of the farms are on sites where there’s been a dwelling of some kind for centuries, or maybe because routes and pathways hold ancient appeal. And I suppose we know much less about what elves might be doing away from the beaten track.

They had