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

an ‘incident’ once, Brynja tells us, when a group of men tried to leave without paying, claiming that since they hadn’t slept they shouldn’t pay. There had been too many of them in one room anyway. Brynja was alone in the hotel that night and had no way of stopping them from going, but when the men had loaded their car and were about to set off, they found that one of the tyres was punctured. ‘So I stood there and watched while they unloaded everything and got the spare wheel, and that one was flat as well. So they couldn’t get away without our help. But by that time Jóhann was back, and when they asked him for our pump he reminded them that they hadn’t paid us. And then they said, “OK, what do we owe you?” So then we lent them the pump and they left, and we never saw them again. But I think we had help from the elves: you don’t leave here until you’ve paid up!’

There are more cards, more elves. Some who perhaps fly a little, others who have appeared in Brynja’s and her daughter’s dreams. There is, Brynja says, a lost book in the Bible that tells how God came to visit Eve after she had left Eden, giving notice so that she could wash and dress the children. But Eve had many children, and when God arrived, some were still grubby. She hid the unwashed children behind the house, and in punishment God hid them from human sight.

Brynja has a story to match Vilborg’s brauðskerasaga. One night, when the hotel was full with a tour group and Brynja had two girls helping her in the kitchen, they were drizzling the plates with balsamic syrup. One bottle ran out, and Brynja sent a girl to the store-room for more. The girl came back and said it wasn’t there, so Brynja, who had just bought a new multi-pack, went to look for herself. She’d put the bottles on the shelf that morning, and they had gone. Mid-service, they garnished the remaining dinners with chocolate syrup. (Alec and I, who have co-authored a book about chocolate and get mildly competitive about cooking, don’t look at each other.) When all the guests had gone to bed, Brynja and the girls went to check the store-room again, and there were the bottles, back in place. I want to ask if the elves had used any of the syrup, but I’m struggling not to sound incredulous and there’s a more important question, one that seems rude to ask but impossible to avoid.

‘Have you ever seen them? Any of them? Yourself?’

‘No,’ says Brynja. ‘No, I can’t say I have.’ She rallies. ‘But I think we get their help when we’re doing the right thing, and we struggle when we’re not. It’s just Nature, you know? When we moved here, I had such a strong sense of Nature, that we’re not alone in this world, that there’s something we can’t ever conquer. Like the volcano. And you have to show respect, that’s all it’s about, showing your respect for Mother Nature. Even if it’s just by getting permission.’

We are all nodding and murmuring agreement. Most of the Icelanders I know are rather enjoying their volcano, flattered to find Iceland on the front page of British newspapers again. There are jokes about mis-hearing what is still called, even in headlines, the Icesave Thing, and returning ash instead of cash, jokes that are not quite jokes about showing the world what happens if you mess with Iceland, as if Eyjafjallajökull is enacting the will of the Icelandic people not only by erupting but by erupting 30,000 feet into a south-east wind, as if the land speaks with the people’s voice. The volcano is erupting to avenge the financial crisis, although Icelanders who depend on income from tourism – an increasing number, and increasingly important to an economy in desperate need of foreign currency – are watching the flight schedules and feeling sick. Brynja, for all her acceptance of Mother Nature’s omnipotence, is among them.

‘We have to know how to live with Nature here,’ she says. ‘We have to learn respect. You notice, even with the volcano and all this ash, nobody’s died.’

‘Nobody even seems frightened,’ I point out. I’ve been fascinated by the absence of the apocalypse here. We’ve been told to keep young children inside if ash is visible in the air and that a group of medical researchers is taking this opportunity to investigate the long-term effects of ash-inhalation, which is not currently believed to cause more than passing symptoms. The English headlines, read online, are much more panicky than any in Iceland, fearing ash drifting over the North Atlantic, causing lung problems and possibly affecting crops and groundwater. In Iceland, air-freight isn’t arriving from Europe as regularly as usual, but since few Icelanders can afford to buy air-freighted produce anyway, that’s not having much affect on food supplies. The swine flu epidemic, which reached Iceland just after Christmas, has similarly led to predictions of the new Black Death in the UK and been greeted with mild concern for the vulnerable in Iceland. Icelanders don’t do panic.

‘Nobody panicked because this happens here every four or five years. It just doesn’t usually close down international airspace, that’s all. But we’re getting the calls now: “I’m panicking, I’m afraid, I want to cancel my booking for August because I’ve heard about the volcano. Maybe next year.” And I’m like, yeah, OK, but next year you’re going to be even more afraid because Katla’s gonna go.’

Katla’s the big volcano. One of the big volcanoes. Big volcanoes are serious; the Laki eruptions in the late eighteenth century killed seventy-five per cent of Icelandic livestock and twenty per cent of the human population in the resulting famine. Katla has erupted roughly every eighty years since records began, and is now ten years overdue and rumbling. Every previous eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, which comes from the