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

a song? asks Alec. Just relax and enjoy it, Brynja tells him approvingly. Let it all go. Alec intones a low note. Ommm. Alec’s a trained singer, and the note goes on a long time. He takes another breath. Ommm. Longer and lower than you would think possible, an American historian sitting in a knitted hat on a wet rock in Iceland, waiting for tall elves with electric signals in their hair to sing a duet with him.

Later, I find the poem. It’s the one that’s famous because Auden wrote, in pen, on paper, ‘each poet has a name for the sea.’ Christopher Isherwood wrote back, admiring the line, ‘each port has a name for the sea’, and Auden decided the mistake was better than the original. I’d remembered it, vaguely, as yet another saga-worship poem in the tradition of William Morris, but reading it again properly, with the landscape outside Borgarnes in mind, I see that it’s doing something different, and darker:

Here let the citizen, then, find natural marvels,

a horse-shoe ravine, an issue of steam from a cleft

in the rock, and rocks, and waterfalls brushing

the rocks, and among the rocks birds;

the student of prose and conduct places to visit,

the site of a church where a bishop was put in a bag,

the bath of the great historian, the fort where

an outlaw dreaded the dark,

remember the doomed man thrown by his horse and crying

Beautiful is the hillside. I will not go,

the old woman confessing He that I loved the

best, to him I was worst.

I recognise my own distrust of Icelandic tourism, of the collector’s desire to tick off geysers and volcanoes and midnight sun on some kind of Lonely Planet checklist, totting up experiences like any other commodity. There must be a better reason to travel, a better way of travelling, than the hoarding of sights your friends haven’t seen. I’m also, I find, resistant to the lens of the ‘student of prose and conduct’ who finds ‘places to visit’ because of historical events. I don’t want to see the bath of the great historian. I don’t want to know that the great historian had a bath. I want to sense the long-dead outlaw’s dread of the dark, not to be told about it in an interpretation centre. I want, I suppose, an unmediated Iceland, even though I know there’s no such thing. I read on:

A narrow bridge over a torrent,

a small farm under a crag

are natural settings for the jealousies of a province:

a weak vow of fidelity is made at a cairn,

within the indigenous figure on horseback

on the bridle-path down by the lake

his blood moves also by furtive and crooked inches,

asks all our questions: Where is the homage? When

shall justice be done? Who is against me?

Why am I always alone?

Our time has no favourite suburb, no local features

are those of the young for whom all wish to care;

its promise is only a promise, the fabulous

country impartially far.

Tears fall in all the rivers: again some driver

pulls on his gloves and in a blinding snowstorm starts

upon a fatal journey, again some writer

runs howling to his art.

These aren’t William Morris’s sagas. For Morris, the sagas hymn the lives idealised by many late-Victorians, presenting a wilderness society shaped by the fights of heroes, a world where Nordic men are Nordic men known by their swords and no-one else matters much. Auden’s doing something different here. The voices could speak from any time, but the last verse puts its hand on my arm. Auden wrote his Letters from Iceland in the year he calls ‘the eighteenth of our western peace’, 1936. He encountered Goering’s brother in a hotel in the north, and eavesdropped on German tourists talking approvingly about the blondness of Icelandic children. Auden himself was only seven in 1914, but of a generation of writers for whom fighting had no glamour. ‘Again some writer/ runs howling to his art’: the sagas are an inadequate response to a culture of hurt and betrayal. I think again about Brynja’s affection for her ‘guardians’, about the enduring sense of dark presences in the Icelandic landscape. The thefts of balsamic syrup and bread-slicers are easy to mock, but these stories are ways of domesticating fear. What is outside is dangerous. Yule Lads, hidden people, molten lava, boiling quicksand, blizzards pouring black cloud across a blue sky, aurora sweeping the mountainside like searchlights. The doomed man thrown by his horse and refusing to go into exile, refusing to become an outlaw in the wilderness. Elves seem synthetic to me now, embarrassing, but somewhere behind the electric hair and painted rainbows of Brynja’s story there’s a very old instinct about this landscape.

13

In Search of the Kreppa

By late May, the air is full of the chatter of birds, especially noticeable late at night. There is sunset on my late-night walks again, and it’s hard to remember to go to bed. Start a book or film last thing in the evening, and by the time you’ve finished it is daylight again. The grass, which has been yellow and dead since early September, is green again. There is still snow on the top of Esja. Anthony comes back from the school run. Is it warm enough to go out without a cardigan? I ask. He wrinkles his nose. No, he says, not quite, not yet. We both know that I am not asking if it’s warm enough to go out in indoor clothes. (Even in July, you take a coat.) I’m hoping one layer will do, a coat without a woollen cardigan underneath. And it won’t.

I still haven’t found the kreppa. I still feel like a poor person here, the only one who can’t afford a cup of coffee, who brings sandwiches to work and mends her children’s clothes. It’s normal for the UK, I tell friends who observe us rationing use of our pay-as-you-go phones, walking to save the petrol, turning the heating down. But it doesn’t seem to be normal for Iceland, even