Names for the Sea, page 23
On the appointed day, Kathy and Alec have come from the Netherlands for a few days. Many friends promised to visit, but most of those who got as far as booking tickets have been thwarted by the volcano, which allows take-off and landing from London when the wind is in the west or from Reykjavík when the wind is in the east. Every couple of weeks a north wind lets the post through, although too late for our postal voting cards and a crucial birthday present. We are disenfranchised by the volcano. But in the middle of May Kathy and Alec have got through, at least one way, and are happy to come elf-hunting.
I pick them up from their hotel on an industrial estate behind Route 1, the only one that had vacancies with so many tourists stranded in Iceland. Alec volunteers to map-read. It’s not summer, not even spring by European standards. There’s low cloud over the city, with only the lower slopes of Esja visible. The squeak of the windscreen wipers is the day’s metronome. It’s the end of rush hour, I say, and the traffic is still a bit crazy. SUVs weave across the lanes, three people drive bumper to bumper at eighty kilometres per hour, horns blaring and lights flashing in the aftermath of an altercation. We have about 100 metres before our entry lane becomes an exit lane and we get funnelled back into suburbia. I accelerate hard into a gap between two jeeps that doesn’t exist as I start to pull out but does, just about, before we get siphoned off to the south. Bloody hell, says Kathy. It’s roughly what would happen if you let Italian drivers loose on American freeways, observes Alec. Worse, I say, worse. Think Greeks on the M25. Driving tanks in heavy rain. I spend too much time trying to find metaphors that will convey the awfulness of Icelandic driving and am pleased to have a willing audience. (I do not tell them that a few days ago, driving home alone, I found myself thinking that I’d better indicate at the approaching intersection because it’s not a place where anyone would expect me to make a left turn. And then realised that I’d driven across the city while thinking about my book and not noticed anyone’s driving. I fear I may lose my UK licence before we get home from Gatwick.) We leave the city via a slalom race over gravel tracks around roadworks, and all the extra lanes peel off into malls, industrial estates, supermarkets and the outer suburbs that trickle towards Esja, until Route 1 is dual track and the car behind is a Golf in no particular hurry to overtake. The windscreen wipers creak, and we crane up at the mountain. There’s a lovely walk up through those trees, I tell them. Maybe on the way back, if the rain clears. We round Esja and the city is gone. The rear-view mirror holds sky and sea, and a mountain, dark with rain, fills the windscreen. There’s some kind of factory at the far end of the fjord, a complex of white tanks and tubes extending spidery legs across the turf. Follow signs for the tunnel, says Alec. The tunnel under Hvalfjörður, which is nearly six kilometres long and one of the deepest in the world. There have been no disasters that I’ve heard of, but I can’t help feeling that tunnels under the sea are the sort of thing best left to the land-locked Swiss, say, or the Germans, people with an eye for risk assessment. We go down. And down and down, until after a while I can’t tell if we’re going down or up. The orange lights in the walls swoop. Down, says Kathy. Up, says Alec, definitely up, and we embark on a futile argument that takes my mind off the distance between the fire extinguishers and the near-certainty that there’s no escape route. They’ve just cut the number of fire engines and firefighters at the airport, because there’s never been an accident, and I dare say there’s never been a pile-up in the tunnel either.
(A few weeks later, the Iceland Review reports that the Hvalfjörður tunnel has been found in the annual inspection of tunnels to be the most dangerous in Europe, requiring urgent remedial action to meet basic standards. I read the EuroTAP report. The lighting is too weak, the inclines too steep, there is no automatic fire alarm system, the one hydrant in the middle of the tunnel is inadequate for fire-fighting, the escape routes are not marked by lighting and the ventilation system would ensure that the whole tunnel filled with smoke in a fire. I begin to have more faith in my judgements about Icelanders and risk.)
A paler light appears in the distance, but when we come out the rain has closed in. Without the fog, you’d be able to see over to the glacier there, I tell them, right across to Snæfellsnes that way. There are white farmhouses stretching gravel tracks towards the road, and corrugated iron barns low under the cloud. Horses stand beside stone walls, as if waiting for the rain to stop, and then flurries of snow come scrambling off the mountainside and buffet the car. In Leiden, Kathy and Alec have been cycling to the beach with a picnic.
The town of Borgarnes appears at last in the bottom left of the windscreen, crouching under a black mountain and muffled by cloud. Route 1 goes along a causeway across a kilometre or two of sea to get to Borgarnes; it’s not a town that you could reach at all without a vehicle. Or perhaps, in good weather and with a good crew, a boat. Gosh, says Kathy, as we set off across the dark waves, which is what we said to each other a lot fifteen years ago, when we’d look out of the bus and see water on both sides. Let’s stop for coffee, I say, because with only a few weeks left to go I’m beginning to feel more adventurous about spending money on coffee when there’s a perfectly good kettle at home.
Borgarnes is another town built for cars. It has two clusters of shops around car parks: a couple of banks and petrol stations, a video rental place, two small supermarkets and a shop (closed) with mannequins in the window wearing women’s fashions of the late 1960s. Streets peter out up the mountainside, as if the houses have slid slowly from the top until inertia overcame them on the shore. I drive through the town, which is doing a good impression of having suffered a poison gas attack in the night, to the Settlement Museum, which tells the story of the first people to arrive in Iceland. I park at the tip of the town’s peninsula, and we force the car doors open against the wind and huddle under the boot struggling with zips and scarves that flail in our hands.
There’s a path down to the sea so we take it, and it leads round the headland and then winds up the hill towards a sculpture positioned and presented like a war memorial, looking out over the fjord, across the causeway to the scree-covered slopes on the other side. It stands on a black marble plinth, behind loops of knee-high chain, and we prepare to be reverential. A shipwreck, perhaps. The loss of half the settlement’s men. A landslide slicing the roofs off houses in the middle of the night. We approach, rain mottling all of our glasses. It looks like a flying snail, says Alec. Maybe one landed here, suggests Kathy, one dark and stormy night. Perhaps that’s how the elves got here, I add, and then we start making fun of the sign explaining that we are standing on the very spot where someone in Egill’s Saga threw a rock at somebody. The Flying Snail is there to commemorate the throwing. We’ve had fifteen years’ practice at making each other laugh, but I’m over-reacting; there are tears running down my cheeks and I feel a flicker of concern for my pelvic floor. It’s not that funny, says Alec, and he’s right, but I realise it’s a long time since I laughed so much. Maybe since we left England (in fact, since Guy visited six months ago and we bought the car). I feel as if I’m not allowed to find things funny here, because the least the foreigner can do is to take everything seriously, nod earnestly over Icelandic history, and I know I’m behaving badly, crying with hilarity over the Icelandic reverence for the sagas and the way the tourist board assumes that the rest of the world is just waiting to find out Egill Skallagrímsson’s nurse’s gnomic utterance when her charge was dropped on his head one winter’s day a thousand years ago. We take pictures of each other in silly poses until our hands are too cold to control the camera. I’m freezing, says Kathy, can we go get a coffee? Not easily, it turns out, because although it’s mid-morning the waitress has just laid the tables for a Norwegian bus tour that will be stopping here for lunch and she doesn’t want us messing it up, so we take our drinks out onto the stairs and compare and contrast the rudeness of waitresses in Russia, Germany and France. We’re acting like tourists, like bad tourists, and it makes me feel good.
We drive on, the windscreen wipers marking time. We’re the only people going this way, winding through wide valleys with white, red-roofed farmhouses scattered along the rivers. The fields are a lifeless shade of yellow-green, grasses bowed by wind and rain. We pass barns, their red roofs darkened by rain, and horses hanging their heads in resignation. Two lines from Auden’s ‘Journey to Iceland’ murmur at the back of my mind: ‘A narrow bridge over a torrent,/ a small farm under a crag.’ I can’t remember the rest of the poem, or why it suddenly matters now. On. There are summer houses, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to spend their summer surrounded by agricultural land with Borgarnes as the only source of amusement. I can’t, anyway, imagine how people pass the time, weeks and weeks of summer, in Icelandic summer houses, although many remote hillsides and valleys are sprinkled with wooden huts. There is an enduring distrust of the city here, despite the almost complete urban drift of the population over the last twenty years, a widespread instinct that real life is in the countryside that now has very few permanent inhabitants. Are we nearly there yet, I ask Alec. We have to pass the university, he says, the university of Bifröst, and after a while it appears on the hillside ahead, a set of low white buildings raked across the slope like a barracks or a prison. Imagine going to university there, I say. Like the tower block in Garðabær, the university has a Soviet air, as if a few blocks of downtown Minsk had appeared on an Icelandic mountainside. There’s no-one moving around, no cars, and we sweep past it and on, at last, to Hraunsnef, where two wooden watchtowers, like something out of a low-budget Dungeons and Dragons film, guard the track. I turn between them. There’s a new building to the left, with a patio and rain pouring off a striped awning over a barbecue, and a house that looks deserted on the right, lace curtains hanging askew and cracks across the pebble-dash walls. A Labrador comes bounding from the older building. Alec distracts it while I sidle out of the car, keeping Kathy between me and the dog, and after we’ve walked around the old house Brynja comes out of the new one. I understand immediately what Messíana meant about Brynja being more familiar than Þórunn; she’s dressed, like us, in jeans and a coat, but there’s something about her brisk walk and her smile that feels uncomplicated, as if, despite the elves, she’s just a busy woman working like the rest of us. The dog rushes, but Brynja catches it and makes it go away somewhere. She ushers us into the bar, which is so clean that our wet coats and shoes are an insult. The tablecloths hang in ninety degree folds, with second tablecloths making exact margins. The white-tiled floor shows no sign of having ever been touched, and there is a straight row of Icelandic chocolates across a white plate. Rain runs down the windows, and piped music plays. There are carpentry noises off; Brynja’s husband is hurrying to get the noisy work done during the day while the guests are out. Out where, I wonder, and doing what?
Brynja and her husband moved here from Reykjavík in 2004, she tells us. She used to be an occupational therapist and he was a car-salesman, working all hours, never home. They used to go on holiday and fantasise about running a hotel, and then one day they decided to do it. They offered on a place in Akureyri, near the ski-slopes, but then the vendor found a hot spring on the land and put the price up. They were upset about that, had had their future all set up. Then they looked to the east of Reykjavík, out past Hveragerði, where there are a lot of hotels, but then there was the earthquake and they were a bit worried about all the volcanoes round there, and then they found this place, just along from the university which gets a lot of visitors, and it’s close to the city and not particularly close to any volcanic activity. So they bought it, and moved, and that’s when they started to hear that there were a lot of elves on the property.
‘And at first we were like, yeah, there’s lots of elves everywhere. And then what happened was that my husband’s mind kept turning to these beings while he was working out there.’ She gestures up the hill, where we saw some low outbuildings. ‘His mind kept thinking about these things. And he thought he should do something about it, so he came in and told me, “Please call Erla. Ask her to come and tell us what we should do about this.” You know Erla?’ Brynja asks.
I nod. I haven’t met Erla, but everyone I’ve been asking about elves has mentioned her. Erla is the national elf expert, now abroad.
‘I asked Erla and she came at the end of August that year, and she told us that these gnomes who live round here are really after the publicity, they want the world to know about them, and that’s why my husband had such strong thoughts of them while he was working up there. And we thought that could be the beginning of something big. So my aunt helped us, we started to make a map of the property with drawings of all the elves and other creatures on it, so that people can get some sense of what Erla is seeing around here. And these postcards come from that map.’
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.’
