rime

If they ever tear that place down, plow it under, or refurbish it, I will be very sad. The Kreppa will probably preserve it in its núverandi form, however.

This summer the heitir pottar were full of the usual suspects:

• Ormtyngdur former institute director backtalking his colleagues
• Broad-faced giant absently fiddling with his own nipples
• A young bóndi from Dalasýsla reminiscing about the countryside with men much older than he by enumerating the things vanished from his valley: the slaughterhouse, the children, the majority of the sheep
• Pensioner with an unending book project that brings him daily to his desk at the library and then to his evening soak
• The usual token foreigner, oblivious to the content of the skvaldur around him

The poster outside touts the health-giving properties of the minerals suspended in these waters. It does not mention the pipes in the showers, ever more encrusted with those same minerals. It does not mention the encrustation of chattering characters on the edges of the hot tubs, but I have even greater faith in their salutary effects on body and soul.

whorl

CaCO3

Probably calcite. Probably in basalt that's been cooked green under the earth. Probably that.

These are tiny crystals. They barely pick up the light, never mind bend it double. In a large piece, one ray reaches your eye later than the other. Not that you'd notice that. You only know that you're seeing a double image. But one image is further back in time than the other.

When were you last on this beach? Was the air so still like this? You think you remember wind. There was always wind then. It tossed your hair; it tossed his. Black and straw; hraun and shell sand. Probably that's how it was, yes.

sæúlfur

Did I tell you about the steinbítr? I didn't, did I. Wolffish. Seacat. Anarhichas lupus. Scarborough Woof.

I found the dessicated head of a steinbítur among the corpse-whelks and weed on an olivine and pyroxene beach. There are always interesting things in the weed. What did Sappho say? If you are squeamish, don't poke the beach rubble. Something like that. Once I found the perfect skull of a seabird. I set in on my balcony to dry, but the wind took it away. Even a dead bird flies here.

I carried the head back down the beach. The bergfræðingur, patient with questions, points to its grim teeth. Here and here, for picking its food from the bottom. Here, to crush the shells of mollusks, bolt them whole.

brenn-mig-ei

• stone flax or silk (depending on its fineness)
• amianthus (or amiant)
• salamander wool (for those either ignorant or given to metaphor)

The present proper term is asbestos, though asbestos is a misnomer. It is from a Latin word from a Greek word for quicklime, even though quicklime is something completely different. Its Greek designation meant "inextinguishable," as quicklime (CaO) is, reacting as it does violently with water. Asbestos does no such thing. It is merely and quietly impervious to flame.

Quicklime might have been an ingredient in Greek Fire, the napalm of the Byzantine Empire. It took a long time to figure out that the feathery mineral with more obvious defensive applications would be at least as dangerous.

gler

1.
Several batches, not all of them successful. One, a solution of white sugar in cherry juice, refused to coalesce as taffy, fudge, or even hard crack. Prolonged cooking turned it deep, charred wine. You could -- with effort -- push the edge of a wooden spoon into it and carve a glistening furrow. It was perfect, dark sugar with no crystal in it.

2.
There are more things called glass than just the stuff in window frames. Obsidian is one. Sideromelane is another. Muscovite is a third. Isinglass is not a physical glass (neither the fish gelatin nor the mineral), and its etymology is obscure. I grew up on the edge of a disused isinglass quarry, and I remember how the soil everywhere glittered. I would push my fingers into the dirt in search of larger pieces I could then pry apart into transparent flakes with my stubby fingernails.

3.
In Cocteau's Orphée, from which i remember almost nothing, I remember this: In the Underworld a man walks the main thoroughfare calling out the name of his wares, selling not icecream but glass.

tiberius

The snow building up against the window glass looks like travertine.

I learn that it is lapis tiburtinus, the stone of Tibur, that is Tivoli. For me, Tivoli is a pleasure garden in Copenhagen. Its name is another tiny gesture towards a long-standing Northern fascination with an imagined, exotic, leisured south. Last I was there, there was nonetheless snow, if only the artificial sort sifted over a life-sized diorama of secular Christmas. When in Iceland, a tivoli is a traveling carnival, called, of course, after the garden in Copenhagen. All carnivals in Iceland are traveling, I think. I remember a ferris wheel unfolding quayside in Reykjavík in 1998. I was so struck by the notion of a carnival moving by sea.

I learned the word tivoli late, another new sound offered on the seductive tongue of the North. I learned the word travertine when I was still very young. It was a word for talking about buildings and geology. They were related for me, a small person inquisitive about things my own height: the wainscotting, the chair rail, the doorknob. If the wall were clad in stone, I would want to know which stone it was.

My father worked in a tall building with a lobby entirely clad in travertine. Its whiteness was so different from the dirty gray streets of the urban empire outside. Waiting for the elevator with my mother, waiting to ascend into the world of powerful men, I would poke the stubby edge of my fingernail into the holes and crevices.

glaumur

Tink, clenk. Mugs do not ring like glass does. The ceramic is, at, base, stone, and stone makes a poor bell. But then the chime of bronze post-dates other, older signs of the tiny realm of men ringed about by the great Wild. Is this like the sound of drinking in an ancient hall? (--less the clamorous voices; we are hard at work in our books even as we hear the coffee on its way.) Re-read Beowulf and watch for it: the cold heath stretching to the horizon, the flicker of warmth beneath the roofbeam.

hrafn og örn

A guest in someone else's beloved North, I am welcomed by ravens and eagles, familiar people and unfamiliar mountains. Glaciers did not scour this land as smooth, and they pierce the eternal clouds like teeth. It is green with rain. The stones are quieter here: they do not chant old poetry but instead whisper of gold and jade.

touchstone

1.
Basalt takes its name from Gk. basanos, "touchstone," a stone used to test gold.

2.
Four words for basalt columns:

cockle
shirl
trap
whin

3.
Webster's 1828 dictionary speaks beautifully of basalt:

A dark, grayish black mineral or stone, sometimes bluish or brownish black, and when withered,the surface is grayish or reddish brown. It is amorphous, columnar, tabular or globular. The columnar form is straight or curved, perpendicular or inclined, sometimes nearly horizontal; the diameter of the columns from three inches to three feet, sometimes with transverse semi-spherical joints, in which the convex part of one is inserted in the concavity of another. The forms of the columns generally are pentagonal, hexagonal, or octagonal. It is sometimes found also in rounded masses, either spherical, or compressed and lenticular. These rounded masses are sometimes composed of concentric layers, with a nucleus, and sometimes of prisms radiating from a center. It is heavy and hard. The pillars of the Giant's causey in Ireland, composed of this stone and exposed to the roughest sea for ages, have their angles as perfect as those at a distance from the waves.

nýströnd

An island in the sound in someone else's North, not my own. An unfamiliar but pleasing strand, littered with white and purple shells and strewn with weed like black magnetic tape, cluttered with drifted timber from the forests of pine and fir. The stones are black and green and some quartz-translucent, grown green with algae and mosses. Some of them, I am nearly sure, are basalt shot with crystal, the old, cold sputterings of nearby volcanoes. Others are like the blue-green rock of Austurlandið.

I am on the edge of the world, or of my world. Other people's worlds must extend past here to the West, but so far mine does not.

And it is St. Stephen's Day. I have seen no wren, living nor dead, but an eagle, white-headed, flew along the water as I watched from the shore.

sjávargler

I was there again, í fjörunni, picking up rounded pieces of glass and stuffing them deep into my pockets. Green, teal, blue, pink, amber, all frosted and looking too much like gumdrops to set safely in a bowl on the table. Someone might break a tooth.

Instead they are in a straight-sided glass, covered in water and placed in the window where they can catch the light and shine more like they did where I found them, light að sunnan skimming the water and catching them broadside, making them flare like gems against the black pebbles. But this water is fresh. They do not smell of salt here, not any more than everything else does, of sweat, after a too-warm day.

There are other salty waters, it occurs to me. Amber washed up on northern beaches was called, in poetry, Freyja's tears. She had wept for her husband Óðr, who had gone away and never returned. Judging by the rest of the mythology, she got over it, but the world got amber for her heartbreak.

These pseudo-gems are not so precious as amber. They are, in fact, the smooth-polished garbage of a hard-drinking people, the thick bases of bottles scoured into lemon-drop shapes by basalt and waves. But then amber is mere tree sap. There should be some lofty story for these colored stones too, I think, some tragedy or some deed.

fjórðungaorð

Having made the rounds, here are four words from the four quarters:

From the north: ógilslegt
I confess to having coined this myself, upon having a certain gil or gully pointed out to me. It was indeed very unlike a gil for having been smoothed out and leveled in several distinct sections, an ógilslegt gil.

From the east: lágfota
"Short-legs," a very pleasing name for the vixen and a fitting one, if you have ever seen her glide over the ground.

From the south: draugasteinn
"Ghost-stone," the nativist word for chalcedony. I learned it in the East, but it was further south that I saw long veins of it shot through the basalt and scraped smooth by the course of the Svínafell glacier.

From the west (sem er í raun fyrir sunnan): grátberi
"Tears-bearer," one who brings tears, or brings them on. Compare vatnsberi (water-bearer), the designation for Aquarius, or tilberi (to-bearer), the milk-hare witches used to steal milk from other women's cows. I do not think it can be used poetically, of rain.

borg

She goes all the way out to this northern-facing fjord to pay her respects. She walks through the grass to the jutting hill that dominates this settlement and starts around it, sunwise. She makes two circuits, with downcast eyes and a humble expression, stepping carefully all the while. She sees wild thyme growing near the path. She reaches to brush the tips of her fingers against its red leaves, but she does not pluck it, and she does not stray from the path. Then she sees a while feather crushed into the stoney ground. This she picks up, smooths with her fingers, and stands upright, quill downward, near where it had lain. She continues, now coming around the last third of the second circuit.

A black horse in a nearby paddock whinnies, and she looks up expectantly. Somewhere else nearby, a dog cries. It is a painful sound. Her heart thumps a little faster, and her throat tightens. Walking away now, with eyes downcast once again, she sees before her a round stone, green as the sea, a little smaller than her fist. She smiles, relieved, and picks it up. It feels good in her hand, almost warm.

Driving out, she passes an old man on a bicycle, heading for one of the outer farms. A black dog is bounding through the grass to meet him.

sendlingur

Placing the wave-rounded glass and stones back in the little bowl, now high on a shelf, after their brief sojourn in a cardboard box, I remember picking them out of wet sand. Now my fingers smell of that same wet sand, that slapping, weed-full bay, and I sniff them for a long minute and think of where I went, sandpiper-like, among the rocks of the seawall, where the bend traps smooth stones like the eggs of songbirds. I will not tell you just where.

fjörugler

Dashing out of the house for an appointment in the city, she grabs a milky white piece of sea glass off the shelf and thrusts it deep into a pocket. She keeps a finger curled around it as she strides to the station. On the train, she places it on her tongue. It is still salty. The roundness of it is awkward in her mouth. When her attention wanders, it scrapes again her teeth. She tries to hold it steady as she exits the train on the other side and heads up the street to the hotel bar. The salt has worn off it by the time she pushes through the doors. Seated in a leather-covered chair, she balances the piece glass, oblate, the size of a thrush's egg, and pours a berry-flavored cocktail past it. Over the course of the evening she nearly forgets how the glass feels in her mouth. It is warm now and tastes almost like the rest of what her tongue finds on the hindside of her teeth. Paying, pushing back out through the doors, she sucks on the white glass quite unconsciously, only distantly registering a mineral flavor. On the train again, somewhere between here and there, she remembers the glass and presses it against her palate, traces around the shape of it with the tip of her tongue. She reaches home and shuts the door behind herself, takes the glass from her mouth with thumb and forefinger, and places it on the nightstand before climbing into bed to sleep.

three small stones

Three little things that have somehow gone unmentioned in the course of this winter sojourn:


The sign at the end of the allé, near Hringbraut, is made of two posts with thin strips of metal bearing names bolted to them, with narrow gaps between them. In a high wind, the air catches in the gaps and whines and sings, and the whole structure becomes a harmonica. The unwary passer-by making for the busstop in the dark may be startled, thinking that she is hearing voices or the playing of flutes.

Glitský. Eerie, uncommon, opalescent clouds high in the chilly atmosphere. I have seen several. I still do not know what they are called in other languages. They look like something you might see if an oily film were imperfectly cleaned from the membrane of the sky; a smear of fat from the flesh of a salmon, perhaps, or a thumbprint.

I encounter again and unexpectedly a dog whose acquaintance I had made on a previous trip and find that he remembers me and is pleased to see me, smell my hands, lick my face, and rest his long bristly jaw in my lap.