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  In a recent article, Ólina Thorvarðardóttir, a specialist in Icelandic literature and cultural anthropology at the National Museum in Reykjavik, explained the existence and importance of an elemental respect culture, stressing how many ancient and apposite messages are delivered through the supernatural beingsix of Iceland’s super-nature:

  The fate of humans depends on how they interact with these spirits. We are not speaking here of pretty fairies with magic wands, but rather the huldufólk [who] cast spells upon people, blessing or cursing them according to how they judge their behavior . . . The stories have served a meaningful role in raising children. What child would dare to climb the rock believed to be the habitation of the huldufólk? The huldufólk took grim vengeance upon children who caused a disturbance near their dwellings, and likewise they punished farmers who strained the resources of their estates. Environmental concerns, thus, have been one of the motifs of Icelandic oral tradition since ancient times.8

  Having spoken to Icelanders like Haraldur and Stefán, and worked in such a remarkable place as Hvítárnes, I think belief and respect for the huldufólk is perfectly reasonable, logical even; an Arctic animism akin to the Shinto of another island beset by tectonic Sturm und Drang: Japan.

  In a 2015 interview, Terry Gunnell, professor of folklore at the University of Iceland, told the Guardian:

  When your house can be destroyed by an earthquake, when you can be blown over by the wind, when boiling water from your taps tells you there’s lava not far beneath your feet – then you don’t mess with nature.9

  To live in a country as potent and metamorphic as Iceland is to be constantly reminded, made acutely aware, that the land is both ancient and new. Bolshie, raw, evolving geology; a territory as likely to mushroom a volcano as to disappear a lake overnight. Here, mighty maelstroms habitually tear buildings apart and vanish the debris as you might brush crumbs from your lap.

  In such a situation a charge of pareidolia might be made – the psychological phenomenon by which the mind perceives familiar patterns and shapes where none exist; as the Man in the Moon so the trolls in the mountains around Hvítárnes and Þórsmörk – phantasms engendered by an eldritch scape, spectres of a terror firma. But to do so would be to misunderstand the respect and connection Icelanders feel for their world.

  Rather than the negative associations of pareidolia – a word with its roots in illusion, of thoughts beside the truth, as paranoia stems from ‘irregular’ + ‘mind’ – I suggest that many Icelanders possess an almost extrasensory perception, an imaginative facility which affords a better understanding of their isle. William Blake wrote of twofold vision – the world seen ‘not with but through the eye’x – a doubling of sight which enables a person to see beyond the concrete to behold contexts, associations and emotional meanings. The huldufólk embody this doubling, an empathic insight which has helped foster an elemental solidarity between people and place.

  Flying out of Iceland I thought of my great-gran, an implacable Scots voice echoing down the ages; ‘the spectator sees more of the game’ she used to say – she had many maxims – another favourite being ‘Don’t come all yea with me, Sonny Jim, or you’ll get your head in your hands to play with.’ I sense she and the huldufólk would have got on like a house on fire. ‘Don’t come all yea with me,’ warn the Icelandic wilds, ‘or I will respond in kind . . .’ And with that my mind flew back to Rebecca Solnit, a brilliant chronicler of the modern human condition, political and environmental drama and upheaval, who often deploys parables and allegoric essays to better unpack the stories, unpick the people and speak truth to power. Here she is regarding America’s forty-fifth President:

  He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker. He acquired buildings and women and enterprises and treated them all alike, promoting and deserting them, running into bankruptcies and divorces, treading on lawsuits the way a lumberjack of old walked across the logs floating on their way to the mill, but as long as he moved in his underworld of dealmakers the rules were wobbly and the enforcement was wobblier and he could stay afloat.10

  An ancient story. The tale of a tyrant – an anti-huldufólk. The cap fits and so does the form of the telling. Far from anachronisms, the environmental morals and message of Iceland’s ancient fables remain resonant and relevant. Deeply strange and supernatural, compelling, clearsighted and wise.

  The original sæluhús were refuge stations for travellers crossing the interior hinter/highlands. The remains of many structures dating back to Viking times can still be found, whilst others have become modern bunkhouses, new buildings on ancient foundations.

  New visitors arrive – drop in.

  Not all of them esteem the environment as they should.

  Some ‘get the ghosts’.

  So it goes.

  Much has changed since the first sæluhús were built but the wilful earth and ice, and the stories they stir – the maxims, counsel and cautions of old, the novels, music and dreams of now; the essential questing unrest and respect that exist between Icelanders and their nature – are thriving; potent and apt as ever.

  Hvítárnes, Iceland. Photographs: Dan Richards

  ______________

  i On the day of the 2017 summer solstice – shortly after my return from the island – Sigur Rós unveiled a twenty-four-hour ‘slow TV’ event live on Iceland’s national television station – also streamed live globally via YouTube. Route One features footage of a 1,332km journey around the whole of Iceland’s coastal ring road, set to a constantly evolving soundtrack based around elements of their latest song, ‘Óveður’.

  ii The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s Paradox, is a thought experiment which asks the question whether an object that has had all its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is recorded by the first-century writer Plutarch in Life of Theseus. Plutarch asked whether a ship that had been restored by replacing every single wooden part remained the same ship. See also – Trigger’s broom.

  iii He also showed me photographs of huts that had been broken into during the off-season, ransacked and abandoned open to the elements, shaking his head in sad disbelief.

  iv Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (aka Kría Brekkan, born 5 January 1982) is an Icelandic vocalist and classically trained multi-instrumentalist. She is best known as a former front-woman of Múm – having sung on their first three/ best three albums – Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK (1999), Finally We Are No One (2002), and Summer Make Good (2004). Howl, Kristín’s first full-length record under her own name, was released in 2015. Now simply known as Kristín Anna, her new LP, I Must Be the Devil, came out in October 2018.

  v ‘Black Lake’ was one of the centrepiece songs on Björk’s 2015 album Vulnicura, a deeply affecting, haunting set of songs which detail the break-up of a relationship, blank despair ceding to cautious optimism. In common with almost all of Björk’s music, the lyrical allusions are elemental and rooted in nature – the fractured anguish and ferocious anger tectonic, glacial, visceral and earthy. Such songs as ‘Black Lake’ and ‘Quicksand’ suggest that the artist finds solace and asylum in nature; that Iceland’s wilds can both reflect inner turmoil and provide a vulnerary aid.

  vi The stove was a handsome dark green Jøtul NR507 with a horse cast on the front. Stefán told me this was the second such stove Hvítárnes had had in its lifetime. The first was stolen in the middle of winter about twenty years ago. ‘A hell of a thing to do,’ Stefán said, shrugging. ‘A really bad winter. These stoves weigh a ton. Crazy robbers! I’ve never known another such theft.’

  vii Notably the ghost seems to appear mostly to men, although that may be due to that fact that historically it has been mostly men who’ve stayed at Hvítárnes.

  viii The logbooks of Hvítárnes 1938–2003 are kept in the Manuscript Collection at the National and University Library of Iceland in Reykjavík, whilst Stefán and Ferðafélag Íslands currently hold the books from 2004–12. I’m very
grateful to Halldór Óli Gunnarsson, Icelandic folklorist and author of Draugasögur úr Hvítárnesskál / Ghost Stories of Hvítárnes Bowl (University of Iceland, 2012) – a fascinating and hugely useful document and compilation of hauntings and ghostly happenings at Hvítárnes. Halldór spent many hours carefully looking through old guestbooks and kindly let me quote some of his findings here. ‘But remember,’ he told me, ‘those guestbooks only date from 1938 to 2003. I’m pretty sure there are more stories in the books from 2003 to 2012 that are kept by the FÍ.’ He also reckons that a great many people might have experienced strange events at the sæluhús but left no written record; so much so that he could easily imagine a thesis or book being written about Hvítárnes based on oral history alone – ‘because I do think there are many people who have experienced something out of the ordinary in that cabin . . . it would [be] a massive project to interview every single person with a story to tell.’

  ix In the prologue to his beautiful book, The Earth Is Only a Little Dust Under Our Feet, Bego Antón provides a more fulsome résumé of Iceland’s magical bestiary:

  There are elves in Iceland. Also fairies, unicorns, huldufólk, trolls, beach dwarfs, water sprites, mountain spirits and ghosts. Icelanders don’t throw stones in the air for fear of hitting one of these mysterious beings. They don’t jump on stones, in case a huldufólk might be living inside. And someone once told me:

  ‘If the president

  claimed he didn’t believe in these

  magical creatures

  he would never be re-elected.’

  — The Earth Is Only a Little Dust Under Our Feet, Bego Antón, Overlapse, London, 2018, p.iii.

  x The EYE . . . ‘not with but through the eye’, a phrase which Blake may have taken from Plato’s Theaetetus. This ability consists in the spontaneous translating of the visible into human qualities, the process now called ‘empathy’. – A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, S. Foster Damon, Brown University Press, New England, 1988, p.134.

  ‘He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing, mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.’ – Life of William Blake, Vol. 2, Alexander Gilchrist, Harper Perennial, London, 2011, p.153.

  III

  SIMON STARLING – SHEDBOATSHED

  Clear? Ha! Why a four-year-old child could understand this! Run out and find me a four-year-old child . . .

  – Groucho Marx1

  SAILHOUSE

  I caught a train to Copenhagen to see the artist Simon Starling. I wanted to talk to him about his Turner Prizewinning installation, Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2) – a work described, a little erroneously, on his gallery’s website as a ‘Wooden shed, 390 × 600 × 340 cm, 2005’.

  Yes, now, I want to say; now it’s a shed of the proportions you suggest, at the moment. The brilliance of Shedboatshed is that it is an evolving roving work – the sort of work land artist David Nash might describe as ‘becoming’. It is currently a shed . . . again. But it was once a boat. Shed is the bread of its sandwich life, the middle is filled with travel, rivers and derring-do. It is a shed with stories to tell. A shed that’s been on a great adventure. Its timbers dream of the river.

  In the run-up to my trip I began to see the world in sandwich terms. Days became sleepwakesleeps, my cat was a napeatnap, this book a teawritetea.

  An hour out of Hamburg, I travelled on a trainboattrain when we rolled on to the rail-ferry which links Puttgarden and Rødby, crossing the Vogelfluglinie or Fugleflugtslinjen – the bird flight line, a wonderful compound name which alludes to both the ‘as the crow flies’ course of the ferry and the transport corridor’s importance to birds migrating between Central Europe and the Scandinavian Arctic.

  I was not flying as a crow. I’d taken the train to experience the distance and landscape between London and Copenhagen, stopping off in Brussels where I made friends with the owner of a record shop who introduced me to sour beer as gravy; Köln, where between connections I saw an unsettling Gerhard Richter exhibition at Museum Ludwig in the twin spire shadows of the high gothic cathedral; and Hamburg, where I got confused and ended up in a Tesla showroom being shown electric cars by somebody who for some reason thought I was solvent and able to drive.i Then I was back on another train with a winningly square flat face and rolling north to the ferry where, near dusk, we clacked on to the car deck, snug beside lorries. Upstairs in the observation lounge I saw that the first thing seasoned Fugleflugtslinjeners do is form a snaking queue around the closed canteen. This seemed quite a passive-aggressive display until the moment the ferry, with a hoot, left the slip and, as one, the shutters shot open and a school-dinner supper was served. The system, the shutters, the singing men on the next table over: all were clearly very well oiled.

  I bought a coffee and sat back down amongst the diners, all of us gazing at the dark waters and red outlined horizons whilst the ship trembled beneath us. Eventually the windows welled into mirrors and the formica diner fanned out either side like wings spreading into the night.

  All that way on rails and water to see a man about a shed. It might sound like a shaggy dog story but it was actually something of a pilgrimage. Shedboatshed is an artwork which I like lot. I liked it the moment I saw it as a shed at Tate Britain and took an even greater pleasure in it once I’d learnt its backstory. But even at face-value it has an excellent face: a porch-mouth of cubicles, four little chalets, above which a single paddle is fixed. The roof is angled like a jaunty hat with a fringe of corrugated iron. The boards of its face are wide, old boards from big trees. It’s mostly creosoted but some planks seem to have missed the brush. Some are mellow chestnut, others tangerine, some new wood and some leathered grey. In pictures it looks soft, like a shed which has been worked quite hard and had its corners knocked off in the process, but in person a lot of it was quite knotty, gnarlygrained, a mix of silky and splintered wood – an expedient assemblage. And once that mongrel aspect is noted the chalet-mouth seems to take on a panting aspect and, with that, the shed reveals itself as rather canine.

  Dogs like a river. They like to stand above water and look down past their front paws, examining the rippling ribbons of sun or brown silty shallows. I’ve seen them. Sometimes they jump in with abandon and sometimes they lower themselves with minute care. Shedboatshed looks like the sort of dog-shed which, having yolloped in a river, has just hauled its joyfully quivering back-end out, spira-shaken itself dry and is now having a rest, panting at the scene with more than half a mind to lunge in again – launch itself off the bank as Simon Starling launched it on a trip down the Rhine in 2005 in the temporary form of a boat.

  In short, a shed of agency; a transportive space of imagination. As children build dens which are infinitely more than the sum of their parts, so Shedboatshed is both infinitely more and exactly the sum of its parts; nothing added or taken away. Somewhere beside the Rhine there’s a flat piece of ground, the spot where Starling discovered the shed, saw its potential, beheld its charismatic raw material and, shortly afterwards, set about rebuilding it as a flat bottomed weidling punt.ii Shortly after that he poled it several miles down the river to a Basel gallery where he returned it to its original form.

  I’ve always been drawn to simple structures – garden sheds, hay barns, line-side shelters glimpsed from passing trains. As a child, every door in a whitewashed wall held the promise of a secret garden, every cupboard was a possible gateway to Narnia, every cellar stair or crypt a portal to the underworld. A great many stories I loved involved passing through doors with unexpected worlds the other side. Each week Mr Benn would walk along Festive Road in his black suit and bowler hat to try on a new costume at his local fancy dress shop. He chose an outfit with the help of the owner – a befezed man with a sphinxy smile – before dressing up and walking out of the changing room door and into an adventure. The Batcave was accessed down the Batpoles which were situated behind a perfectly ordinary-looking sliding bookcase.
The TARDIS is a spacecraft and time machine, bigger on the inside and disguised as a police box.

  My closest encounter with a TARDIS occurred as a child in the dunes above Porthcurno beach. We were on a family holiday to Cornwall, perhaps we’d gone to see the Minack Theatre or Land’s End; either way, whilst exploring the sand and marram grass I found a small concrete hut emitting the kind of wavering singsong sound of a radio set between stations. The walls inside were lined with apparatus akin to elderly gas meters plumbed in to wires and hoses emerging from the oxblood floor. A brief notice informed me that this, the Porthcurno Telegraphy Station, had once been the landing point for a web of intercontinental submarine cables. A map showed massed lines eeling out from the cove below. The original network had long been retired, their current of morse and voices cut off, but the wires did not fall silent. They began to sing. Today they broadcast the sound of sun-flares and lightning around the world; electromagnetic music bubbling up from the bottom of the sea. The siren which had drawn me into the hut had been a mix of deep tectonic tunes, elemental airs and the cosmic songs of stars.

  I think of Porthcurno and Hvítárnes sæluhús as kindred transmitters.

  The first time I walked into Simon’s studio, I felt that here was a workshop where new outposts and adventures might be created – a long light room a little like a drawing office with desks at one end and a big table at the other. Hidden in a courtyard behind a high blond-brick tenement, a low-key inner-city ideas factory from which stories and artworks might be loosed into the world. The first works I saw were two silver photographic prints pinned to the back wall. They were of a canoe on a beach, no people. Just the canoe, the beach and the horizon, below which water, above which sky. Some clouds. Odd marbled mounds on the beach to the right of the canoe gave a clue to the canoe’s location: the salt shores of the Dead Sea.