Field Notes

Short notes from the research: the plants, houses, fires, and birds of 19th‑century Iceland, gathered while writing Let Theirs Be Light.

• Fjallagrös, the moss that is not a moss

  Iceland moss is a lichen, not a moss, and in the nineteenth century it stood between many families and hunger. Gathered on the heaths in damp weather, when it softens and will not crumble, it was boiled in milk into a bitter porridge given for coughs and lung complaints, and in lean years it was dried, ground, and kneaded into bread to stretch scarce grain. A biologist notices what the housewife knew by hand: the lichen’s starches gel when simmered, which is why the sick‑room milk thickened, and why the bread held together at all.

• Hvönn, the angelica garths

  Angelica grows wild along Icelandic rivers and was one of the few plants deliberately cultivated beside farmhouses, in small walled garths, since the Middle Ages. The hollow stalks were eaten fresh, the roots chewed or steeped against pestilence and stomach ills. It was once valuable enough to be protected by law, and to travel: Norse traders carried angelica south when little else grew this far north. In the novel’s period a farm’s angelica garth was medicine chest, larder, and inheritance in one.

• The turf house

  A nineteenth‑century Icelandic farmhouse was built mostly of the land itself: walls of cut sod laid in herringbone courses over a frame of precious driftwood, roofs grown green in summer. Timber was so scarce on the treeless island that rights to driftwood beaches were written into property deeds. Inside, life concentrated in the baðstofa, one long room where the household ate, worked wool, told sagas, and slept, often two to a bed, warmed less by fire than by bodies, and by the cattle stabled below the floor.

• Fire without forests

  There are almost no trees to burn. Households burned peat cut from the bogs and dried dung, and fires were banked, not extinguished: embers were kept alive overnight under ash, and a family whose fire died borrowed live coals from the next farm. Warmth was a thing carried across a valley in an iron pot. When the novel’s characters speak of a cold hearth, it is not a metaphor first; it is a household emergency.

• Söl, the harvest below the tideline

  Dulse, called söl, was gathered from the rocks at low water, dried in stacks, and eaten with butter or stewed in milk, a salt‑sweet staple in coastal districts where grain would not ripen. Seaweed fed people, and sheep in hard winters, and even the fire, since dried wrack burns. On a shore, almost nothing was allowed to be useless. A stranded whale was such fortune that the word for windfall in Icelandic is still hvalreki: a whale washed ashore.

• The King’s white falcons

  For centuries the Danish crown held a monopoly on Iceland’s gyrfalcons, the largest falcons in the world. Each year trapped birds were carried by ship to Copenhagen, tended below deck on padded perches and fed meat dipped in milk against the roll of the sea, then sent onward as royal gifts, the white ones prized above all. A single white falcon could be worth more than a farm. This trade, and these crossings, run beneath the novel I am writing.