“One hour in land will let you forget a week in the storm,” my mother once said. “But only if the land is vast and covered in grass.”

I sat by the fire, listening with awe, while she talked of the places she’d seen.

“If the land is hilly and bare, you should not trust it. You should not feel safe. It’s better to face the storm than to feel the land under you sailing away.”

Lyngbakur,

The largest of all the illhveli, the lyngbakur, was one of the largest legendary creatures of the Arctic and Northern Seas. In Icelandic folklore only the Hafgua, mother of all sea monsters, it’s said to be bigger than the Lyngbakur.

In the 18th Century, Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík, an Icelandic schol...

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