Notes From Afield | The Horse with No Name
A field essay from Iceland, south of Hvolsvöllur
Notes From Afield | The Horse with No Name
Iceland, south of Hvolsvöllur
It was the draugalog, the haunted stillness that hung above the plain, that did it.
That wide, feral quiet that lives between the wind and the earth in Iceland. I had pulled off the road without knowing why — just a flick of the wrist and gravel under tyres.
The horse was already waiting.
Not a word passed between us, nor would it have mattered. He stood with his face to the wire, a crown of hair hiding one eye, the other watching me like he knew the part I’d forgotten. That I was kin. That I belonged to something older.
Behind him, the valley ran flat to the glacier shadows, and a second horse — smaller, a sister maybe — lingered like a memory out of reach. Something felt familiar to me. I stepped closer, careful not to break the moment.
No cars. A few dark birds. No sound but the hush of the wind on túngresi (grass/straw).
When I finally spoke, it wasn’t English or Icelandic or even sound. Just a breath.
The horse stayed. And I did, too.
Somewhere off to the east, a low song carried — too faint for lyrics, but enough to stir the old places. The ones beneath language. Earth is breathing here. And now it was speaking to me.
I had read that the Icelandic word for silence, þögn, doesn’t mean the absence of sound — it means the presence of stillness.
This was that.
He sniffed the air. A twitch of ear, a shift in hoof.
I could see the dark half-circle of his eye now beneath the pale sweep of bangs. He wasn’t white, not fully. There were streaks of dun and ash in his coat — the kind of colour you see in glacier ice, layered with time and memory.
I placed my hand near the fence. I didn’t reach for him.
He moved first.
The touch was warm. Felt like moss after rain, like a thing kept alive for centuries by slow, patient magic. His breath, when it came, was fog and furnace — a puff of earth’s fire disguised as animal soul.
And just like that, I remembered something.
Not a story, exactly.
More a shape. A presence.
From when I was young and good at imagining, or maybe from a place I had been in another life.
The story went like this…
The old woman who lived behind my childhood thoughts once told me that every land has its keeper — not a king or queen, but a watcher. And in The Land of Ice, she said, they walk on four legs and guard the seams between this world and the next.
I’d laughed then. But not now.
Because here he was. The watcher. No name, no bridle, no purpose that I could name.
And then, in the silence, a shift.
A sound behind me — not footsteps, not wind.
I turned slowly, as if the air itself had thickened.
Nothing. Just the empty road, the hired car, the long thread of wire fence stretching.
But when I looked back, he was gone.
Not walked away — gone. Like mist. Like myth.
Only the fence remained, the flattened grass where his hooves had stood, and that low song, still drifting across the plain… the breath from the breathing earth.
I drove on carrying the moment with me.
And occasionally, even now, when the world is too much, I play that song — the one with no words — and I remember him.
The horse with no name. The one who knew I was kin.
The End
Coda
Ég gleymi þér ekki. I do not forget you.
