“You took her poisoned wood!”

Elsa is choking on a laugh raucous enough to crack ribs.

Apparently, it was not a gesture of goodwill—the small log that I took from the sauna to the house on the hill—but a letter of war.

Curls of steam billow into the heavy blue sky above us; it’s midday, but the stars are already out. Someone let me sleep in, my soul screams; it is dying to see pale air, but I’ve missed it again. So, I must stay myself for another day of night.

Wisps of exchange students and tourists slipping in and out of the sheds catch my attention. Hot air escapes through an open door, before their shrivelled feet scarper down the hill, lunge through the snowy beach, and halt in the salted liquorice ocean.

Silent for one knife-curdling second, then come the screams.

Then laughter. Then racing, lurching, reaching, running, grappling back inside the fiery hut; footprints in the spotlights of the tour bus, evidence of their fairy flight.

Opposite is The Galleri, a tired barn painted Norwegian red with plastic sheets as windows, that thump in the breeze. I can hear my boyfriend, Callum, cutting wood for the saunas, and Erkki, the artist, chatting to him in Finnish as though he understands.

Bugøynes sits at the edge of northern Norway. In the draughty Galleri, with a flickering candle stuck into a reindeer horn, we talk about governance, culture, and Nazis. Our audience fidgets, their swimming costumes crusting icily under haphazard layers, yet still their arms shoot up for questions.

“Why did the Nazis come back this way, wasn’t Norway neutral?”

“So should Finnmark be part of Finland, then?”

“How did the Norwegians ban a language?”

There we were, two strangers to this community, teaching its history to thirty more strangers. One day, when Elsa was busy, she led us into the barn, instructing us to “tell them something,” before shutting the door behind her. Obeying the prompt for distraction, we created an impromptu pedestal and recited the collected stories we’d gathered from our time there. Our guests gathered in penguin formation, and these talks soon became part of the tour routine.

Erkki is an older man, over fifty, but guessing age when you travel is an impossible task, especially when you don’t speak a snowflake of one another’s language. He makes art out of avalanching oily colours and lives in one of the residencies which Elsa takes care of. On his days off, he casually skis down mountains with a shotgun tucked under his elbow for fun, returning with tales of close bear tracks. He and Elsa like to tease us with his tales, which nevertheless come with forewarnings, and our eyes become as round as the moon as we gaze upon wolf-toe outlines in the snow. He is younger than Elsa, yet they remember their time together in Kven.

Kven is a type of dialect unique to this area of Norway, which developed from Finnish migrants who came to Finnmark in the 18th and 19th centuries. We first heard it, between Elsa and Erkki, whose broad shoulders jiggled with knowing humour when taking her instruction. Kven is not the Finnish of today, as a Norwegian man from the area found out when he learned it for his girlfriend; surprising her and her family with his new language skill, who couldn’t stop laughing at him.

“You sound like an old man!” they proclaimed.

Although impressed he’d gone to such lengths, the dialect was antiquated, in the same way Victorian English is to us now.

So, around the fireplace, we share stories in an assortment of tongues: the two of us speaking English, with broken German, Norwegian, and French; Elsa speaking Kven and Norwegian with broken everything; and Erkki speaking Finnish, but understanding Kven.

Elsa is seventy-five, a number placed with pride upon her ‘Volunteers Wanted’ profile, which we verify before reaching out to her. One night we pass a large bungalow; she says, “This is where I will go when I am old, the people take care of me.” It is the local retirement home. Retiring is as far from Elsa’s plans as my own are, at twenty-three, much to the frustration of her children and neighbours. Her children would prefer her to act like a grandma, treating their little ones, rather than being this snow maiden of adventure. The women in the town complain that she brings too many strangers here, that she pollutes the air by burning toxic items. They depend upon their knitting-come-souvenir-come-café house to which Elsa brings much-needed traffic, but sometimes the busloads have time only for the saunas, or must leave early because of the weather. This is what is underneath a small town at the edge of the world: village politics; village caring.

Elsa takes us everywhere with her; we, visitors from England, are her shiny pride. One day, whilst tackling king crab claws in a pot, there’s a knock on the frosted door. It’s Elsa... but... shorter, with a different smile? “She is my identic, but you should tell us apart.” It’s her twin, yet we can tell them apart. Their difference is spun in their facial expressions, creases mapping beliefs on how one should live.

It’s Yuletide, and from this dinner we are invited to a jul-buffet, a jul-party, then to jul-babysitting—rolled through the community like a second-hand rug, warming their floors for just an evening.

Norwegian food is known to be plain with little spice, but once you have tasted their fairy-tale porridges made in a thousand delectable ways, you'll find yourself craving that bottom-of-the-bowl feeling. Risgrøt, fire, and people, in a frozen tundra, become symbols of joy and comfort, or koselig, a feeling of cosiness through a sense of belonging.

Over dinner we listen to differing opinions: of Norway, the UK, Scottish independence, and of Elsa... “Elsa is unique, she can’t help it.” “Her husband built the saunas, and when he passed away, what was she supposed to do? Just stop using them?” “The water here is magic! It can cure your arthritis and broken heart—people should cherish it!”

Every year the sea grows another inch taller, sighs Elsa, and her town, she believes, may shrink beneath it. The fishing industry on which they thrive is tough work, yet the king crabs, their biggest money-maker, are not even indigenous, having originally come from the waters around Russia—or so rumour has it—and therefore ‘unnatural.’

The main theme of these community murmurs is global warming and rising ocean levels; it laps nonchalantly at the edges of conversation, deceiving the guests who frolic in the sauna’s ripples.

Should they be more careful, however, in how they treat their land, and should Elsa?

Can this tiny community control the ocean—or is it the guests who will help most?

As we return from a jul gathering, Elsa is laughing and waving a white shirt out of the window, an ancient greeting to the Northern Lights. “You know who Elsa is? The Witch of Ice—I will show them a witch!” Her head rocks back, emitting a familiar throaty cackle into the air. This Snow Queen doesn’t have time for idle gossip.

She hands us the key to the house sauna—it’s now our moment to be cured by the waters.

Below the green streams and glowing red horizon, we dash toward stiff waves. The Aurora Borealis has become a nightly friend, as commonplace as a robin redbreast in an English winter garden.

Nature, no matter where you are, spoils you like an old relative.

In the water, my pores are like magnets for a billion hammering pins. This must be what a lightning strike feels like. My teeth are involuntarily melodic, as if a desperate part of my brain is thrumming out Morse code. My arms attempt a swimming motion, but my legs, scolding from the cold, prepare to run long before my head decides to do so.

We are now like the students we have watched, breathless and eager to return to our burrow of sweat, the static harmonies of the Northern Lights silkily rolling us back there. I have no notion of my senses. I know simply the wooden building is getting closer, the icy ocean further behind. The Arctic Ocean: aptly named, aptly felt. My body is rebooting; I feel like Frankenstein’s monster jolted into existence, or Ophelia in her bed of reeds on the edge of life.

Are we cured or are we crazy?

Inside, the steam smells of green and yellow, of bubbling citrus sweets and the wide, wide forest. My pasty skin has tinged teal under its speckled Celtic patterns, and in the sapped fog of our spruce hut, Callum’s fierce blue eyes blink; they are the colour of the ocean in summer, electric from sun bolts. I close mine, unable to imagine the sunshine in this place of lunar beams. This glowing place of never-ending evening parties. With our jaws bowed in stutters of amusement, and my spine unable to take the pressure of a complete laugh, we manage to gasp, “Well, if nothing else, that… has given us… iron… lungs.”