My roommate in Reykjavik refuses to name her cat anything permanent, calling him a different name every single week depending on his mood, a habit she inherited, she claims, from an actual old Icelandic custom around naming. "This week he's Þór," she announced, watching him knock a glass off the counter with total indifference. "Very dramatic energy. Very thunder-god behavior." "You named him Buttercup on Monday." "Monday he was soft," she said, like this settled it. "He's not soft today." I thought she was just being whimsical until she explained that some older Icelandic tradition holds names as something that can shape a person's fate, meaning you don't rush a name, you watch and wait until it fits….. which apparently, in her personal interpretation, extends indefinitely to cats. "He's had, what, thirty names?" I asked. "Doesn't he get confused?" "He's a cat," she said. "He doesn't answer to names anyway. This is really for me, not him." Three months in, she finally landed on one that stuck for good — Muninn, after Odin's raven, the one that flies out into the world and reports back everything it's seen. "Why'd this one stay?" I asked, noting the sudden permanence after months of chaos. She watched him for a long moment, curled against the window, uncharacteristically still. "Because he finally stopped changing enough for me to catch up," she said. "Took him longer than most. Took me longer too, if I'm honest."