2022Europa – Geschichten und Mythen - Serie

Floating Islands
In many island cultures there are ideas of floating islands. Islands that mysteriously float out of the surrounding sea, disappear again, run aground, or dock with the rest of the archipelago's islands, often by magic or something similar.
In this regard, the Faroe Islands are no exception. Most of the very small islands have some sort of floating island legend. In his work "FÆROÆ ET FÆROA RESERATA" From 1673, the parish priest Lucas Debes describes the phenomenon, attributing it either to icebergs floating past the islands or to the devil's delusion of the superstitious populace. A good century later, in 1781/82, the enlightener Jens Christian Svabo rejected Debes' theories and attributed the legendary islands to floating, rocky clouds on the horizon or the weather phenomenon " pollamjørki ", dense, billowing fog.
There is little doubt that Svabo was correct in his assumptions. Once you've seen the sea fog drifting over the small islands, it's hard to resist the impression that it's the islands that move across the sea and through the fog. But reality is known to be seldom as entertaining as a good fairy tale, so we'll stick to the imaginative explanations of natural delusion that the world of legends offers. To do this, let us look at two examples of islands that swam up with mountains and valleys or even pigs and giants in their wake.