Once, a farmer wanted to capture it. They tied a bunch of keys to the tail of a swimming sow, and when the sow swam towards the island, they followed her by boat. This was in the night and fog. The sow waddled ashore, and with that the island was pinned in place.

The iron, Abbe explained. If you brought iron or steel to a floating island you could pin it to the ground, any kind of iron, even a few keys, if you threw them and hit your mark.

It was something, I could hear it. The way he spoke.

A lasso around a travelling land.

Many of the small islands that could be seen from the coasts, from the ferry, had once come floating here, people thought, long after the first villages were settled. The same thing had happened to most of them as with Svínoy. Now it could neither float nor dive.

Now it was just a part of the earth, I thought.

Abbe continued. For ages there was a giant who moved the small islands around, slotting them together into one big one. He had his eye on one of the smaller populated islands, but when folk on the island said it belonged to a 158little calf, the giant got all hoity-toity. Deciding it was too lowly, he let the island be.

I was picturing some sort of calf. A calf with a royal crown.

Abbe probably sensed that I hadn’t quite followed.

Driving down the road on the other side of the fjord was a red car. It crawled along in the shadow of the mountain, shiny as a beetle.

Some islands simply floated past, he continued, ploughing ahead. They came out of the sea. Others had a route, they were like migrating birds, and always appeared in the same place. They brought riches with them, waterfalls of silver and herds of fat pigs; their heathered mountains glowed in the setting sun till even grown men cried. Some clinked like crystal and were covered in soft forests. Anything on which the eye might wish to gorge.

I tugged at the line.

‘Not so hard.’ Then he added, more gently, ‘And did you know Mykines is a floating island too?’

That woke me up. The island was so near us. Hidden behind the green curve of the fjord from where we stood, but visible from the village, the white house. A cartoon island. A King Kong island with a hat of clouds. So close I could have kicked a ball and watched it disappear into the sky, or so it seemed, and yet I’d never been there.

‘Mykines, you know, isn’t even mentioned in the Faroese Saga. Your omma would say there’s a reason for that.’ 159