The Floating and Wandering Island in Medieval and Renaissance Culture and Isolarii

CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3
FLOATING ISLANDS 4
INTRODUCTION 6
1. EXPLICITLY FLOATING ISLANDS 15
2. ISLANDS WITH NON-FIXED LOCATION 31
3. SPATIALLY DISLOCATED ISLANDS 43
CONCLUSION 51
APPENDIX 54
BIBLIOGRAPHY 65
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Detail of floating islands in Persian miniature, Throne of Gayumarth
1
2. Detail, as above
3. Popular floating island, Land of Green Ginger
4. Contemporary sci-fi floating island
5. Typical floating islands
6. ‘X’s on a map
7. Islands became increasingly detailed
8. Detailed island
9. Simple cusped outline of Caloiero
10. More detail of Caloiero
2
11. Peppering the sea with islands
12. Contemporary image of Chinese floating Island of the Immortals
13. Anonymous Chinese painting of Water and Moon Guanyin resting on a floating island
14. Another way to look at the world
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I warmly thank my supervisors Dr. David D’Avray and Dr. Sophie Page in the History
Department for their advice and continual friendly support, Dr. Thibaut Maus de Rolley in
the French Department, the staff at the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum for
their enthusiastic support, the staff at the British Library, Dr. Alessandro Scafi, Dr. Charles
Burnett and Dr. Tabitha Tuckett at the Warburg Institute and John Gillis for their advice
and encouragement.
3
FLOATING ISLANDS: THE FLOATING AND
WANDERING ISLAND IN MEDIEVAL AND
RENAISSANCE CULTURE AND ISOLARII
Kde bolo, tam bolo… Where there was, there there was…
Traditional Slovak fairytale beginning
იყო და არა იყო რა … There was and there was not…
Traditional Georgian fairytale beginning
4
1. Detail of floating islands in Persian miniature attributed to Sultan Muhammad, ‘Throne of Gayumarth’,
Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, c. 1520, Tabriz, Iran: MS Geneva, Aga Khan Trust for Culture, MS 200, f. 20 vo
5
2. Detail, as above
INTRODUCTION
Medieval and Renaissance times were the heyday of islands1. They rose in importance
during these times; they were part of the trajectory of travel as pilgrimage to travel as
conquering. The desert of the Desert Fathers became the European forest, which
eventually became the sea; exile on an island as white martyrdom. Irish monks thought
1John R. Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave,
2004, p. 85: ‘Islands played a far larger role in the period 1500-1800 than at any other time before or since’.
6
of the ocean as a kind of liquid desert2. The holy and the hellish moved offshore to
islands, which became repositories for marvels and wonders. With Renaissance
expansion into Asia, continuing from Medieval times, islands were imagined in the
fabulous East, also the location of Paradise and wonders - then as more of the world
was mapped, there was a shift from East to West, especially to the Atlantic, as the rise of
the Ottoman Empire made the East less accessible. Islands increased in popularity,
changing from hovering on the edge of maps to taking a central place in the isolarii
(island books), and demanding increasingly detailed mappings of their coastlines and
interior geographical features. Columbus (1450-1506) found a continent, but actually, he
was looking for islands. Islands formed part of the empires of access that European
powers claimed as they forged their paths across oceans. The renaissance of islands and
the cult of the isolarii coincided with the actual European Renaissance and islands, or at
least the idea of islands, spurred the Age of Discovery itself. There was a yearning for
islands, islands imagined as goals, likened to the feminine body3. But people’s
imagination stayed the same, and they took their myths with them wherever they went.
If something didn’t suit, they relentlessly pursued islands until they found something that
would fit. Myths are persistent; the Brendan island-legend took centuries to die out.
This exploration was ‘conditioned by the imagination’4, and insular imagination was
crucial to European expansion and acquisition of real geographical knowledge.
2 Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1988, p. 51
3 Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans.
Fausett, David. Cambridge: Polity, 1994, p. 82: ‘...fantasmic objects that were kept from the navigator (like the
feminine body) during wanderings that extended over whole years. It was in the quest for those ungraspable
drifting islands that was consummated the feminization of the archipelago’.
4 John L. Allen, ‘Lands of Myth, Waters of Wonder: The Place of the Imagination in the History of
Geographical Exploration’ in Martyn J. Bowden and David Lowenthal, eds., Geographies of the Mind: Essays in
Historical Geosophy in honour of John Kirtland Wright. New York: OUP, 1976, p. 43 and 58
7
The word ‘island’ as we understand it today – a landmass completely surrounded by water or
suspended in the air – did not come to mean this until Renaissance times. Although
Isidore’s Etymologies (c. 560-636) links islands (insula), ‘so called because they are in ‘salt water’
(in salo)’5, with the sea, the concept of island in the Middle Ages was broader than today.
Anglo-Saxon ey6 was applied to what we now think of as islands as well as castles, fortresses,
blocks of buildings, temples, copses, peninsulas, gardens, rocks in a pond, even people living
separately from others7. Thus Iland, ysland and insula were also used to describe any place that
was remote or mysterious, and it was not until the sixteenth century that water-locked
landmasses were called islands as distinct from continents. The idea of sacred spaces
themselves, ‘set apart’ from the everyday, as islands were, is the idea of isolation. The Indo-
European root of sacer, sci, skei knowledge/science is to cut, compartmentalize, separate8.
Indo-European akwa, water9, morphed into iland under Germanic influences, first appearing
in Old English in 888 AD10. The ‘s’ in ‘island’ derives from French isle, which itself derives
from Latin insula, and over time, these have coalesced into the single concept of island11, a
discrete landmass surrounded by water.
5 S.A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and O. Berghof, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006, p. 293
6 Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: A Contribution to the
History of Ideas. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965, p. 29: ‘Words for ‘island’ reflect its
relation to the water, as ‘floating’, ‘water-land’, ‘flowed-around’’, but also related to ‘meadow’.
7 Gillis, Islands of the Mind, p. 84
8 Stuart E. Mann, An Indo-European Comparative Dictionary. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1984-7, p. 1108:
sakros ‘revered, dedicated’, archaic ‘pure’, later ‘holy’; p. 1122: sek- radical element of ‘cut’; p. 1153: skeiio ‘divide,
split, distinguish, choose’; holy things are set apart or sectioned off from the profane.
9 Mann, An Indo-European Comparative Dictionary, p. 14: akua
10 Sophie Partarrieu, ‘Islands on the Mind: A Brief Etymology and History of Ideas’, in Imagining Islands: Artists
and Escape, catalogue from exhibition of the same name. London: Courtauld Gallery, 20 June – 21 July 2013, p.
5
11 Partarrieu, ‘Islands on the Mind’, p. 5
8
This discreteness of islands is thrown into particularly sharp focus when we think of floating
islands.
FLOATING ISLANDS TYPOLOGY
The main difference between a floating island and a mobile or flying one is ability of
independent movement. Simply ‘floating’ implies that they are moved by currents and
have no inherent faculty of movement of their own; however, the gases now known to
be generated by real floating islands suggest there can be an inherent ‘moving drive’ or
engine emitted from the islands themselves. The ‘movement’ could be fast or slow, but
the fact that these are dense clods of earth imply slower movement. By ‘floating islands’
I also mean moving, mobile, drifting, errant and wandering islands. The catch-all term
‘floating islands’ is the most common way to reference them, especially in scientific
literature. The latter three give the islands more personality, and vagabond islands (îles
vagabondes) definitely have one. Flying islands are the ultimate floating island and the
faculty of flight grants them a separate category. Floating islands buffeted around by
external forces such as the wind and waves are symbols of exile, of a person being tossed
around by Fate; mobile islands are symbols of liberty, self-imposed isolation and
nomadism; flying islands are symbols of ultimate freedom and power – Swift’s Laputa
was one of the first examples of aerial bombardment. Floating islands can wander the
seas or levitate in the air, and can float in both time and space; they can appear and
9
disappear intermittently or vanish altogether. Looming12, a phenomenon often reported
by sailors, is when an island suddenly appears at sea as if from nowhere, with no prior
warning. Medieval and Renaissance people were no strangers to the idea of floating
islands, since time and space for them were both fixed and fluid just as today. Floating
islands today are a popular trope in computer games such as Final Fantasy; the artist
Robert Smithson made a floating island in 1970 and they are also a French dessert.
12David B. Quinn, ‘Atlantic Islands’, in John de Courcy Ireland and David C. Sheehy, Atlantic Visions. Ireland:
Boole Press, 1989, p. 84: He cites the article by Brian Harrison in Cruising World ‘(‘Now you see it, now you
don’t. Mirages at sea perplex navigators’): “When the illusion of inferior mirage is experienced at sea, it is
usually within several miles of land. The mirage appears when a layer of low density (hot) air hanging over
warm water is covered by a layer of high density (cold) air and light rays are refracted upwards when striking
the boundaries between layers. The mirage... appears to be floating above the water”’.
10
3. Popular floating island. Noel Langley, The Land of Green Ginger, cover illustration by Barbara Brown.
UK: Penguin, 1975
Floating islands can take the form of floating masses of vegetation. Pumice rafts created
after volcanic activity allow plant and animal species to migrate and wander among the
waves, and astrobiologists have hypothetically linked this to the origin of life itself13.
13Martin D. Brasier, Richard Matthewman, Sean McMahon and David Wacey, ‘Pumice as a Remarkable
Substrate for the Origin of Life’, Astrobiology, 11 (2011), pp. 725-35
11
Natural floating islands are buoyant mats of plant roots, peaty soil, decaying vegetable
matter or aquatic vegetation and organic detritus whose process of decay releases
oxygen, allowing them to float14. They exist on six continents as well as the oceans, and
can support trees and even grazing cattle. Floating artificial islands, such as those
famously made by the Uros people of Lake Titicaca in Peru, can be made of bundled
reeds, providing an advantage against attacks by neighbouring tribes. The Aztec capital
Tenochtitlan also made use of floating island-gardens for agriculture.
A Native American creation story tells of a tree on a floating island high above the
world, which was covered in water. Different animals put soil on the turtle’s back,
forming the first floating island, indeed the first land, and the world came into being15.
Noah’s Ark could be considered a type of floating island, containing examples of the
worldwide gene pool at the time, perhaps like today’s seed banks, containing within itself
hopes of new beginnings and the memory of the disaster of the Flood. Monasteries
were imagined as islands of faith; similarly, the metaphorical ship of the Church, the
institution of Christianity, was imagined as a floating island. Portable thrones16, on
which the King represents the State, may equally be imagined as floating islands. The
Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks of Jason and the Argonauts and the Planctae, the
Wandering Rocks of Greek mythology, are not fixed to the seabed and are therefore
mobile. Since Atlantis is widely imagined as a continent, it is not included among the
lost or disappearing islands here. A flying carpet is a kind of floating island. So is an
14 Chet Van Duzer, Floating Islands: A Global Bibliography, with an Edition and Translation of G. C. Munz’s Exercitatio
academica de insulis natantibus (1711). California: Cantor Press, 2004, p. v
15 J. Edward Chamberlain, Island: How Islands Transform The World. London: Elliott and Thompson, 2013, p. 20
16 Lucie Polak, ‘Charlemagne and the Marvels of Constantinople’ in Clare Isoz, Peter Noble and Lucie Polak,
eds., The Medieval Alexander Epic: Essays in Honour of David J. A. Ross. New York, London and Liechtenstein:
Kraus International Publications, 1982, p. 160
12
iceberg, or Rabelais’ (c. 1483-1553) frozen words hanging in mid-air. In the Central
Asian legend of Kor-Kut, the eponymous hero tries to escape Death by running away
from him to the four corners of the earth, but when Death finds him everywhere, Kor-
Kut fashions his own floating island-carpet in the middle of the Syr-Darya and ‘decided
that he would live [forever] on the floating carpet expecting that not even Death could
find him on this wonderful island’17. On it he built a yurt and lived there happily with
his wife, and it was only when she sneaked across to the banks to get a basket of fresh
fruit that Death, in the form of a snake, hid in the basket and bit Kor-Kut, ending his
life. This reveals the floating island to be a kind of ‘other’ place, protecting them, and
only outside interests are pernicious. In Canto VI of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1474-
1533; published 1516-1532), Ruggiero is carried to Alcina’s island by a hippogriff, then
ties the animal to a myrtle to make a carpet – then Astolfo tells of how Alcina has power
over the sea creatures and how he was carried to Morgana’s island by a whale, itself
reminiscent of the Brendan legend18. In this sense a raft, a boat or a ship is also a
temporary island, whether drifting at sea or flying in the sky towards the moon and, on a
gigantic scale, the moon itself, or even whole planets can be envisaged as floating islands
in space. For the purposes of this essay we will set apart the moon and other planets
from islands.
Why did islands float and then start to fly? Floating islands in particular were important
in the trajectory from early science fiction which was projected onto flying islands and
eventually into outer space. After being shifted into the furthest reaches of the earth,
17 Denis and Vladimir Karassyev, Mysterious Asia: Forgotten Legends of the Great Silk Road. Tashkent: Voris-
Nashriyot, 2007, p. 91
18 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman. Oxford: OUP, 2008, pp. 50-59
13
and once the whole world was mapped, and when the world became too ‘small’ or too
‘known,’ islands started to fly. Now islands were no longer mythical, unreachable places
on the cusp of culture. As islands became more tangible (visited, explored, mapped)
perhaps the thirst for exotic places required islands to be projected into space. In parallel
to this, early science fiction first dreamt of the moon, then other planets, solar systems
and galaxies, eventually wandering further into deepest space.
14
4. Quick glimpse of a contemporary sci-fi floating island suspended in the air complete with buildings and
spires
1. EXPLICITLY FLOATING ISLANDS
Both ancients and moderns had floating islands. They featured in mythology and legend,
scientific and geographical treatises, satire and literature. The Greek Hyperie meant the land
or island “beyond” or “above”.19
FLOATING ISLANDS AS WONDERS AND MARVELS THAT RESOLVE
PARADOXES
Floating islands are paradoxical. Floating islands are animate, sometimes travelling great
distances, but are not themselves alive. Wonder was linked to geography; what was
wondrous in Western Europe was normal in the land of the Pygmies, and vice versa20. If the
world is turned upside-down and the natural order is reversed, or something significant
enough to reverse the natural order occurs, then islands might also float. This was a marvel
astounding enough to be recorded.
Natural explanations
These floating islands were wonders or marvels that resolved paradoxes with natural
explanations in early historical and geographical treatises. Pomponius Mela (died c. AD 45)
19 Diskin Clay and Andrea Purvis, Four Island Utopias: being Plato’s Atlantis, Euhemeros of Messene’s Panchaia,
Iamboulos’ Island of the Sun, Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. USA: Focus, 1999, p. 28
20 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. New York: Zone Books,
1998, p. 122
15
speaks of the floating island of Chemmis, ‘which supports sacred groves, a wood, and a large
temple of Apollo; and it is driven in whatever direction the wind pushes it’21. Seneca (c. 4
BC - AD 65) saw a floating island in Lake Cutilia, ‘moved by any light puff’22, confirmed
later by Macrobius (c. fifth century)23. Pliny (AD 23-79) saw floating islands in Lake
Vadimon, which were:
‘green with reeds and sedge… and all have their edges worn away by friction, as they
are constantly knocking against each other and the shore. They all have the same
height and buoyancy, each shallow base dipping into the water like the keel of a boat:
and this has the same appearance from all sides, both the part above and the part
under water. Sometimes the islands join together to look like a continuous piece of
land, sometimes they are driven apart by conflicting winds, while in calm weather
they are left to float about separately… Cattle are often known to walk on to the
islands while grazing, taking them for the edge of the lake, and only realize that they
are on moving ground when carried off from the shore as if forcibly put on board
ship, and are terrified to find themselves surrounded by water; then, when they land
where the wind has carried them, they are no more conscious of having ended their
voyage than they were of embarking on it’24.
21 Pomponius Mela, Book 1, § 55, in F.E. Romer, Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World. USA: University of
Michigan Press, 1998, p. 50
22 Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones, 10 vols., trans. Thomas H. Corcoran. London: William Heinemann, 1971, vol.
1, Book 3, § 25, 8-11, p. 263

23 Macrobius, Saturnalia, trans. Percival Vaughan Davies. New York and London: Columbia University Press,
1969, Book 1, § 7, 28-30, p. 60: ‘After many wanderings they came to Latium, where in the lake of Cutilia they
found a floating island… The discovery of this marvel showed the Pelasgians that here was the home foretold
for them.’
24 Pliny, Epistle 8.20 to Clusinius Gallus in Pliny, Letters and Panegyrics, 2 vols., trans. Betty Radice. London:
William Heinemann, 1969, Book 8, § 20, 1-6, pp 60-61
16
5. Typical floating islands. Chet Van Duzer, Floating Islands: A Global Bibliography, with an Edition and Translation of
G. C. Munz’s Exercitatio academica de insulis natantibus (1711). California: Cantor Press, 2004, p. 46
Something floating or switching places could also be considered a marvel - Gervase of
Tilbury’s Otia imperialia (c. 1150-1228; written c. 1210) is a catalogue of a hundred and
twenty-nine marvels, ‘ending with a spring near Narbonne that changed place whenever
something dirty was put into it’25.
The rise and fall of floating islands could be used to echo the cycle of the universe. Kircher
(1601-1680) found sixteen floating islands in the Lacus Albuneus, modern Lago della Regina,
25Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, p. 21, and p. 93: ‘According to Marco Polo, Kublai Khan’s
famous levitating cups were made by Bakshi or enchanters’.
17
near Tivoli, Italy. In his 1665 Mundus Subterraneus, after a discussion about the lightness of
water, (levitate aquarum) and a diagram of how things float in water after Archimedes26, he
continues with his treatise De Insulis in Lacubus & Stagnis, fluctuantibus: ‘Of floating islands in
lakes and pools’. He maintains that floating or swimming islands are portions of earth
composed of a mixture of light and viscous or sticky materials, including bituminous earth,
lumps of sulphur, twigs, wood, reeds, roots of plants, cement, clay and mud, and that it is
due to the lightness of these materials and a ‘wonderful natural energy’ which mixes
everything together and keeps the islands buoyant. The texture of lighter material floats with
the wind and they are moved to and fro by the wind and never fixed in one location. He
describes how some floating islands can even sustain sheep and oxen27. He ends by
affirming that many an ancient Roman floating island has now disappeared, and that in this
way, the nature of the orbit of perpetual generation and corruption is the rhythm of the
earth, and when they cease to exist, they will then rise up again in other parts, only with each
successive generation to pass away again.28
Supernatural explanations
Floating islands could resolve paradoxes with supernatural explanations. Delos was
famously the floating island where Leto gave birth to Artemis and Apollo, having been
forbidden by Zeus to give birth on either land or sea. Delos, being neither, conveniently
came to her rescue. Later it was fixed by Zeus to the seabed. Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC)
26 Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus. Amsterdam: Typis Joannis Jansfonij à Waesberge et Elizaei
Weyerstraet, 1665, pp. 276-277

27 Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, pp. 276-279
28 ibid., pp. 276-279
18
describes the same floating island of Chemmis in Egypt as a great marvel with a supernatural
explanation:
‘“The Egyptians tell the following story in connexion with this island, to explain the
way in which it first came to float, “In former times, when the isle was still fixed and
motionless, Leto … received Apollo as a sacred charge from Isis, and saved him by
hiding him in what is now called the floating island”’29.
Islands can appear intermittently. Nordic grave mounds were dug with ditches surrounding
them and there are ‘strikingly many Iron Age graves on uninhabitable islets’30. Such ditches
would periodically fill up with water and ‘turn the grave-mound into an island, making an
island realm of the dead’31. Seasonal grave islands were thought to be “exceptionally in-
between”, constantly shifting between states and therefore between worlds32. Some holy
islets periodically turn into islands, when the sea surrounding them is shallow enough to be
forded, or for their connecting spit or sub-water ridge to the mainland to be traversed. Such
“super-liminal” islands had special status and were thought to be especially holy, possibly
because ‘being surrounded by water they are islands, but being reachable on foot they belong
to the mainland; therefore they may have been seen as being situated on the very border
between worlds and therefore especially suitable as points of contact with the Otherworld’33.
There are islands such as the Saami sacrificial sites, which are periodically submerged, again
29
Herodotus, Persian Wars, trans. George Rawlinson, in The Greek Historians, Francis R. B. Godolphin, ed., 2
vols. New York: Random House, 1942, vol. 1, Book 2, § 156, p. 155
30 Eldar Heide, ‘Holy Islands and the Otherworld: Places Beyond Water’ in Gerhard Jaritz and Torstein
Jorgensen, eds., Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind. Hungary: CEU Medievalia, 2011, p. 60
31 Heide, ‘Holy Islands and the Otherworld’, p. 60
32 ibid., p. 75
33 ibid., p. 74
19
highlighting their liminality34. Sometimes water freezing over renders an island periodically
accessible35.
Floating islands as marvels could be ‘fixed’ by means of fire, as Gerald of Wales (c. 1146-
1223) maintains. This is not too far-removed from the modern scientific explanation of
volcanic activity in creating new islands. He describes a phantom island that appears out of
nowhere and tantalizes people for long enough that they send out young men in a rowing
boat to investigate it. However, when the men approach the island, it sinks away entirely
before them. The same ‘trick’ of the island is played out the next day. The following day
they threw on the island an ‘arrow of red-hot iron, and then disembarking they found the
land stable and habitable’36. Gerald of Wales triumphantly proclaims: ‘So there are many
proofs that fire is always most hostile to phantoms … For fire by its position and nature is
the most noble of the elements’37. Floating islands are remarkable enough natural marvels to
be mentioned more than once. Of the mountains of Eryri, he says:
‘On the highest parts of these mountains are two lakes worthy of admiration. The
one has a floating island in it, which is often driven from one side to the other by the
force of the winds; and the shepherds behold with astonishment their cattle, whilst
feeding, carried to the distant parts of the lake. A part of the bank naturally bound
together by the roots of willows and other shrubs may have been broken off, and
increased by the alluvion of the earth from the shore; and being continually agitated
34 ibid., p. 75
35 Juhan Kreem, ‘Seasonal Isolation in the Communication in Livonia’ in Jaritz and Jorgensen, Isolated Islands in
Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind, p. 125
36 Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John O’Meara. Ireland: Dolmen Press, 1982, p.
66
37 Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, p. 66
20
by the winds, which in so elevated a situation blow with great violence, it cannot
reunite itself firmly with the banks’38.
He mentions the Eryri floating islands again in his Description of Wales: ‘Upon them are two
lakes, one of which has a floating island’39.
Floating islands as saviours
Floating islands could be marvellous saviours - Pliny told of floating islands in Lydia called
the Calaminae (reed islands) ‘which are not only driven by the winds, but can be punted in any
direction at pleasure with poles, and so served to rescue a number of the citizens in the
Mithridatic War’40. Floating islands could be useful and life-preserving – as well as on the
river Guayaquil, Humboldt (1769-1859) saw floating island-gardens on Lakes Xochimilco
and Chalco, both natural and manmade (the one, he speculated, giving rise to the other).
These handy inventions ‘appear to go back to the end of the fourteenth century’, having
their origins ‘in the extraordinary situation of a people surrounded with enemies... A tribe of
men, too weak to defend themselves on the continent, would take advantage of these
portions of ground which accident put within their reach, and of which no enemy disputed
the property’41.
Floating islands as entertainment
38 Thomas Wright, ed., The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, containing The Topography of Ireland, and the
History of the Conquest of Ireland, translated by Thomas Forester; The Itinerary through Wales, and the Description of Wales,
translated by Sir Richard Colt Hoare. London: H. G. Bohn, 1863, p. 454
39 Wright, The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, p. 483
40 Pliny, Natural History, 10 vols., trans. H. Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1938, vol. 1, Book 2, § 96,
p. 341
41 R. H. Stoddard, The Life, Travels and Books of Alexander von Humboldt, with an introduction by R. Taylor. New
York: 1859, Book 2, p. 272
21
Floating islands as marvels could give pleasure or entertainment - Pliny described floating
islands in Nymphaeum, ‘called the Dancing Islands, because they move to the footbeats of
persons keeping time with the chanting of a choral song’42.
FLOATING ISLANDS RESOLVING NARRATIVE PROBLEMS
Floating islands could be launchpads from which narrative problems could be resolved, or
placed conveniently to illustrate certain issues. The island of Tyre is said to have been a
floating island, the natives of which had to invent navigation in order to overcome this
problem,43 thus turning a seeming disadvantage into an advantage for humanity. Aeolia, the
home of the winds and the realm of Aeolus, King of the Winds, was a floating island,
featuring in Homer’s Odyssey (c. seventh/eighth century BC). Aeolus (aiolos) means
‘“darting,” “quick moving,” “changeable,” like the wind.’44 Aeolia had a bronze wall
surrounding it, underscoring the irony of a heavy material on a floating island, and firmly
shutting away the outside world. Its only inhabitants are Aeolus’ family: ‘Sons are married to
daughters and the island is turned inward upon itself and upon a single endogamous family
sufficient unto itself’.45 Therefore it will eventually die out, like the pharaohs - a dying island.
Aristophanes’ Cloudcuckooland – Νεφελοκοκκυγία (c. 446-386 BC) – floated between
heaven and earth. Iambulos’ Island of the Sun (in Diodorus Siculus II 55-60; c. 60-30 BC) is a
journey where the heroes sail out to sea but in a way, into outer space as well – an early
science fiction journey across a body of ‘air’ as well, to a floating island (the Sun). The Sun
42 Pliny, Natural History, Book 2, § 96, p. 341

43 Pomponius Mela, Book 1 § 65, in Romer, Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World, p. 53: ‘In Phoenicia is Tyre
[Soûr], once an island, but now tied to the mainland, because siegeworks were thrown up by Alexander, who at
one time assailed it’.
44 Clay and Purvis, Four Island Utopias, p. 32
45 ibid., p. 32
22
was imagined as part of a solar system of seven planets, corresponding to the seven isles of
Iambulos’ archipelago.46 In Canto XXV of Folengo’s Baldus (1491-1544, written 1517), the
companions ‘float through the air to the house of Phantasia, which is held up by crickets’47.
The inconstancy of floating islands is exploited in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1552-
1599; published 1590-1596) where the scattered wandering islands - ‘stragling plots’48 - are an
allegory of the instability of a lawless society, since they ‘to and fro do ronne/In the wide
waters’49. These wandering islands show how ground shifts and landmarks are fluid, ‘subject
to the needs of the action’50 and reveal Spenser’s master plan of praising the stability of
empire, one queen calmly ruling over all.
Floating islands could be complex tropes; sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful; at
one time a prison, at another a beautiful allegory of the world. They feature in masques such
as Ben Jonson’s Masques of Blacknesse and Beautie (c. 1572-1637; performed 1605 and 1608
respectively). Several Ethiopian nymphs want to become fair, so they seek out the island of
Britannia, having been inspired by an oracle seen in a glowing face in the lake (another kind
of floating island).51 On their way to Britain they hear that their sisters have been
imprisoned by Night on a floating island, and only upon seeing the newly-beautiful faces of
their sisters will they be free. Eventually the Moon breaks the spells of the Night, and all the
sisters arrive on the floating island, which has now become the Land of Beauty.52 The
46 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, Book 2, § 5, 55-60 in Edwin Murphy, The Antiquities of Asia: A
Translation with Notes of Book II of the Library of History of Diodorus Siculus. New Brunswick and Oxford:
Transaction, 1989, pp. 71-77
47 Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing. Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998, p. 47
48 Peter Conrad, Islands: A trip through time and space. London: Thames & Hudson, 2009, p. 85
49 Conrad, Islands, p. 85
50 Tamsin Badcoe, ‘ “The compasse of that Islands space”: Insular fictions in the writing of Edmund Spenser’,
Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies, 25 (2011), p. 415
51 Stephen Orgel, ed., The Renaissance Imagination: essays and lectures by D. J. Gordon. Berkeley and LA: University
of California Press, 1975, p. 137

52 Orgel, The Renaissance Imagination, p. 141
23
floating island is ‘an image of the turning world, presided over by Harmony, with Beauty set
in the wheeling heaven which is its cause, and attended by Love moving like the planets’53.
Floating islands could also be metaphors for our fragile planet suspended in space. De
Camões’ Lusiads (c. 1524-1580; printed 1572) contain a mise-en-abîme: Venus fixes the floating
Isle of Love to the sea floor54, where the sea goddess Thetis shows Vasco da Gama a floating
globe in which are contained a series of brilliant concentric orbs, and de Gama is himself
transfixed by the sight of these floating globes:
‘They find themselves, where doth enamelled shine/A plain with jewels, such that to
the sight/It seems they tread upon some ground divine./Here hangs a globe in air,
through which the light/Doth penetrate so brilliantly and fine,/That e’en its very
centre doth appear/As plain as is its superficies clear/They cannot trace the
substance with their eyes,/But that it is compose, ‘tis plain to trace,/Of various orbs,
which wand of an All-wise/Composed, and did a common centre place;/Revolving,
now it falls and now doth rise’55.
Floating islands used in satire
Floating islands are used extensively in satire to illustrate or ridicule. Their qualities of
movement, appearing/disappearing or flying are exploited to the full in this genre.
Lucian’s True History (c. AD 125 – post AD 180) tells tall tales of a floating island made
53 ibid.,
p. 154
54 Luiz
de Camões, Os Lusiadas, 2 vols., trans. J. J. Aubertin. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1884, vol. 2,
Canto 9, 52 – 53, p. 173
55 Camões, Os Lusiadas, vol. 2, Canto 10, 77 – 78, p. 233
24
of cheese56, an island of cork, a material renowned for floating57, a floating island which
is actually a giant bird’s nest58 and a floating forest59. He extends the floating theme to
clothe his inhabitants in light and diaphanous materials, and incorporates other such airy
silken materials as spiderwebs on the Moon.60 Other materials – the ‘smoke and mirrors’
which heighten the feel of lightness and floatingness – such as glass, liquid air and dew,
are mentioned throughout.61 He also specially mentions floating islands: ‘Three days
later the sea became clearly visible, but there was still no sign of land, except for a few
islands in the air, which were much too hot and bright for us to approach.’62 His next
explicitly floating island story is the battle of the floating islands, conducted by fiery
giants ‘three hundred feet high sailing about on islands, just as we do on ships.’63 This
pointless war is played out on mobile islands to show how the principles – and territories
- we fight and die for can be as flimsy and changeable as these moving bits of land. The
heroes’ next island is a strange one. As we know, the moon is made of cheese, and so is
this island: ‘Shortly afterwards we entered a sea of milk, in which we sighted a white
island with large numbers of vines growing on it. This island turned out to be an
enormous hunk of cheese, of rather tough consistency (as we soon found out when we
started eating it) and measuring nearly three miles in circumference.’64 The island is
deceptive, and tempting - once you’ve eaten the whole island, which is delicious, you
drown. Yet you are forced to consume it, because you have no other food. The island
56 Lucian of Samosata, True History, and Lucius or the Ass trans. Paul Turner. London: John Calder, 1958, p. 35
57 Lucian, True History, pp. 35-36
58 ibid., pp. 54-55
59 ibid., p. 55
60 ibid., p. 11
61 ibid., p. 17
62 ibid., p. 22
63 ibid., p. 29
64 ibid., p. 35
25
wants to vanish and it wants to bring you down in the process. You are bound to it,
should you chance to be marooned there.
Floating islands used in satire could be used to ridicule contemporary search for islands. In
Richard Head’s picaresque satire The Floating Island (c. 1637-1686; written 1673) the island
only appears in summer, as the convenient location for a group of bankrupt tradesmen, the
‘Owe-Much Society’, to hide from their creditors. Head, a ‘bit of a rogue himself’65, has his
fugitives embark on a journey through London across the Thames and come to the Summer
Island, which:
‘... is never seen... in the winter… as some fishes retire into the Concaves of rocks,
upon the approach of cold weather, so this [island] absconds or hides itself within
some narrow gut of the Inland-Country, and crawls out again in fair and warm
weather.’ 66
Head also wrote a satire on the search for the island of Hy-Brasil, where the narrator insists
upon mounting an expedition to find it based on the fact that it was marked on ancient
maps, sailors’ stories, and, especially, a dream the narrator had67.
Floating islands in satire could be used to illustrate political views of the author.
Gulliver’s lodestone-powered flying island of Laputa is populated by the crackpot
65 Barbara Freitag, Hy Brasil: The Metamorphosis of an Island From Cartographic Error to Celtic Elysium. Amsterdam
and New York: Rodopi, 2013, p. 134

66 Richard Head, The Floating Island, or, A New Discovery Relating the Strange Adventure on a Late Voyage from
Lambethana to Villa of Franca, alias Ramallia, to the Eastward of Terra del Templo, by Three Ships, viz. the Pay-Nought, the
Excuse, the Least-in-Sight, under the Conduct of Captain Robert Owe-Much, Describing the Nature of the Inhabitants, their
Religion, Laws and Customs, Published by Franck Careless, One of the Discoverers. London: 1673, p. 17
67 Richard Head, The Western Wonder: or, O Brazeel, an Inchanted Island Discovered; with a Relation of Two Ship-Wracks
in a Dreadful Sea-Storm in that Discovery, To which is Added, a Description of a Place, Called, Montecapernia, Relating the
Nature of the People, their Qualities, Humours, Fashions, Religion, etc. London: 1674
26
mathematicians and astronomers in the Academy of Lagado, Swift’s satire (1667-1745;
written 1726-1735) of the Royal Society. Similarly to Lucian, he employs light and
diaphanous imagery such as silk and cobwebs, and describes other pointless experiments
such as extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, condensing air into a dry tangible
substance, or softening marble for use in pillows. Morelly’s Naufrage des Isles Flottantes, ou
Basiliade du célébre Pilpai (Shipwreck of the Floating Islands) (1717-1778; written 1753), a
pretend-translation of the Indian philosopher Pilpai, describes a happy, quasi-anarchistic
state ruled over by Zeinzemin, which, along with More’s Utopia (1478-1535; published
1516), was one of the earliest predecessors of communism. Zeinzemin finally returns to
the mainland and leaves the human vices on other islands waiting for their eventual
shipwreck, when they will perish for eternity.
FLOATING ISLANDS AS WARNINGS AND ILLUSIONS
Floating islands can be warnings – if you bind yourself to the Devil, he will drag you
down to Hell with him. They warn you to be on your guard against something
seemingly innocent that turns out to be evil. Brendan’s floating island-whale Jasconius is
one of the most famous episodes in his Navigatio (c. 484-577; earliest extant Voyage c.
AD 900). During their voyage, Brendan and his sailors are relieved to sight land,
alighting upon it to start a fire. However, as soon as they have settled down, it moves.
In some legends it sinks under the sea, taking the hapless sailors with it. Its predecessors
or contemporaries – as this story has been found in different guises across the world
throughout history – include the aspidoceleon from the Physiologus (c. second century AD),
27
a Brendan source68; the Zaratan69; Sinbad’s turtle-island70. In the Anglo-Saxon tenth-
century Exeter Book bestiary, the dangerous island-whale deceives men deliberately.71
Just when you think everything is okay, your world is turned upside-down. Brendan
revisits Jasconius several times to celebrate church feasts. The episode, then is ‘an
important structuring element within the story’72. It serves as a floating ‘Room of
Requirement’ – Jasconius is there when the story needs it. They, significantly, celebrate
Easter there – a time of resurrection and renewal.
In medieval times, castles were thought of as being islands, surrounded by moats of
water. Otherworldly castles can be thought of as floating islands, which ‘recall the
heavenly city, shining crystal with a hundred towers and gold buttresses… buildings of
precious stones, which illuminate the place like day’73. In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso,
Astolfo eventually destroys Atlas’s enchanted castle: ‘The palace dissolved into smoke
and mist’74.
FLOATING ISLANDS AS PARABLES
The little man on a leaf in episode 29 of Brendan’s Voyage is a miniature floating island. The
leaf is the size of a hand and the little man measures around an inch, and this story may have
68 Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint: Sources and Analogues of the Twelfth-century Voyage of Saint Brendan, trans. Thea
Summerfield. Portland: Four Courts Press, 2000, p. 52
69 Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 2005, p. 207
70 Simone Pinet, Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011, p. 42. Other sources include Buzruk ibn Shahryar’s Wonders of the Sea of India, 342H ( =
AD 953), which may also have had an influence on the Sinbad legend.
71 Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, p. 209
72 Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint, p. 51
73 Lea T. Olsan, ‘Enchantment in Medieval Literature’ in Sophie Page, ed., The Unorthodox Imagination in Late
Medieval Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, p. 177

74 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, Canto 22, p. 258
28
Sanskrit origins.75 He is trying to measure the volume of the sea before Doomsday, clearly
an impossible task. When Brendan points this out, the little man replies that yes, no more
could he measure the sea before Doomsday, than Brendan could see all God’s wonders on
this earth.
FLOATING ISLANDS AS SYMBOLS OF ABSOLUTE POWER
Rotating islands or rooms are unstable yet simultaneously project the dynastic stability and
strength of the ruler wealthy enough to commission such fabulous engineering. Turning isles
or Iles Tournoyante have featured in romances: ‘The Island of Gold is a fundamental space in
Renaut de Beaujeau’s Li beaux inconnu, curiously also called Turning Island’ (late twelfth-early
thirteenth century)76. This can be likened to the trope of the Whirling House, the wicker
“Domus Dedaly, /That Laboryntus cleped ys”77, reminiscent of the wicker cage supported
by griffons used in Alexander’s flight, symbolizing the world’s temporality: ‘Once inside the
whirling cage, the dreamer feels no sense of whirling. In the centre of the universe, the
turning is no longer perceptible. The cage, then, appears to be a representation of the
macrocosm78.’ We become the fixed and stable point, while the island revolves around us.
Something normally fixed, yet which now moves, takes us by surprise and disorients us, just
as the sailors were temporarily disorientated upon realization that they were on an unstable
island. Brendan’s Citadel of the Walscherands devotes a considerable part of the lengthy
description to the crystal wall around it: ‘…animal and human figures are depicted on it
which move as if they were alive... a river runs through the middle of the citadel which

76 Pinet, Archipelagoes, p. 28
77 J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968
78 Carrie Esther Hammil, The Celestial Journey and the Harmony of the Spheres. Texas: Texas Christian University
Press, 1980, p. 51
29
causes the animals to rotate’ - made to move by waterpower. Descriptions of walls with
moving figures of this kind can be found in classical and eastern accounts of rooms in which
a miniature universe had been built’79. The Sasanian kings (224-651 AD), with their
legendary rotating rooms in which the walls and even ceilings all revolved, and the Heraclius
legend, which recounts how the Byzantine emperor Heraclius defeated Chosroes II (590-628
AD), may have influenced Le Voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople (1060 –
1175), which in turn contains a rotating room. Charlemagne goes into King Hugo’s palace,
which is decorated with the heavens in the domes, birds and beasts on the walls and the fish
near the floor. The whole of creation is here, and the palace itself is an automata: ‘When the
wind rose from the sea… not only did the copper trumpeters blow their horns and turn to
look at each other smiling, but the palace itself began to rotate’ and ‘while Charlemagne and
his peers are in the hall, the wind rises, a gentle rotation begins and the trumpeters make
music. Then, as the storm becomes more violent, the rotation increases and the French fall
to the floor’80. Significantly, the rotating palace is ‘central to the structure and interpretation
of the poem’81. The device is used to show the overwhelming, and, to untrained eyes,
unearthly power of the owner of this mechanical marvel. Gulliver’s flying island of Laputa is
also one of the earliest examples of aerial bombardment, the island having absolute power
over the lands it flies beneath.

80 Polak, ‘Charlemagne and the Marvels of Constantinople’, p. 162
81 ibid., p. 163: ‘In the economy of the poem it is the turning point… in Charlemagne’s…sympathies. Up to
that point, Charlemagne was ready to acknowledge Hugo’s superiority. But when Hugo proceeds to impress
them with his might by frightening them with his marvels…no acknowledgment of his power ensues. They
have been made to lose face, and admiration is replaced by fear’.
30
2. ISLANDS WITH NON-FIXED LOCATION
ISOLARII
A map allows for island-hopping and many possible ways of tracing journeys through all the
ideas contained. The Hereford World Map (c. 1300) and Abraham and Jafuda Cresques’ 1375
Catalan Atlas are renowned for being encyclopedic and encompassing all knowledge, myth
and speculation included, in their approach to mapmaking, but by the late Middle Ages the
mappaemundi competed with a new genre that emerged – the books of islands, or isolarii, which
arose during the fifteenth century and were consistently popular until their eventual decline
in the seventeenth century. While portolan charts tracing coastlines grew more detailed, the
seas remained blank on the maps. The empty ocean provided mapmakers with a tantalizingly
blank slate, an exciting clean canvas on which to project their fantasies in all their staggering
variety and multiplicity of possibilities, and allowed their makers to give ‘free play to the
impulse to imagine worlds different from anything that had ever been known before’82.
Buondelmonti’s isolario Liber Insularum Archipelagi (1386 – c. 1430; written c. 1420) was the
first example of its genre. The isolarii were a blend of fact, fiction, fantasy, sailor’s stories and
eyewitness accounts, and the phenomenal rise in popularity of the isolarii during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries charts the rise in importance of islands themselves in the Renaissance
imagination, which, ‘in many ways… was a continuation of medieval geosophy’83. Pinet takes
the Amadis chivalric romance cycle (c. fourteenth century) and the Liber Insularum isolario as
starting points. The island is intrinsic to both these genres and she traces their developments

83 ibid., p. 43
31
into what they eventually became – the novel and the atlas, which eventually took over from
the isolario.84 She puts the number of isolarii at 20; Lestringant figures around 11; in Tolias’
in-depth study there are 3285; I may have found a couple more (see Bibliography).
84Pinet, Archipelagoes, 2011.

85George Tolias, ‘Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century’, in David Woodward, ed., The History of
Cartography, vol. 3, ‘Cartography in the European Renaissance’. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 263-284
32
6. Islands started off as simple ‘X’s on a map with typical vague ‘cusped’ outlines. Bartolomeo da li Sonetti,
Isolario, c. 1485: MS London, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, MS D 6073 SON
7. Islands became increasingly detailed as interiors were explored and mapped. Benedetto Bordone, Libro di
Benedetto Bordone nel qual si ragiona de tutte l’isole del mondo, Venice, N Zoppino, 1528: MS London, Caird Library,
National Maritime Museum, MS C 5215 BOR
33
8. Detailed island. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, attr., Isole famose, porti, fortezze, e terre marittime, c. 1565-1575:
MS London, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, MS C 5213 CAM
34
9. Simple cusped outline of Caloiero from Bartolomeo da li Sonetti’s isolario
35
10. More detail of Caloiero from Benedetto Bordone’s isolario
Can floating islands ever be mapped? If they are mapped while they are floating in one place,
and then drift off into another, the initial mapping becomes a historical gesture, and thus the
map becomes history, not geography; it cannot be geographically described in space because
it is not a fixed entity. These frozen histories of an island’s trajectory have been immortalized
in isolarii and chart the wildly differing supposed locations of these roving islands at any
given time.
Mobile map islands
The floating island was used as a receding carrot-on-a-stick for explorers hungry for
adventure and riches in ever more exotic locations. One example of this wandering is that
36
of the insulae fortunae, the Fortunate Isles, also known as the Canaries and even Paradise.
Paradise in medieval times was imagined to be in the East, along with Jerusalem. Originally
a walled garden86, it was a floating island too, changing its location according to necessity and
new discovery, when, during the later Middle Ages, ‘the Latin Europeans got used to
adapting their geographical views to new findings and insights, as well as needs, hopes, and
expectations’87. At the end of the fourteenth century, Paradise was actually found, in the
form of a superabundant island, or so they believed. Domenico Silvestri, whose own isolario
(1385-1406) was written to fill the gap left by Boccaccio’s De montibus, lacubus, fluminibus,
stagnis et paludibus et de nominibus maris (On mountains, lakes, rivers, ponds, and swamps and
on the names of the seas) (1313-1375)88 - which left out the islands – announced of the
Canaries: ‘Due to the fecundity of the land believed they were in Paradise (easdem esse
Paradisum putaverunt)’89.
His opinion was, ‘almost literally, a quotation from Isidore of Seville on these islands’90. The
fact that they couldn’t agree whether or not the Garden of Eden and the Fortunate Islands
were both (or neither) Paradise shows that Paradise really was wandering. Silvestri himself
places the Canaries simultaneously within the Fortunate Isles and beyond the Pillars of
Hercules, two different locations, in his own isolario91. Indeed, even on Venetian Fra Mauro’s
1448-9 World Map, the Canaries are located at the Fortunate Isles, and then again on the
86 Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, p. 491: παράδεισος, from Avestan
pairi-daeza, ‘hedged-in place’
87 Felicitas Schmieder, ‘Paradise Islands in the East and West – Tradition and Meaning in some Cartographical
Places on the Medieval Rim of the World’, in Jaritz and Jorgensen, Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and
Mind, p. 6
88 Schmieder, ‘Paradise Islands in the East and West’, p. 11
89 Carmela Pecoraro, ed., Domenico Silvestri, De insulis et earum proprietatibus. Palermo: Atti della Accademia di
scienze, lettere e arti 14.2, 1954, pp. 117-8

91 ibid., p. 11
37
same map close to Ireland92. Found, lost, then found, then lost again, in a tradition of
wandering that dates back to Pliny93 - perhaps elusiveness suits the very nature of Paradise
itself. The more infamous they became, the more of a prize they were for anyone who could
locate them.
The Fortunate Isles were even conflated with St Brendan’s Isles, or isle, which have their
own vagabond history. Variously known, as San Borondon, Brandain, Brandon, Brandano,
Blandon…94, the variations in the name alone testifying to the isle’s transformation, this isle
started in myth, then ‘“drifted” from the waters between Iceland and North America, to the
subtropical seas west of the Canaries and beyond’95. Old habits die hard: ‘it took the Isle of
Saint Brendan some thirteen centuries to disappear from the sea charts’96. Brendan’s Isle
even managed to migrate all the way to Newfoundland, yet finally came to rest ‘in the
marshes on the coasts of South America’97. Humboldt saw the myth as a stimulant for
westward exploration, postulating that the trajectory of the isle’s wanderings West and South
from the North Atlantic itself mimicked the ‘development of navigation and the direction of
commerce’ in these very same directions98.
St Brendan’s isle may even have been an explicitly floating island – thus doubly floating.
Mathewson links the Humboldt’s floating gardens of the New World with Pliny’s floating
‘vegetative islands with entangled roots that blew around the Atlantic like rafts’99, which blew
92 ibid., p. 13
93 Peter Barber, ‘Old Encounters New: The Aslake World Map’ in Monique Pelletier, ed., Géographie du Monde au
Moyen Age et à la Renaissance. Paris: Éditions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989, p. 85
94 Kent Mathewson, ‘St. Brendan’s Mythical Isle and Toponymic Drift: From Iceland to Ecuador’, in de Courcy
Ireland and Sheehy, Atlantic Visions, p. 53

95 Mathewson, ‘St. Brendan’s Mythical Isle and Toponymic Drift’, p. 51
96 ibid., p. 42
97 ibid., p. 55
98 ibid., p. 53
99 ibid., p. 56
38
about in the Sargasso Sea in the same coordinates as the purported Brendan Isle100. He
states further that: ‘At certain times of the year, especially at the end of the rainy season, the
main river courses of the Guayas Basin are clogged with floating “islands” or “rafts” of
vegetation, principally water hyacinth’101 and continues that in the late Middle Ages ‘it was
acceptable to speak of the “legendary floating island of San Borondon’102. Myth blends easily
into reality and fact into fiction.
Hy-Brasil, or O’Brazil, Brazil, Berzil, Berzill (unrelated to the modern-day country, whose
name comes from the eponymous red dyewood103) may have been ‘the result of an
adaptation of Saint Brendan’s “fire island” by speakers of a Roman language to their
expectations in the West, since fire or better blaze means, in Portuguese/Spanish, brasa
(Italian brace/bragia)’104. Hy-Brazil also means ‘Isle of the Blest’ in Gaelic, and it started its
travels in the sixth century off the Irish coast, from where it was cut-and-pasted further west
and north, off the coasts of Spain and Africa, going up to Newfoundland, but always coming
back home to roost off Ireland, ‘where it remained on some charts until the 1870s… There
still exists a Brazil Rock off Cape Sable, Nova Scotia’105, anchored there for all time by
‘mapmakers loath to give up their favourite movable island’106. So popular was the island
that the Englishman John Jay even ‘initiated an annual search for the elusive island of Hy-
Brasil in 1480’107. The stuff of Celtic legend, Hy-Brasil was also a floating island on two
accounts – not only did it float in space, wandering the map, it also floated in time, regularly
100 ibid., p. 56
101 ibid., p. 56
102 ibid., p. 56
103 Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages A. D. 500-1600. New York:
OUP, 1971, especially Chapter 4, ‘Flyaway Islands and False Voyages 1100-1492’, p. 103
106 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 104
107 ibid., p. 163
39
appearing and disappearing off the coast of Ireland, spawning numerous legends that date
back to Gerald of Wales.
Other errant islands include the Antilles, Antilia, or the Islands of the Seven Cities,
associated in Medieval legend with fabulous wealth deposited by seven exiled bishops from
Islamic Spain. Antilia ‘first appeared on a Venetian chart in 1424, and was sufficiently
believable to trigger several Portuguese and English expeditions’108 – including one mounted
by no less than Columbus. It moved from mid-ocean to the Caribbean archipelago we know
today. Even California was once believed to be an island, associated with the same Seven
Cities, inspiring Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) to look for the purported gold it contained. In
1555 an Isle of Demons was sighted in the Atlantic and travelled to numerous locations
before finally disappearing109; the Azores or Islands of the Sun similarly persisted and drifted
around maps; Buss Island did so from the sixteenth century up until the nineteenth110.
In the fourth century B.C., although other early geographers doubted its existence, Pytheas
(active c. 325 BC) had reported Thule as lying to the freezing North of Britain, variously
associated with the Shetland and Faeroe Isles, then Iceland, then Greenland... Thule became
for the Romans ‘a kind of outer limit, and so, as each new island was discovered, it moved
farther beyond the horizon of exploration’111, giving it its name of Ultima Thule. Bizarrely, it
was later transposed to the tropical Indian Ocean112.
HORROR VACUI

109 ibid., p. 55
110 ibid., p. 55
111 ibid., p. 53
112 ibid., p. 53
40
Before peppering their seas with errant islands, medieval mapmakers stuffed continental
interiors up to their borders with cities and monstrous races at the edges; it was a culture
used to ‘islands’ of grotesques in the margins, parallel, perpendicular, opposed or even
unrelated to the main continental body of text. So it was no wonder that eventually they
began to populate the oceans with little islands.
A cartographer may have peppered his oceans with islands lest his patron think he was not
getting value for money113. Additionally, if a mapmaker was compiling a map intended for
navigation (which they increasingly were), then ‘he could not risk a customer’s being
shipwrecked by leaving any possible obstacle uncharted’114. This helped to overcome horror
vacui, the horror of the void, and reassured any would-be adventurer that instead of sailing
out into the vast unknown, he would be greeted by a host of friendly little islands in which
to dock if necessary, familiar faces seen on maps before departure. The Ptolemaic globe that
was now familiar to cosmographers was still mostly vacant, ‘a kind of vacuum that gave new
life to speculation and a reinvigoration of cosmography but added little to empirical
geography’115. Gillis explains: ‘Vacuity invited intense islomania’116.
Cut-and-paste islands were first used to inspire adventurers to find riches, then to reassure
explorers to go, and then to come back with their precise coordinates for future generations
of mapmakers, who, if reports about the existence of a certain island proved negative,
‘would cheerfully move it to another spot’117. Pinet conjectures that ‘islands… are there for

114 ibid., p. 84
116 ibid., p. 48
117 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 83-84: ‘There is a lot of truth in Berry’s cartoon of a monk
working on a map in the scriptorium, saying to one of his brothers, “I think I’ll throw in a couple of extra
islands just for laughs!”’
41
at least two reasons: to entice the imagination into reveries of riches and exotic fantasies, and
to obliterate the blank spaces of the map’118, agreeing with Lestringant that ‘cosmography
had a horror of the void’119. In the geographical imagination, ‘blank spaces are intolerable…
and people are tempted to fill them with imaginative extrapolations’120. Mapmakers, artists
and patrons disliked empty spaces, preferring instead to conjure up islands on a whim, as
outlets for their own imaginations, knowing for certain that they were sure to be found
someday, if not today – anything was better than the cold, glaring silence of nothing at all.
They preferred the comfort of the known, or soon-to-be-known, rather than the horror of
the unknown.

119 Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, p. 113
120 Allen, ‘Lands of Myth, Waters of Wonder’, p. 57
42
11. Peppering the sea with islands. Thevet’s isolario, Frank Lestringant, Le Livre des îles: Atlas et récits
insulaires (XVe-XVIIIe siècles). Geneva: Droz, 2002, p. 75
3. SPATIALLY DISLOCATED ISLANDS
Floating islands may have occurred in dreams among medieval people, but under different
names – medieval ideas about islands were more inclusive than today (see Introduction). We
43
can see evidence of islands in medieval dreambooks. Fischer lists an inventory of the topoi
of the Somnia Danielis but ‘island’ is not listed. However, the word ‘island’ as we know it
today did not mean the same thing in medieval times so our own thinking needs to be
broader. Equally, an island could be the setting for a dream, yet not the main protagonist,
and thus not listed. Castle, Church, Cloud, Exile, Garden, Lake, Monastery, Moon, Palace, Paradise,
Prison, Sea, Ship, Swim, Travel, Water121 are mentioned, all of which have some connection to
islands.
The Otherworld was often imagined to lie beyond a body of water, on the ‘other side’, either
horizontally or vertically, and to be an island. Seeing an island’s mirror reflection in water
may have contributed to this idea122. Valhalla, like Avalon, Tir Na Nog, the Isle of the Dead
and the Chinese Island of the Immortals, was located on the other side of the water123. The
twelfth-century Gesta Danorum mentions that the floating island of Valhalla is reached by
crossing a rainbow bridge in the air124. The Island of Apples, lying just beyond our world, is
where fairy queens heal knights, and where a hero may disappear, as Arthur does to
Avalon125. For the Isles of the Blest, we return once more to Lucian. His Isles include glass
bathhouses, glass trees, perfumed clouds, shadows and cobwebs, and are ‘exclusively
inhabited by disembodied spirits’126 which, though insubstantial, give the impression of
complete materialness. At the party of the Blessed, guests are ‘waited on by the winds’.127
The heroes then set sail for the Island of Dreams, which is like a desert mirage:
121 Steven R. Fischer, The Complete Medieval Dreambook: A Multilingual, Alphabetical Somnia Danielis Collation. Bern
and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1982, p. 16
122 Heide, ‘Holy Islands and the Otherworld’, p. 57
123 ibid., p. 61
124 Hilda Ellis Davidson, ed., Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes 2, trans. Peter Fisher. Cambridge: Brewer,
1979, Book 1, pp. 67-9

125 Olsan, ‘Enchantment in Medieval Literature’, p. 173
126 Lucian, True History, p. 39
127 ibid., p. 40
44
‘We soon caught sight of it not far ahead of us, but its outlines remained blurred
and shadowy, as though it was still a long way off, and like a dream it kept
retreating as we approached, and doing its best to appear in the distance’128
although they do eventually manage to land at its Ivory Gates and wander
through the island among the personified Dreams themselves, some of whom
were ‘tall and handsome’ and others which were ‘cheap and shoddy’ (presumably
nightmares) and yet others which the heroes recognized as their Recurrent
dreams, whom they greeted like old friends.129
128 ibid., p. 50
129 ibid., p. 52
45
12. Contemporary image of Chinese floating Island of the Immortals
46
13. Anonymous Chinese painting of Water and Moon Guanyin resting on a floating island, late 13 th to
early 14th century
FLOATING ISLANDS AS OMENS
47
Floating islands could be viewed negatively as omens rather than as marvels. Perhaps this is
because floating islands were seen as against-nature, and needed to be ‘fixed’ or ‘corrected’,
to restore the natural order of things. One day the errant isles could be rendered motionless,
just as all islands, according to Revelations, would one day be reunited with the mainland, and
the world restored to perfection once more – with no more sea130 – no more unknown
depths. Since Augustine (354-430) thought of islands as symbolic of the fallen condition of
man, and that at the end of the earth all lost islands would be found131, roving islands needed
to be restored to the motherland and fixed forever to the same spot; they needed to be given
roots.
The Otherworld may also rise from the sea. These supernatural islands on the other side of
the water include phantom or disappearing islands, such as Hy-Brasil, Stuithin132, Inishbofin,
Buss and others, known by sailors as flyaway islands. Phantom island-legends have certain
themes in common: they are usually seen once every seven years; sometimes a person who
sees a phantom island is said to die before its next appearance133; sometimes whole cities
with spires and rooftops can be glimpsed; sometimes riddles must be solved, as in the case
of the floating island of Manister Ladra (Ladiri), Ireland, where its monarch can be questioned
as to the whereabouts of gold, but if the riddle is answered incorrectly, he vanishes in
mocking laughter134 and these floating islands can also be ‘fixed’ by fire.
FLOATING ISLANDS AS EXAMPLES OF EARTHLY POWER

131 ibid, p. 12
132 Thomas Johnson Westropp, ‘Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic: Their History and
Fable. A Contribution to the “Atlantis” Problem’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 30 (1912-1913), p. 251:
Also known as Kylestafeen/Kilstuithin island, Liscannor, Ireland
133 Westropp, ‘Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic’, p. 251
134 ibid., p. 251
48
Geographic imaginations were open to possibilities – things were presumed to exist until
proven otherwise; innocent until proved guilty, rather than guilty until proved innocent. The
argument that an island might or probably does exist is an optimistic and positive one, and
bestowed upon the recipient as a present from a ruler, gift-islands assert his earthly power
over things assumed to lie within his realm. The Yet-to-be-Found island is related to horror
vacui. These ‘gift-islands’, such as the Azores, bestowed upon those that find them,
foreshadow colonialism. João de Lisboa’s sixteenth-century Livro de Marinharia has a whole
chapter dedicated to as-yet undiscovered islands135. Between 1462 and 1490 the Portuguese
tried to find islands that they presumed to exist – there are 6 cartas de doacão (letters of
donation) within 13 years136 of ‘gift-islands’ pre-given to those who would eventually find
them (mostly they did not). Donation presumes that the King owns the yet-to-be-found
island already - a bit like trading in stocks and shares today, it was largely imaginary, or at
least unreal.
FLOATING ISLAND USED AS ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
Floating islands were used to illustrate ontological arguments: Anselm (c. 1033-1109) uses
the ‘Lost, or Perfect, Island’ to argue about existence as a predicate. We would have to
imagine it in a place, but since we cannot imagine it in this place (since it is lost), we cannot
imagine it anywhere, therefore it cannot exist. Gaunilon (eleventh century) objects to
Anselm’s idea of the Lost or Perfect Island – which is said to be superior to all other lands that
men inhabit – by claiming that it follows that this Island really exists somewhere. Therefore
Gaunilon ‘conceives of this island as being the best actual island, and not the best possible

136 ibid., p. 96
49
island’137. Gaunilon’s argument is that Anselm’s logic is flawed, because Anselm’s argument
could allow many things to exist where they definitely do not exist. But Anselm allows the
Perfect Island – an island of which there is no greater – to be a concept rather than an entity.
What is interesting is – why did he choose the image of an island (and not any other object)
for his argument? Because an island is a discrete entity, and easily moveable in the mind,
unlike a greater landmass. An island’s form readily lends itself to floating.
The Not-Found Island is related to the Lost or Perfect Island. In Amadis, there is an island
called the Ínsula No Fallada – the Not Found Island138. The irony is that this island presumes
a quest; it wants to be found, but since no-one knows how or where to search for it, can we
be sure it even exists? This island is used to provoke ontological questions. The question of
evil arises, as Augustine imagined evil as the phantasmagoric image of a non-existent
island139, something that violated the current space-time framework. Floating islands are
limbos of these unanswered questions, and convenient places on which to hang these
debates. In the fifth book of Amadís, Urganda leaves the Ínsula No Fallada to turn back time
and to freeze them on the Ínsula Firme, which is then ‘sent to the depths of the earth, only to
re-emerge when the appropriate time for them has come’140. Even the name of ‘Firm Island’
shows how actually, it is not firm at all, but also an illusion. Again, the island is used like a
Room of Requirement, a convenient storage space for when the narrative needs it.
Utopia could be a floating island, as it is nowhere to be found, yet exists briefly in the mind
when we imagine it. More’s Utopia ‘is No Place, No Thing’; a ‘Nowhere, a Never Never
137 Allan Bäck, ‘Anselm on Perfect Islands’, Franciscan Studies, 43 (1983), pp. 188-20; p. 191
139 ibid., p. 101
140 ibid, p. 107
50
Land – Nusquama’141. Eco’s Island of the Day Before142 straddles the international date line,
existing neither in the present nor the past.
Perhaps the ultimate floating island, the Unknown Island was a trope recurring in tales and
maps about the Atlantic, covering ‘more than twenty-five centuries in time, and three
thousand seven hundred kilometres’143 and symbolizes the journey or quest in order to fulfil
a goal, as well as giving rise to questions about ontology.
CONCLUSION
Floating islands are Rooms of Requirement (as in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series) – since
they are mobile, they are there when you need them. The floating islands of the isolarii were
shifted around wherever and whenever they needed to be, whether they were used to project
fantasies, pave the way for colonialism or simply to dispel horror vacui. They were used to
stimulate exploration, as moving targets or baits for adventurers eager to seek fame and
fortune. They were even used to reassure explorers that they were there, available, just in case
– sailors would not be setting off into a lonely expanse of nothing at all, but would be guided
by these familiar friendly islands, conveniently located at strategic points of the journey,
equivalents of the navigational stars. They were reminders of the flexibility of the
geographic imagination and the inconstancy of the map. Ephemeral islands reminded
Deleuze that the immense ocean is always ready to swallow the land, or that the potent earth
141 Clay and Purvis, Four Island Utopias, p. 10

142 Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before, trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage, 1998
143 Margaret Elphinstone, ‘The Unknown Island’ in Jaritz and Jorgensen, Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature,
Culture and Mind, p. 88
51
is always ready to ‘punch through to the surface’144 – a powerful binary opposition and
reminder of the ‘fluent continuum’145 of the cycle of life. They were used to provoke
questions about existence itself. Floating islands could be metaphors for human lives as they
are buffeted by the changing winds and fortunes of Fate – as images of the misery of man146;
metaphors of an unstable world147, our fragile floating planet in the vastness of space,
melancholy symbols of the futility of quests or reminders of illusion in troubled, uncertain
times – for ‘some islands are forever wavering’148.
‘We are all cheated by the floating pile’149.
144 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina, David Lapoujade, ed.
Paris: Semiotext(e), 2002, p. 9: ‘Some rise slowly; some disappear and then return, leaving us no time to annex
them. These two kinds of islands, continental and originary, reveal a profound opposition between ocean and
land. Continental islands serve as a reminder that the sea is on top of the earth, taking advantage of the slightest
sagging in the highest structures; oceanic islands, that the earth is still there, under the sea, gathering its strength
to punch through to the surface’.
145 Conrad, Islands, p. 119
146 Frank Lestringant, ‘L’Ile des Démons dans la Cosmographie de la Renaissance’, in Grégoire Holtz and
Thibaut Maus de Rolley, Voyager avec le Diable, Voyages Réels, Voyages Imaginaires et Discours démonologiques (XV e -
XVIIe siècles). Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008, p. 99: ‘L’île à la merci des flots, c’est l’image
de la miseria hominis’ - The island at the mercy of the waves is the image of the misery of man.
147 Lestringant, ‘L’Ile des Démons dans la Cosmographie de la Renaissance’, p. 99: ‘L’île sans racine ni
gouvernail est le parfait symbole du ‘monde instable’’ -The island without roots or rudder is the perfect symbol
of an ‘unstable world’.
148 Pliny, Natural History, Book 2, § 96, p. 341: ‘Certain islands are always afloat’.
149 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. William Stewart Rose. London: John Murray, 1823, Canto 6, 37, p.
193
52
14. Another way to look at the world. Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in
the Western Imagination. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001, p. 250
53
APPENDIX
I.
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF FLOATING ISLANDS MENTIONED
Nordic grave mounds (Iron Age)
Homer (c. seventh/eighth century BC), Aeolia, Odyssey
Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC), floating island in Lake Chemmis in Egypt, and Delos, Persian
Wars
Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BC), Cloudcuckooland, The Birds
Iambulos (in Diodorus Siculus II 55-60; c. 60-30 BC), Island of the Sun
Seneca (c. 4 BC - AD 65), floating island in Lake Cutilia, Naturales Quaestiones
54
Pomponius Mela (died c. AD 45), floating islands in Lake Chemmis, Egypt, Description of the
World
Pliny (AD 23-79), floating islands in Lydia, Nymphaeum and Lake Vadimon, Letters and
Panegyrics and Natural History
Physiologus (c. second century AD), aspidoceleon
Lucian (c. AD 125 – post AD 180), floating islands of cheese, cork, giant bird’s nest, floating
forest and floating islands in the air, True History
Sasanian dynasty (224-651 AD), rotating throne rooms in Heraclius legend (1060 – 1175), Le
Voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople
Macrobius (c. fifth century), floating island in Lake Cutilia, Saturnalia
St. Brendan (c. 484-577; earliest extant Voyage c. AD 900), Jasconius and little man on a leaf,
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
55
Anselm (c. 1033-1109), Lost or Perfect Island
Gerald of Wales (c. 1146-1223), phantom islands and floating islands in the mountains of
Eryri, History and Topography of Ireland and Description of Wales
Gervase of Tilbury (c. 1150-1228; written c. 1210), mobile spring, Otia imperialia
De Beaujeau (late twelfth-early thirteenth century), Turning Isle, Li beaux inconnu
Amadis cycle (fourteenth century), Not-Found Island
Isolarii (c. 1400-1700; peak in fifteenth century), Fortunate Islands, St Brendan’s Isles, Hy-Brasil,
Antilles, Azores, Buss Island, Thule
Early Portuguese explorers (1462 -1490), Yet-to-be-Found island (‘gift’ islands)
Ariosto (1474-1533; published 1516-1532), animal floating islands, Orlando Furioso
56
More (1478-1535; published 1516), Utopia
Rabelais (c. 1483-1553), frozen words hanging in mid-air, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Folengo (1491-1544, written 1517), House of Phantasia in the air, Baldus
De Camões (c. 1524-1580; printed 1572), floating islands and concentric orbs, Lusiads
Spenser (1552-1599; published 1590-1596), scattered wandering islands, Faerie Queene
Jonson (c. 1572-1637; performed 1605 and 1608 respectively), floating islands, Masques of
Blacknesse and Beautie
Kircher (1601-1680; written 1665), sixteen floating islands in Lacus Albuneus, Mundus
Subterraneus
57
Head (c. 1637-1686; written 1673 and 1674 respectively), satires The Floating Island and O
Brazeel
Swift (1667-1745; written 1726-1735), Laputa, Gulliver’s Travels
Morelly (1717-1778; written 1753), Naufrage des Isles Flottantes
Humboldt (1769-1859), floating island-gardens in Mexico and on the river Guayaquil
Eco (1932–), Island of the Day Before
II.
ATHANASIUS KIRCHER’S PASSAGE ON FLOATING ISLANDS
TRANSCRIPTION
Consectarium II. De Insulis in Lacubus & Stagnis, fluctuantibus.
58
‘INsulae natantes sunt in lacubus terrestres ex varia levioris & viscosae materiae miscella
aggestae portiones, quae à vento hinc inde agitatae, nullo loco firmae fixaeque sunt,
cujusmodi olim in Lacubus Stratoniensi, Tarquiniensi, Vadimonis se vidisse testatur Seneca, &
nos de iis in Hetruria nostra fusè egimus, quarum tamen hodierna die nulla superesse
comperitur. In Lacu Cutiliae Agri Reatini, tempore Aborigenum ingentem natasse Plinius
docet, priscis Italiae colonis oraculo cognitam; & in Lydia Nympharum Insulas Saltuares ad
ictus modulantium pedum motas Pomponius refert: Mira narrat Herodotus de Insula Lacus
Chemnis in AEgypto, quae lucos sylvasque, & Apollinis grande sustinens Templum natabat:
Hodiè compluribus locis tum in Europa, tum in caeteris Mundi partium Regionibus, Asia,
Africa, America reperiuntur. Sed iis omissis, eas prosequamur, quae nobis & vicina sunt, &
magis cognitae.
‘Tribus Tybure milliaribus Romam abeuntibus transeundus est fluvius Albuneus, sive Albula,
à colore lacteo sic dictus, qui originem suam ex lacu vicino habet, sedecim insulis
fluctuantibus quas Barchettas vocant, conspicuo, quarum naturam, proprietatem, formam,
modum, compositionem cum in nostro Latio, integro Syntagmate descripserimus, Lectorum
illuc remitto. Est & in Gallo-belgica Provincia juxta Andomarum lacus, ingentem Insulam
arboribus consitam, & pascuis uberem portans, in qua oves & boves pascuis intenti unà cum
insula, quocunque eos ventorum impetus impulerit, agitantur. In Gallia quoque Narbonensi
non longè à Ruscinone una cernitur, minuta gracilique arundine perviridis. Sed omissis hisce
ad propositum nobis argumentum revertamur. Duo meritò hoc loco nobis discutienda sunt:
Primum est, cur fluctuant; Secundum, quomodò pleraeque, quarum à Veteribus tam celebris
mentio facta fuerint, tandem desierint. Causa fluctuationis haud dubiè est ipsa levitas
materie, juxta ea, quae paulò ante diximus, de insidentibus in aqua; Si enim graviores esset
59
aquae mole, cujus locum occupant, utique mergerentur; sed non merguntur, quia uti saepe
curioso scrutinio examinavimus, quemadmodum eae ex terra bituminosa, sulphureis glebis,
festucis, lignis, juncis, radicibus plantarum mira naturae industria viscosi bituminis glutine,
unà limo & luto commistae cohaerent, quoque levioris materiae textura ad ventorum
arbitrium natant, & hinc inde fluctuant nullo in loco stabiles. Quomodo autem generentur,
& cum tempore corrumpantur, discutiendum restat: Res ita se habet: Cum ferè pleraeque
Insulae natantes in Lacubus bitumine, sulphure, nitro, & simili material foetis nascantur;
accidit, ut primo viscositate bituminis diversae matetiae unà cum arenis, aut luto,
sulphureisque atque nitrosis corpusculis, quae vi aquae iis imbutae concrescunt,
conglutinentur; hae verò successu temporis, sive alluvione lacus sive tempestatibus ac
ventorum vi agitatae, vel pluviarum imbriumque, praesertim in terreno non saxoso, sed
lutoso exesae tandem deciduntur, quod ubi factum fuit, mox etiam ex levitate materiae,
quibus constituuntur, fluctuant, & sic in Insulas natantes evadunt; Fieri quoque potest, ut
sive terraemotu, sive alio accidente, in fundo lacus tophacea portio descissa, levitate sua in
superficiem abiens, in natantem insulam abeat. Atque hisce modis Insulae generari possunt.
‘Evanescunt verò, sive natare cessant, vel frequenti multorum annorum allisione, tum inter
se, tum ad littus facta, qua cum tempore atteruntur dissolvunturque, & in complures partes
fractae, littorum fixae terrae unitae denuò coalescunt: Vel etiam hujusmodi insulae nimio
crescentium herbarum, stirpium, fructicumque onere pressae, nec non sulphureae
nitrosaeque materiae ibidem continuo concrescentis copia aggravate, gravitate Insulae,
gravitatem aquae, cujus locum occupant, superante, suapte tandem sponte, pondere mersa
suo fundum subsidat in imum. Atque haec est origo & corruption insularum natantium:
Unde mirum non est, olim multas hujusmodi insulas in lacubus suprà memoratis fuisse, quae
60
hodie non comparent, quae vel coaluerint cum terra fixa, vel pondere, auctae tandem
subsiderint: Multas quoque hodierna die reperiri Insulas natantes Romanis veteribus
incognitas, uti de Lacu Albuneo retulimus. Hoc pacto natura perpetuae generationis
corruptionisque vicissitudine ludit in Orbe Terrarum, ut quae hoc loco cessant, alibi
insurgant novae, suo quoque tempore interiturae. Atque haec de Insulis natantibus
sufficiant’150.
TRANSLATION
A translation of Athanasius Kircher’s passage on floating islands (a complete English
translation of Kircher’s Latin has not yet been published) – I am very grateful to Dr. David
D’Avray for providing this expert translation:
‘Floating islands are portions of earth, in lakes, put together from a wide range of light and
sticky material, which are driven hither and thither by the wind, and are not firmly fixed in
any place: such as formerly Seneca states that he saw in the lakes of Straton, Tarquin and
Vadimon; and we gave them a full treatment in our treatise on Etruria, though none of them
are found to have survived to our own times. Pliny tells us that a huge one floated in the lake
of Cutilia, at the time of its original inhabitants, and was known by word of mouth to the
early colonists of Italy; and Pomontius reports that in Lydia the Saltuares [Gamekeeper]
150 Kircher,
Athanasius, Mundus Subterraneus. Amsterdam: Typis Joannis Jansfonij à Waesberge et Elizaei
Weyerstraet, 1665, p. 279
61
island of nymphs were moved to the rhythmical beating of feet; Herodotus tells amazing
stories about the island of lake Chemnis in Egypt, which floated supporting groves and
wood and a great temple of Apollo. Today they are found in many places both in Europe,
and in the other regions of the world, Asia, Africa and America. But, leaving those aside, we
will deal with those that are both nearer and better known to us.
‘For those going to Rome via the Tiber it is necessary to cross a river called Albuneus, or
Albula, called thus from its milky colour; the source of this is a neighbouring lake which is
remarkable from the sixteen floating islands which they call ‘little boats’; since I have
described, in my synthesis on Latium, the nature, character, form, manner and compositon
of these, I refer the reader to that. There is also, in the Gallo-Belgian province, by
Andomarum, a lake supporting a huge island with trees on it and rich in pastures, in which
sheep and cows, intent on grazing, are driven together with the island wherever the wind
takes them. One can be seen also in Gallia Narbon not far from Ruscino, very green, with
extremely fine sand. Leaving these aside however let us return to the main theme. We need
to investigate two things here: firstly, why they float, and secondly, how it is that very many,
which were made so famous by the writers of the past, in the end ceased to exist.
‘The reason why they float is without doubt the very fact of the lightness of the material –
see what I wrote above – of the objects floating in water: for if they were heavier than the
mass of water which they displace, they would indeed sink; but they don’t sink, since, as we
have often investigated by close examination as they are constituted by a wonderful natural
process from a sticky pitch from pitchy earth, sulphurous clods, stalks, pieces of wood,
rushes, roots of plants, mixed together with soil and mud, so too they also with the texture
62
of a lighter material swim at the will of the winds, and float hither and thither, not fixed in
any place.
‘It remains to look into how they are produced and corrupted with time. It is like this: since
almost all islands floating spring up in lakes full of pitch, sulphur, potash [nitro]; it happens,
that from the first stickiness of the pitch various materials get stuck together, with sands or
much, and sulphurous or tiny nitrous bodies, which, eaten away by the force of the water
which soaks them, become compact mass; but these, as time passes, disturbed either through
the flooding of the lake or of storms and the force of winds, or of rains and showers,
especially in terrain which is not rocky, but earthy, in the end break off. When this happens,
they soon also float, from the lightness of the material from which they are constituted, and
so they turn into floating islands. It can also happen that if, in an earthquake, or some other
disaster, a gritty section as the bottom of the lake is split off, and, rising because of its
lightness to the surface, turns into a floating island. And in these ways islands can be
generated.
‘They disappear, or cease to float however, either through the friction repeated over many
years either between each other or against the shore, through which, with time, being worn
away and dissolved, and broken up into many parts, they are united to the terra firma of the
shores, and become united [to it] again. Or also, these islands, weighed down by the
excessive weight of the vegetation, plants, and shrubs, and also made heavier by the mass of
sulphurous and nitrous material continually increasing there, as the weight of the island
becomes greater than the weight of the water that it has displaced, finally of its own accord
under its own weight sinks and goes down to the very bottom. And this is the origin of
63
floating islands and the way in which they cease to be. So it is no wonder, that there were
many islands, which are not visible now, in the lakes mentioned above, islands which either
rejoined the shore or, increasing in weight, finally sank; and no wonder that today too many
floating islands are found which were unknown to the ancient Romans, as we have
recounted of Lake Albuneus. In this way nature plays in the universe with the alternation of
perpetual generation and corruption, so that when things which cease to be in one place,
new ones rise up elsewhere, to come to an end in their turn. And that is enough about
floating islands’.
***
64
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I.
WORKS CITED
PRIMARY SOURCES
Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman. Oxford: OUP, 2008
–, Orlando Furioso, trans. William Stewart Rose (verse). London: John Murray, 1823
Barney, S.A., Lewis, W.J., Beach, J.A. and Berghof, O., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006
Bennett, J. A. W., Chaucer’s Book of Fame. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968
Bordone, Benedetto, Libro di Benedetto Bordone nel qual si ragiona de tutte l’isole del mondo, Venice,
N Zoppino, 1528: MS London, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, MS C 5215 BOR
65
Borges, Jorge Luis, The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin
Books, 2005
Camocio, Giovanni Francesco, attr., Isole famose, porti, fortezze, e terre marittime, c. 1565-1575:
de Camões, Luiz, Os Lusiadas, 2 vols., trans. J. J. Aubertin. London: Kegan Paul, Trench &
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86

The Floating and Wandering Island in Medieval and Renaissance Culture and Isolarii

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CONTENTS

1. EXPLICITLY FLOATING ISLANDS 15

2. ISLANDS WITH NON-FIXED LOCATION 31

3. SPATIALLY DISLOCATED ISLANDS 43

1. Detail of floating islands in Persian miniature, Throne of Gayumarth

3. Popular floating island, Land of Green Ginger

4. Contemporary sci-fi floating island

5. Typical floating islands

7. Islands became increasingly detailed

9. Simple cusped outline of Caloiero

10. More detail of Caloiero

12. Contemporary image of Chinese floating Island of the Immortals

14. Another way to look at the world

WANDERING ISLAND IN MEDIEVAL AND

RENAISSANCE CULTURE AND ISOLARII

Traditional Slovak fairytale beginning

იყო და არა იყო რა … There was and there was not…

Traditional Georgian fairytale beginning

interior geographical features. Columbus (1450-1506) found a continent, but actually, he

crucial to European expansion and acquisition of real geographical knowledge.

European root of sacer, sci, skei knowledge/science is to cut, compartmentalize, separate8.

discrete landmass surrounded by water.

FLOATING ISLANDS TYPOLOGY

UK: Penguin, 1975

Tenochtitlan also made use of floating island-gardens for agriculture.

institution of Christianity, was imagined as a floating island. Portable thrones16, on

lost or disappearing islands here. A flying carpet is a kind of floating island. So is an

1533; published 1516-1532), Ruggiero is carried to Alcina’s island by a hippogriff, then

and galaxies, eventually wandering further into deepest space.

1. EXPLICITLY FLOATING ISLANDS

or island “beyond” or “above”.19

FLOATING ISLANDS AS WONDERS AND MARVELS THAT RESOLVE

astounding enough to be recorded.

Vadimon, which were:

voyage than they were of embarking on it’24.

1, Book 3, § 25, 8-11, p. 263

William Heinemann, 1969, Book 8, § 20, 1-6, pp 60-61

Something floating or switching places could also be considered a marvel - Gervase of

something dirty was put into it’25.

successive generation to pass away again.28

Weyerstraet, 1665, pp. 276-277

hiding him in what is now called the floating island”’29.

be mentioned more than once. Of the mountains of Eryri, he says:

reunite itself firmly with the banks’38.

lakes, one of which has a floating island’39.

Floating islands as saviours

river Guayaquil, Humboldt (1769-1859) saw floating island-gardens on Lakes Xochimilco

Floating islands as entertainment

York: 1859, Book 2, p. 272

persons keeping time with the chanting of a choral song’42.

FLOATING ISLANDS RESOLVING NARRATIVE PROBLEMS

Aristophanes’ Cloudcuckooland – Νεφελοκοκκυγία (c. 446-386 BC) – floated between

42 Pliny, Natural History, Book 2, § 96, p. 341

empire, one queen calmly ruling over all.

of California Press, 1975, p. 137

transfixed by the sight of these floating globes:

which wand of an All-wise/Composed, and did a common centre place;/Revolving,

now it falls and now doth rise’55.

Floating islands used in satire

movement, appearing/disappearing or flying are exploited to the full in this genre.

should you chance to be marooned there.

maps, sailors’ stories, and, especially, a dream the narrator had67.