Drangey — Grettir's island

OVERVIEW

Drangey is an uninhabited island in Skagafjörður in the north of Iceland, the remnant of a 700,000-year-old volcano, made mostly of palagonite tuff and standing out of the water as a sheer-sided block. It is famous for its bird cliffs and for its place in the sagas.

HISTORY

Grettis saga, written in the thirteenth century about events around 1030, has the outlaw Grettir Ásmundarson spend his last years on Drangey with his brother Illugi and a servant, unreachable on the top of the rock. His enemy Þorbjörn öngull could not take the island by force, and in the saga's account his foster-mother Þuríður, an old woman versed in the older practice, carved runes on a log, reddened them with her blood, spoke over it and set it adrift so that it came ashore on the island. Grettir cut into the log and the axe glanced into his leg; the wound turned bad, and Þorbjörn's men took the weakened men and killed them. The saga is explicit that it was sorcery that finished him where force could not.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Beside the saga, local tradition holds that two night-travelling giants, a man and a woman, were crossing the fjord with their cow when daybreak caught them: all three were turned to stone. Drangey is the cow; Kerling — the old hag, the female giant — stands to the south of it; Karl, the male, stood to the north and fell long ago. The entry records both — a named act of witchcraft in a medieval text, and a petrification tradition attached to a visible rock.

VISITING

Boat trips run from Reykir in Skagafjörður in the summer; landing and the climb to the top are guided, with fixed ropes and ladders on the steep sections. Not for anyone unsteady on their feet.