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Part I
Foundations of islands and island life
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1
Definitions and typologies
Stephen A. Royle and Laurie Brinklow
Introduction: islands as geographical spaces
What is an island? This book is written in English and we should thus interrogate this language, and the society from which it emanated, to identify the origin and meaning of this simple English word. The part referring to insularity, which itself is based on the Latin word insula, meaning âislandâ, is the first syllable, and a clue to its origins can be found through an inspection of a map of the archipelago off northwest Europe where English developed (see Figure 1.1). This exercise reveals that many of the small islands have â-ayâ or â-eyâ endings to their names.
This is a souvenir of the voyages of the Vikings or Norse around these coasts in the Dark Ages, in the 8th to 11th centuries, a period of Viking expansion from their base in Scandinavia, a time when the sea was a highway rather than a barrier and when small islands were ports of call for refreshment and refuge. The Vikings left their mark, including their place names, as the Old Norse word for island is ey (modern Danish has Ăž), with roots in ea, a proto-Indo-European word for river, thus representing water. This word has not entered the English language by itself: although there is an island off Dublin in Ireland, close to Lambay, another island with a Norse name, called Irelandâs Eye. It is part of the word âeyotâ which is a river island, as in Chiswick Eyot in the Thames in west London. More significantly, it has entered the modern language, via the Old Norse (and Old Frisian) ey and the Old English Ăe, Ă or Ä«eg, in combination with âlandâ, a solid part of the earth, to form âislandâ. In this word âisâ is pronounced as âeyeâ. Matters are clearer if it is realised that an older spelling was âilandâ: the Oxford English Dictionary traces that back to AD 888. The added âsâ results from a 15th-century association of the word with the French-derived Èle, sometimes isle. âIslandâ means the same as the older word, iland, which it paralleled and, before 1700, replaced. So John Donne in 1624 wrote âno man is an Ilandâ. The derivation thus associates land with water. Those islands with the ey- or Ăž-derived endings do not normally take âislandâ as part of their names. To do so would be tautological: it is Jersey, not Jersey Island.
Definition and typology
An island is âa piece of land surrounded by waterâ. The source here is the Compact Oxford English Dictionary and, typical of this popular dictionary, the definition is short, practical and seemingly comprehensive. The Oxford English Dictionary is only marginally more complex, having the primary meaning as âa piece of land completely surrounded by waterâ. However, one word, despite its comprehensive meaning, seems not to have been sufficient for the English, for within the Compact Oxford are also found:
- archipelago: an extensive group of islands;
- atoll: a ring shaped reef or chain of islands formed of coral;
- isle: literary: an island, often a small one;
- islet: a small island;
- key: a low-lying island or reef, especially in the Caribbean [in which area it is often spelt âcayâ, though the pronunciation does not change]:
- reef: a ridge of jagged rock or coral just above or below the surface of the sea;
- rock: mass of rock projecting above the ground or water.
Moreover, the Oxford Compact Thesaurus adds the word âholmâ under its entry for âislandâ. Island writer, Bill Holm, an American of Viking, Icelandic ancestry, noted that this is another word from the Vikings (its origin is holmr), who, as a seafaring society, needed to subdivide the world of islands into different types. Holm made much of his surname; the first words of his Eccentric islands are: âCall me Island. Or call me Holm. Same thing ⊠Holm, an Old Norse masculine noun ⊠means small island or inshore islandâ (2000, p. 3). Off the coast of Wales, within the compass of the Dark Age Viking realm, the substantial island of Anglesey takes the ey-derived ending as do Bardsey, Ramsey and Caldey. But others, true to the origin of the word âholmâ, take that form: Grassholme, Skokholm, Gateholm, Steep Holm and Flat Holm are all âsmall ⊠or inshoreâ islands just off the coast (see Figure 1.1). The Swedish capital, Stockholm, is built on a series of such islands.
It is not unusual in the development of society and language for even a straightforward construct to require a variety of terms to capture its complexity: the best-known example must be the categorisation of âsnowâ into a multiplicity of different types, each with its own word, in Inuktitut and other Arctic languages. English needed several distinct words, not just synonyms, for varieties of pieces of land surrounded by water, marking the importance of the construct to a language which developed in an island setting amongst a trading and colonising people:
Great Britain came to think of itself in insular rather than continental terms, creating for itself an archipelagic empire beginning with nearby Ireland and eventually extending throughout the Atlantic.
(Gillis 2003, p. 29)
In contrast to English, in languages emanating from societies in which islands have not been important, there are few words denoting insularity. Slovakia in eastern Europe is landlocked, and inspection of a standard dictionary reveals just one Slovak word for âislandâ, ostrov, with developments therefrom, such as ostrovÄan for âislanderâ; also sĂșostrovie, for âarchipelagoâ. To the south, Slovenia has only a short coastline on the Adriatic, without offshore islands, and this country has but one island and that only periodically, for it is in a lake which, due to the peculiarities of the local limestone topography, emerges seasonally and surrounds a hillock within its basin. The occasional island and its village are both called Otok; that is also the Slovene word for âislandâ and it does duty for most insular matters, although atol and arhipelag have been introduced from foreign languages.
Figure 1.1 The British Isles and a typology of the islands.
In English, which of the range of words is used for a particular piece of land surrounded by water depends, perhaps, on its formation (see Nunn and Kumar, this volume) as with âreefâ or âatollâ, or its size. Isles are usually small islands and in the region where English developed we find the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight off England; the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea; also the Western Isles and other smaller groups off Scotland (see Figure 1.1).
Some geographical spaces are troubling regarding the second syllable of âislandâ. Van Duzer (2004) has written on floating islands, buoyant vegetation and organic matter that can be substantial enough to support trees, even livestock. This would see them accepted under the Scottish census definition (see below), but not being land, can they ever be islands? To further complicate matters, there are places not always completely surrounded by water: naturally occurring periodic, usually tidal islands. As stated, Otok in Slovenia is a seasonal island; enisling is normally caused by tidal movement as with Lindisfarne (Holy Island) off northeast Britain, where islanding happens on a twice-daily basis, while Modo in Korea is only connected to other land twice a year (see Figure 1.2). Are these places true islands? The answer must be a non-periodic, permanent yes. A trip to Lindisfarne certainly presents visitors with the feeling of being on a small island, for access depends on the times when tides are low; little different than waiting for the ferry on non-periodic islands.
To the Vikings, a piece of land surrounded by water was not regarded as an ey or island unless it was sufficiently distant and distinct for the sound separating it from the mainland to be navigable by a ship with its rudder in place. In the Scottish census of 1861 a piece of land surrounded by water graduated to being worthy of the name âislandâ only if it had sufficient pasturage to support at least one sheep (King 1993). Such functional thresholds for the recognition of an island are not just of historic interest, for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Part VIII, Article 121) does not allow exclusive economic zones or continental shelves to be awarded to rocks incapable of sustaining human habitation or economic life on its own. A case in point here is the granite oceanic crag of Rockall, 461 km (286 miles) west of Scotland, which is claimed by Denmark (for the Faroes), Iceland, Ireland and the UK (see Figure 1.3). At 74 m2 (88.5 square yards), Rockall is small enough to have been mistaken for an enemy ship in the First World War, and it came close to being rammed in what would have been a vain attempt to sink it, after it failed to respond to signals (Gordon 1961). British sovereignty was declared in 1972, with a 1974 claim to exclusive exploitation of a 134,680 km2 (52,000 square miles) zone around Rockall. In 1975, a former British Special Forces soldier spent 40 days on this âislandâ â for so it was declared in 1972 UK legislation â to demonstrate its habitability and to support the British claim. In 1997, the UKâs claim that Rockall was an island was dropped, but the rock is still regarded as part of Scotland (Royle 2014a).
Figure 1.2 Crossing on foot to Modo Island (ëȘšë), Korea, at low tide is a twice-yearly ritual.
Figure 1.3 Rockall: the numerous birds shown â puffins, kittiwakes, gannets and guillemots â provide a helpful sense of scale.
In contrast, writers seeking to diminish an islandâs significance might resort to a lesser term, as with Philip Carteretâs description of the first European sighting of the unpromising Pitcairn Island in the Pacific in 1767 (tellingly named after the young man at the masthead, the son of the Captain of Marines, who first spotted it, rather than the shipâs captain or a member of the establishment): âa small high uninhabited Island ⊠scarce better than a large rock in the oceanâ (Carteret 1965, p. 150). Ironically, it was that very dismissal of Pitcairn Island that made it attractive to the Bounty mutineers who settled there in 1790, seeking seclusion. Their leader, Fletcher Christian, knew of the passage, Carteretâs book being carried on board (Smith 2003). Another case would be that of the Irish nationalist Alice Stopford Greenâs characterisation of the 122 km2 (47 square mile) St Helena in the South Atlantic as a âslag-heapâ in her attempt to magnify for political reasons the deprivations faced by Boer prisoners of war incarcerated thereupon by the British from 1900 to 1902 during the South African War (Stopford Green 1900, Royle 1998).
Taking âislandâ in its conventional use in English does not enable us to calculate for certain even how many islands there are. It would depend on which of the âislesâ down to ârocksâ categories were included. And even if the count were restricted to pieces of land customarily regarded as âislandsâ rather than the lesser categories, discrepancies would emerge. The Vikings, as described, distinguished between ey and holm but, to stay with the Welsh examples used above, note that Ramsey and Bardsey are little bigger than Skokholm. So: why would these places, which today are all uninhabited and with the steering of a Viking longboat a forgotten art, not all belong to the same category of island landmass? Convention only helps at the upper end of the scale, for Australia at 7,686,843 km2 (2,967,907 square miles) is conventionally regarded as continental, which makes Greenland at 2,175,600 km2 (840,004 square miles) the worldâs largest island. But then should large islands be regarded as being insular at all? Shakespeareâs John of Gaunt made much of the advantages for England (part of the island of Great Britain) of it being cut off by the âsilver seaâ, which is both a âwallâ and, a line later, a âmoatâ; comparisons stressing the role of the water as a defensive barrier around the island. That it is a permeable barrier was shown by the many successful invasions up to and including that of the Normans from France in 1066. But the sea still defended, and during the Second World War, having to move his armies across this barrier was one of the factors that dissuaded Adolph Hitler from invading. At this time, there was certainly considerable public consciousness of Great Britain being an island, for it was seen to gain significant strategic advantage therefrom. Howe...
