Kerling the Cliff

Three trolls tried to saw the Westfjords free from Iceland overnight — one dug too slow, ran out of darkness, and turned to stone beside the village pool.

The rock formation known as Kerling stands beside the public swimming pool in the village of Drangsnes, on the Strandir coast of the Westfjords. According to the tradition attached to it, she was not always stone. Three trolls, the story goes, decided the Westfjords should be separated entirely from the rest of Iceland and kept as a country of their own — troll territory, free of human settlement. They set to work digging a channel to sever the peninsula from the mainland: one working from the east, two from the west, cutting through rock and earth through the night, with the fjords deepening and the connecting land bridge narrowing as they worked. They misjudged the length of the night. Dawn arrived with the land still joined. Two of the trolls managed to find shelter before the sun rose. The third — working alone in the east, and by most tellings the angriest and most determined of the three — was still digging when the light caught her. In one version she drove her shovel into the ground in fury at her failure, breaking off a piece of coastline that became the island of Grímsey, before the sunlight reached her and turned her to stone on the spot. That petrified figure is Kerling, still standing today more or less where the story places her, in the village that grew up around the channel she never finished digging.