Hidden by Mist and Waves: Surviving Stories About Land Submergence from the Isle of Man (Irish Sea) are Thousands of Years Old

Abstract The largest island in the Irish Sea (northwest Europe) is the Isle of Man that became an island around 9000 years ago when land connections with Cumbria (northwest England) and Galloway (southern Scotland) were submerged by rising sea level. The Isle of Man is likely to have been occupied by people at this time so they (and their Manx descendants) witnessed both islandization and the subsequent size reduction of the island. As with similar studies of other places in the world, this study argues that many of the numerous Manx stories (oral traditions) recalling land submergence originated with people’s observations of the effects of rising sea level on coastal-land loss. Also similar are the cognitive devices (like periodic island reappearance and the sounds and glimpses of submerged lands) that people often used to sustain the memories of these events in pre-literate (oral) contexts. This study estimates minimum ages for the oldest Manx stories (those recalling the submergence of ‘land bridges’) by comparing the geographies they encode to precisely-calibrated reconstructions of past sea-level change in this region. In this way, it appears that these stories are more than 8000 years old, similar in age to comparable oral traditions from elsewhere in the world.