Faroe Islands

The Faroe Islands rise sheer from the North Atlantic north-west of Shetland, steep basalt islands whose name means ‘sheep islands’. They govern themselves as a nation within the Danish realm. Layers of ancient lava form cliffs that drop straight into the sea and treeless green slopes climbing to Slættaratindur. Undersea road tunnels tie the larger islands together, gannets nest on outlying Mykines, and on Vágar the lake Sørvágsvatn ends at a sea cliff, seeming to hang above the ocean.

Irish hermits may have come first, but Norse settlers arrived in the ninth century, and the Færeyinga saga tells how Sigmundur Brestisson brought Christianity around 1000. Their assembly met on Tinganes, a rocky point by the harbour where the government sits, and the Løgting, their parliament, grew from it. The islands passed with Norway to the Danish crown and stayed Danish when Norway went to Sweden in 1814. Britain occupied them after Germany overran Denmark in April 1940, and home rule followed in 1948.

Pastor V. U. Hammershaimb gave Faroese its written standard in 1846, but the medieval ballads had kept the language alive, and islanders sing them while linking arms in a slow chain dance at Ólavsøka, the national festival in late July. Mutton hung in slatted sheds dries into skerpikjøt. William Heinesen’s novels carried island life abroad. Cod and haddock from the banks, with salmon farmed in the fjords, make up most exports, and the islands’ wool goes into heavy patterned sweaters.