Faroe Islands

• 1. Introduction

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  Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, receives only 840 hours of sunshine a year, the fewest recorded of any city in the world. This is a place of fjords and cliffs, sparse vegetation, and few trees, scattered across the North Atlantic between Iceland, Norway, and the Scottish isles. Just under 55,000 people live here, on a land area of roughly 1,393 square kilometres. The official language is Faroese, partly intelligible to speakers of Icelandic. How did a treeless cluster of rocks near the Arctic Circle come to host one of the oldest continuously running parliaments on Earth? Why did its language vanish from writing for three centuries, then return? And how does a territory that is not a sovereign state field its own football team and sign its own trade deals? The answers run through Irish monks, Norse pirates, a referendum decided by 161 votes, and a hunt for pilot whales documented for over 400 years.

• 2. Hermits Before Vikings

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  Burnt grains of domesticated barley and peat ash, uncovered in archaeological studies from 2021, point to people on the islands before any Norse settler arrived. The deposits fall into two phases, one between the mid-fourth and mid-sixth centuries, another between the late-sixth and late-eighth centuries. Sheep DNA in lake-bed sediments has been dated to the year 500. Since Scandinavians did not begin using sails until about 750, researchers concluded these earlier settlers more likely came from Scotland or Ireland.

  The Irish monk Dicuil wrote of small islands north of Scotland, reachable in a two-day voyage with a favourable wind. For nearly a hundred years, he recorded, hermits sailing from Ireland had lived there. But by his time the Northman pirates had emptied them of anchorites and filled them with countless sheep and many kinds of sea-birds. "I have never found these islands mentioned in the authorities," he added. These hermits are often identified as the Papar, who left their mark in place names such as Paparøkur near Vestmanna and Papurshílsur near Saksun. A ninth-century voyage tale about the Irish saint Brendan describes a visit to an unnamed northern island group, argued by some to be the Faroes.

• 3. Norse Settlers And Saga

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  Grímur Kamban is recorded as the first permanent settler, with Old Norse-speaking arrivals coming in the early 9th century. Many were Norse-Gaels who came not directly from Scandinavia but from communities spanning the Irish Sea, the Northern Isles, and the Outer Hebrides. They brought thralls of Gaelic origin, an admixture still visible in the Faroese genetic makeup and in loanwords from Old Irish. According to Færeyinga saga, Norwegian settlers were spurred by disapproval of the monarchy of Harald Fairhair.

  The Løgting's founding date is not historically documented, but the saga implies it was well established by the middle of the 10th century. A legal dispute between the chieftains Havgrímur and Einar Suðuroyingur, ending in the exile of Eldjárn Kambhøttur, is recounted in detail. Christianity came through the chieftain Sigmundur Brestisson, baptised as an adult by King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway. His mission was part of a plan to seize the islands for the Norwegian crown. His rival Tróndur í Gøtu was converted under threat of decapitation. Sigmundur was murdered, but after Tróndur's death in 1035 the islands fell firmly under Norwegian rule.

• 4. From Norway To Denmark

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  In 1380 the Faroe Islands entered a union with Denmark through the unification of Denmark and Norway. The introduction of Lutheranism in 1538 reshaped religious practice and cultural identity. After the Reformation, the ruling Norwegians outlawed Faroese in schools, churches, and official documents, and the language disappeared from writing for more than three centuries. Between the 16th and 18th centuries the islands suffered repeated slave raids by Barbary corsairs, the most famous being the raid on Suðuroy in the summer of 1629.

  Denmark imposed a trade monopoly in the 17th century, restricting Faroese commerce until it was lifted in 1856. That change let the islands build a modern fishing industry. The Treaty of Kiel formally ceded the islands to Denmark in 1814, along with Greenland and Iceland, and the Løgting was replaced by a Danish judiciary. The parliament had been abolished in 1816 and the islands governed as an ordinary Danish county under an Amtmand. In 1851 the Løgting was reinstated, though until 1948 it served mainly as an advisory body.

• 5. A Language Reborn

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  Lutheran minister Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb introduced an official orthography for Faroese in 1846, after centuries of suppression. This linguistic revival fed a national movement. The reinstated Løgting of 1852 gave it a political home, and across the first half of the 20th century Faroese gradually displaced Danish in the church, in public education, and in law. The clergyman Jákup Dahl, who lived from 1878 to 1944, had great influence in ensuring Faroese was spoken in church instead of Danish. Faroese was accepted as a language of instruction in 1938.

  Faroese belongs to the North Germanic branch and descends from Old Norse, most closely related to Icelandic. Its geographic isolation preserved conservative grammatical features lost in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. It is one of only three languages, alongside Icelandic and Elfdalian, to keep the letter Ð, though in Faroese it is not pronounced. Faroese sign language was officially adopted as a national language in 2017. The oral tradition that survived the writing ban divided into sagnir, ævintýr, and kvæði, the last often set to the medieval chain dance.

• 6. The Vote That Was Annulled

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  On the 12th of April 1940 British troops occupied the Faroe Islands in Operation Valentine, three days after Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and began its invasion of Norway under Operation Weserübung. The British refrained from governing internal affairs, and the islands became effectively self-governing during the war. In 1942-1943 the British Royal Engineers, under Lieutenant Colonel William Law, built Vágar Airport, the first and only airport in the islands.

  The wartime taste of self-rule, together with Iceland's declaration as a republic in 1944, became a model in many Faroese minds. The Løgting held an independence referendum on the 14th of September 1946. The result was a very narrow majority for independence: 50.73% in favour, 49.27% against, a margin of only 161 votes. The Løgting declared independence on the 18th of September, but Denmark annulled the declaration on the 20th of September, arguing that the 481 invalid votes exceeded the narrow margin. King Christian X dissolved the parliament on the 24th of September, and new elections that November returned a majority opposed to independence. After protracted negotiations, Denmark granted home rule on the 30th of March 1948, and Faroese became the official language in all public spheres.

• 7. Autonomy Without Sovereignty

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  The Faroese government controls most areas apart from military defence, policing, justice, and currency, with partial control over foreign affairs. Because the islands are not part of the same customs area as Denmark, they run an independent trade policy and can sign their own agreements, including the extensive Hoyvík Agreement with Iceland. In 1973 the Faroes declined to join Denmark in the European Economic Community, keeping control of their fishing waters; as a result they are not in the European Union today. A protocol means Danish nationals living in the Faroes are not EU citizens.

  When the EU imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014, the Faroes were not part of the embargo, and Prime Minister Kaj Leo Johannesen went to Moscow to negotiate trade. As of 2021 islanders were evenly split between independence and remaining in the Kingdom of Denmark. Two attempts at a separate constitution, in 2011 and 2015, met objections from Danish leaders, including Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, and went nowhere. The Løgting today has 33 members, and the islands hold their own telephone code, +298, the .fo internet domain, and a seat in international sports bodies such as UEFA, FIFA, and FINA.

• 8. Fishing, Whales, And The Open Sea

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  Fishing accounts for around 90% of Faroese exports, and the collapse of the industry in the early 1990s brought unemployment of 10 to 15% by the mid-1990s. The biggest private company is the salmon farming firm Bakkafrost, the third largest of its kind in the world. By December 2019 unemployment had reached a record low of 0.9%. Tourism has grown more prominent since the 2010s. Even so, near-total dependence on fishing and fish farming keeps the economy vulnerable.

  There are records of whale drive hunts dating from 1584. The grindadráp targets long-finned pilot whales, organised at community level, with a long-term average of around 800 whales a year out of an estimated 128,000 in the Northeast Atlantic. A spinal lance, now standard, reduces killing time to 1-2 seconds. Studies have found whale meat and blubber contaminated with mercury, with advice that adults eat no more than one to two meals a month and that pregnant women abstain entirely. On the 12th of September 2021 a super-pod of over 1,420 white-sided dolphins was killed, prompting controversy and government quotas. The annual records of these hunts span more than 400 years, one of the most comprehensive accounts of wildlife use anywhere in the world.