History of the Faroe Islands

• 1. Introduction

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  The Faroe Islands sit in the North Atlantic, and for most of recorded history their story has been one of people arriving from the sea. An Irish monk named Brendan may have sailed past them in the 6th century, noting an Island of Sheep and a Paradise of Birds. But the very presence of those sheep told a quiet story: someone had already been there before him, bringing livestock to a place the rest of the world had not yet named.

  Who were those first settlers? What forces of religion, commerce, war, and economics shaped the islands over the centuries that followed? And how did a small North Atlantic archipelago end up at the centre of a financial crisis that drove one in six of its people to emigrate? These are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Before the Norse Arrived

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  Burnt grains of domesticated barley found in Faroese soil push the story of human habitation back further than the Norse sagas suggest. Scientific researchers dated the deposits in two phases: the first between the mid-fourth and mid-sixth centuries, and a second between the late-sixth and late-eighth centuries. Sheep DNA recovered from lake-bed sediments pointed to around the year 500. Barley and sheep do not cross open ocean on their own.

  Archaeologist Mike Church proposed that these earliest settlers may have come from Ireland, Scotland, or Scandinavia, or from all three. The Irish monk Dicuil, writing around 825 in his work Liber de Mensura Orbis Terrae, recorded a trusted account of islands far to the north where hermits from Ireland had lived for nearly a hundred years. His source described sailing two days and a summer night in a small vessel of two banks of oars to reach them. By the time Dicuil wrote, he noted, Norwegian pirates had driven the monks away, leaving behind only countless sheep and many species of sea-fowl.

  The name of the islands appears for the first time on the Hereford Mappa Mundi of 1280, labelled farei. Old Norse fár, meaning livestock, gives the islands their enduring identity: the sheep islands.

• 3. Grímr Kamban and the Norse Sagas

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  Two medieval sagas name Grímr Kamban as the first Viking to settle the Faroes, but they disagree on almost everything else. The Flateyjarbók places his arrival during the reign of Harald Hårfagre, which ran from 872 to 930. The Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason suggests Kamban was already living in the Faroes long before Harald's rule, and that other Norse settlers fled to the islands specifically to escape the chaos of that king's reign.

  The name Kamban itself is Gaelic in origin, carrying the Irish form Cambán. His first name, Grímr, is Norse. Kamban may have been a Norse-Gael, part of a mixed culture that had emerged from centuries of intermarriage between Norse settlers and Irish speakers in the British Isles. The islands carry traces of that blending in their vocabulary: the Faroese word "blak" for buttermilk derives from the Irish bláthach; "tarvur" for bull echoes the Irish tarbh; "lámur" for hand or paw mirrors the Irish lámh.

  Wooden devotional crosses found at Toftanes on Eysturoy appeared to be modelled on Irish or Scottish examples, suggesting some of the settlers were Christian. A runestone found at Sandavágur on Vágoy Island tells a plainer story: it records that Thorkil Onundsson, a Norwegian from Rogaland, was the first to settle that specific place. The place-name Vestmanna-havn, meaning Irishmen's harbour, points toward the same layered origin. The Alþing, the islands' parliament and law court where all free men could meet, was established somewhere between 800 and 900, giving political shape to this mixed community.

• 4. Christianity, Norway, and Foreign Trade

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  Around the year 1000 the Faroe Islands were officially converted to Christianity, and a Diocese was established at Kirkjubøur on southern Streymoy, which would eventually seat 33 Catholic bishops. The conversion was tied directly to Norwegian power. Sigmundur Brestisson, whose family had flourished in the southern islands before being nearly exterminated by northern rivals, was sent from Norway to take possession of the islands for Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway. He introduced Christianity, and though he was subsequently murdered, Norwegian supremacy held.

  The Faroes became part of the Kingdom of Norway in 1035. King Sverre of Norway had grown up on the islands, being the stepson of a Faroese man and a relative of Roe, bishop of the islands. Norwegian rule lasted until 1380, when the islands passed into the Kalmar Union and then into the dual Denmark-Norway kingdom under King Olaf II of Denmark.

  The 14th century brought a new kind of pressure. Trading regulations required all Faroese commerce to pass through Bergen in order to collect customs tax. The Hanseatic League was growing in power and threatening Scandinavian trade networks. The Black Death then decimated Norway's population, forcing the kingdom to abandon its efforts to hold back the League. In the 1390s, Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, took possession of the islands as a vassal of Norway, drawing them briefly into a North Atlantic principality centred on Orkney.

• 5. Reformation and the Trading Monopoly

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  In 1535 Christian II, the deposed Danish monarch, tried to retake power from Christian III. He failed, and in 1537 Christian III rewarded the German trader Thomas Köppen with exclusive trading rights in the Faroes. The agreement stipulated fair prices and good quality goods, but the guidelines were frequently ignored. After Köppen, successive monopoly holders continued the pattern; smuggling and piracy became rife.

  Christian III also introduced Lutheranism to replace Catholicism. The process took five years, during which Danish replaced Latin in church services and church property was transferred to the state. The bishopric at Kirkjubøur was abolished.

  By the 1600s the Danish king handed the islands to the courtier Christoffer Gabel and later his son Frederick as a personal feudal estate. Their rule was harsh. In 1708 Denmark-Norway took the trading monopoly back to central government, but even the government struggled, with many merchants trading at a loss. The monopoly was not finally abolished until the 1st of January 1856. After the Peace of Kiel in 1814 dissolved the union of Denmark-Norway, the Faroe Islands remained with Denmark. In 1816 the Løgting, the Faroese parliament, was officially abolished and replaced by a Danish judiciary, and Danish became the main language while Faroese was actively discouraged.

• 6. Operation Valentine

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  When Nazi Germany occupied Denmark in the early years of the Second World War, Britain moved quickly. The pre-emptive invasion and occupation of the Faroes, known as Operation Valentine, was designed to prevent Germany from seizing a strategically valuable position in the North Atlantic, one that could have served as a submarine base in the Battle of the Atlantic.

  Instead, British forces constructed an airbase on the island of Vágar, a facility that is still in operation today as Vágar Airport. Faroese fishing boats supplied a significant quantity of fish to the UK during a period of food rationing. The Danish prefect Carl Aage Hilbert retained executive power while the Løgting gained legislative authority, and British authorities formally recognised the Faroese flag for the first time.

  The British presence was broadly welcomed, particularly given what a German occupation might have looked like. Around 150 marriages took place between British soldiers and Faroese women. The British left a lasting cultural trace: a popularity for British chocolate and sweets that persists in Faroese shops to this day, in contrast to their relative absence in Denmark. The last British troops left in September 1945. The experience of running their own affairs during the war proved decisive in shaping what came next.

• 7. Home Rule and the 1990s Crisis

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  A referendum on full independence in 1946 produced a majority in favour, but Denmark refused to recognise the result, citing that only two-thirds of the population had voted. The Danish king dissolved the Faroese government. Subsequent elections returned an anti-independence majority, and in 1948 the Home Rule Act of the Faroe Islands granted a high degree of self-governance. Faroese became an official language that year, though it had only been permitted in public schools since 1938 and in the church since 1939.

  When Denmark joined the European Community in 1973, the Faroes refused to follow, primarily over the issue of fishing limits. The 1980s brought high standards of living and low unemployment, but the economy rested almost entirely on fishing. Then the early 1990s brought catastrophe. Fish stocks collapsed under pressure from high-tech equipment. Government overspending compounded the problem, and national debt reached 9.4 billion Danish krones. In October 1992 the Faroese national bank, the Sjóvinnurbankin, called in receivers. Denmark provided an initial bailout of 500 million DKK, a sum that eventually grew to 1.8 billion DKK on top of an annual grant of 1 billion DKK. Public employees received a 10% wage cut. Unemployment in Tórshavn reached 20% and climbed higher in the outlying islands. Around 6% of the Faroese population emigrated, mostly to Denmark.

  Recovery followed. Unemployment peaked at 26% in January 1994, then fell to 10% by mid-1996 and 5% by April 2000. The annual fish catch rose from 100,000 in 1994 to 375,000 in 1998. A planned referendum on the first steps toward independence in 2001 was called off after Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen warned that Danish financial grants would be phased out within four years if the vote went in favour of independence.