Faroe Islands: The Sheep Islands of the North Atlantic

Eighteen islands in the open ocean

The Faroe Islands are a compact cluster of eighteen steep, treeless islands in the North Atlantic, roughly equidistant from Scotland, Iceland and Norway. About 54,000 people live there, most within reach of Tórshavn, one of the smallest capitals in the world. The Faroese speak their own North Germanic language, descended from Old Norse, and govern themselves — a self-ruling nation inside the Kingdom of Denmark, but outside the European Union that Denmark belongs to.

A short history

1. c. 600s

   The monks

   Irish hermits may be the first people on the islands.

2. c. 800–900

   Norse settlement

   Settlers from Norway bring farming and the Løgting.

3. c. 1000

   Christianity

   The islands convert, and come under the Norwegian crown.

4. 1397

   Union with Denmark

   Norway and the Faroes enter the Kalmar Union.

5. 1814

   Kept by Denmark

   Norway passes to Sweden; Denmark keeps the Faroes.

6. 1856

   Free trade

   The Danish trade monopoly ends; deep-sea fishing takes off.

7. 1888

   The awakening

   A movement to revive the Faroese language begins.

8. 1940–1945

   British occupation

   Cut off from Denmark, the Faroese govern themselves.

9. 1948

   Home Rule

   The Faroes become self-governing within the Danish realm.

Monks, then Norsemen

The first people on the Faroes may have been Irish monks in the 7th century — an account from around 825 describes hermits on remote northern islands, and sheep seem to have been there before the Vikings, giving the islands their name, Føroyar, "sheep islands". Norse settlers arrived from about 800 to 900. They brought a farming and fishing life and an open-air assembly, the Løgting, which met at Tinganes in Tórshavn and ranks among the oldest parliaments anywhere.

The islands converted to Christianity around the year 1000 and came under the Norwegian crown, fully so by 1274. Kirkjubøur, on Streymoy, became the church centre, with a bishop's seat and the great cathedral of St Magnus — left unfinished around 1300 and roofless ever since.

Danish rule and the monopoly

Through the Kalmar Union of 1397 the Faroes passed with Norway to the Danish-Norwegian crown, and when that union was dissolved in 1814 Denmark kept the Faroes, along with Iceland and Greenland. The Reformation was imposed from Copenhagen in the 1530s, which made Danish the language of church and administration and abolished the Kirkjubøur bishopric.

For centuries a royal Danish trade monopoly controlled all commerce with the islands and held the economy down. Its abolition in 1856 changed everything: with free trade, the Faroese converted from subsistence farming to deep-sea fishing, buying up retired British sailing smacks and turning the islands into a fishing nation whose daily bread came, quite literally, from fish.

The national awakening

The Løgting was cut down to an advisory county council in 1816. A cultural revival followed later in the century: a written form of Faroese was devised in 1846, and from the Christmas Meeting of 1888 in Tórshavn a movement grew to bring the language back into schools, church and public life, and to press for more self-government. Faroese identity, long treated as mere dialect and folklore, became a political programme.

The friendly occupation

When Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, Britain immediately occupied the Faroes to keep them out of German hands. For five years the islands were cut off from Copenhagen and effectively ran their own affairs. They flew their own flag, the Merkið, which Britain formally recognised — still marked as Flag Day — and their boats carried fish to wartime Britain at a heavy cost in ships and lives. Having governed themselves once, the Faroese would not simply go back.

A 1946 referendum produced a wafer-thin vote for independence, which was disputed and set aside. The compromise was the Home Rule Act of 1948: the Faroes became a self-governing community within the Danish realm, with their own parliament, government, flag and language, while Denmark retained foreign affairs, defence and the currency, and pays an annual grant.

The Faroes now

To protect its fishing grounds, the Faroes stayed out of the European Community when Denmark joined in 1973, and run their own 200-mile zone. The fishing economy crashed hard in the early 1990s — output fell by about a third and a tenth of the population left — before recovering through fisheries and, more recently, large-scale salmon farming, now the leading export. The communal pilot-whale hunt, the grindadráp, continues and continues to draw international protest.

Debate over full independence and a Faroese constitution recurs in every generation, while a growing network of undersea tunnels — one with the world's first subsea roundabout — physically binds the scattered islands into a single place.

What the Faroes carry

The Faroe Islands have kept a Norse language and a Viking-age assembly through six centuries of Danish rule, and turned a wartime accident of self-government into a permanent one. They sit in a deliberate in-between: not a state, but not merely a Danish region either — a small nation that has arranged its ties to the wider world almost entirely on its own terms.