Danish treasure islands
The Land of Maybe: A Faroe Islands Year By Tim Ecott Short Books £14.99
The Faroe Islands owe little to anyone or anything other than the sea. They lie about 200 miles north-west of Scotland and politically are an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark.
Seventy years ago, Eric Linklater observed that the Faroese appeared to have ‘escaped the vulgarity and inertia of civilisation’. They have been corrupted since (helped by Europe’s fastest internet speeds and woefully complete mobile phone coverage), but much less than the
rest of us. Partly that’s a function of the size of the population: the size is itself a function of geography.
The population of the whole archipelago is just over 50,000, which, with the Faroes’ population density, is a self-policing size. It would be hard for snobs or bullies to thrive, but the ethos militates against them arising at all.
The country is a paradoxical entity, impossible according to the canons of conventional anthropology: a huntergatherer state. If you live in the capital, Tórshavn, you could get all your food from a supermarket, but you’d be despised. You’d have lost your soul, your neighbours would say. They’d mean that you’d lost your connection with the land and the sea, your sense of complete dependency and vulnerability, and your corresponding self-reliance.
Most of the workforce is still involved in fishing, while shepherding and sea-bird catching remain important. Almost every house has a meat-drying shed (the maggots need to be scraped off every day in the summer). If you’re invited for dinner in a Faroese house, you’re likely to have roasted Manx shearwater with dumplings made of cod roe and the fat from around a sheep’s rectum. If you stay overnight, you might get guillemot eggs for breakfast, along with cornflakes flown in from Copenhagen.
Tim Ecott has wandered musingly through this land, watching storms swoop in from Iceland, listening to violin lessons on Skype in a remote farmhouse, following the fate of a raven family, helping with sheep-gathering and hare-hunting, joining expeditions to collect fulmar eggs and gannet