Living in the Faroe Islands | The Nation That Isn’t a Country
In a kitchen above the harbor in Tórshavn, a woman pours coffee into four cups at 7:00 in the morning. One of them for a guest she has not yet met. The coffee is from a thermos she filled at 6:00. The cups are stoneware fired at a pottery in Hoyvík. The guest, on his way over from a hotel on the south side of the harbor, does not know that the leg of lamb on the counter has been hanging in the drying shed behind the house since the second week of October.
In the village of Gásadalur at the western edge of Vágar Island, the waterfall Múlafossur drops straight into the Atlantic 50 m below a farmhouse whose only road has existed since 2004. On a hillside above Saksun, a shepherd counts sheep. There are roughly 70,000 of them in the country. There are 54,000 people.
These are the Faroe Islands. 18 volcanic islands anchored in the North Atlantic 1,400 km from Copenhagen, which still administers them. The Faroes have their own language, their own parliament, the Løgting, traditionally dated to the year 825, their own flag, their own national airline. They do not have their own pa.ssport.
The pilot whale h.unt, recorded in their legal code since the year 1298, is still practiced. The European community they opted out of in 1973, now the European Union, is still the destination for most of their fish. What follows is what daily life actually looks like in a country that is not, technically, a country.
The kitchen is on the first floor of a tarred wooden house on Tinganesvegur, the street that climbs from the harbor to the old cathedral ruins. The stove is a Rayburn, oil fired, on since 5:00. The floor is painted pine. The window above the sink looks down onto the fishing boats in the eastern harbor. 12 vessels at the long key, two of them already out.
On the counter, the hostess has set a round loaf of rúgbrauð, a Faroese rye, denser than its Danish cousin, and beside it, a slab of cold butter the color of straw. She is 58. She has been serving her kitchen to visitors for 9 years. Her husband works at the harbor office two streets down, and we’ll be home at 6:00.
The practice has a Faroese name, Heimablidni. Literally, Heimablidni, home kindness, is the name the country’s tourist board gave around 2015 to what Faroese households had been doing without a name for centuries. A visitor books a table in someone’s kitchen. The hostess cooks what she would cook for her own family.
The visitor eats what they are served. There are roughly 60 kitchens across the islands formally registered for Heimablidni. The hostess in Tórshavn will serve in a good summer week 16 people. She does not call them customers. She calls them guests. Across the sound, the ferry from Nólsoy is already on its way.
Nólsoy is a 20 minute crossing east of Tórshavn, a long, thin island with 220 residents and a single village at its northern tip. The morning boat leaves Nólsoy at 7:15. It carries schoolchildren, a woman with a basket of knitting, two fishermen with thermoses between their knees. On the Tórshavn side, the dock smell is d1esel and salt water.
The ferry will make the return crossing six times today. In winter, four. North of the capital, on the road that runs along the east coast of Streymoy, the black sand beach at Tjørnuvík fills at low tide. Tjørnuvík is 62 people. The houses are gra.ss roofed, small timber boxes with walls tarred black and roofs of living turf, the old insulation.
From the shore, two sea stacks are visible offshore, the Giant and the Witch, Risin og Kellingin in Faroese. The two islanders turned to stone in the old story when the sun caught them trying to dr4g the Faroes back to Iceland. The children walking to school along the beach have known the story since they were four.
They pay it no particular attention. Further north and west, on the island of Eysturoy, the village of Gjógv sits around a natural gorge 200 m long cut into the sea cliffs. The word Gjógv in Faroese means gorge. The village is 49 people. In a kitchen on the gorge side of the upper road, a grandmother has lit a Morsø wood stove at quarter to eight.
The stove is black cast iron. The kettle is already on it. On the wall beside the door, a ledger written in ballpoint lists the countries the hostess has served Heyma Bliðni guests from over 11 years. Germany Germany Denmark Japan Norway France Germany The United States Spain Iceland and on down. The list pa.sses 46. She keeps it because her daughter wanted her to.
Above the kitchen door, a small framed needlepoint of a puffin. Above the needlepoint, a gra.ss roof. 200 years of turf on a timber frame. Reseeded every 25 years or so. Still permitted under Faroese building code. There are somewhere between 400 and 600 traditional turf roofs still standing across the 18 islands.
Goats sometimes climb onto a neighbor’s. The wood in the stove has caught now. The kitchen is warming. The grandmother puts out three plates. She is expecting one guest. The third plate is in case a neighbor comes by. Outside the window, on the cliff above the gorge, the wind has picked up. The hillside above the village of Funinger carries 22 sheep visible from the road and perhaps another 40 in the hollow behind the rise.
They are the Faroese breed, a small thick fleeced landrace unchanged since the Viking settlers brought them in the 9th century. The ewes are off white, the rams dark. They graze on gra.ss, sea pink, and wild thyme. The hills are stone walled in sections, dry stone. Some of the walls a thousand years old. There are roughly 70,000 sheep in the Faroe Islands and 54,000 people.
The ratio has been st4ble, give or take, for 400 years. The oldest surviving law text written in Faroese is called the Seyðabrævið, the sheep letter. And it was issued in 1298 under Duke Hákon Magnuson of Norway to settle disputes over which man owned which hillside’s grazing rights. The letter is still, technically, the foundation of Faroese pastoral law.
A modern shepherd can cite its clauses in a property dispute. Seven valleys in the country still operate under collective shepherding arrangements in which neighbors share the rounding up and slaughter seasons. Behind many of the farmhouses stands a small timber shed built with gaps between the wall boards. It is called a hjallur.
It faces the prevailing wind. Inside it, a leg of lamb or mutton hangs on a h00k from October through to roughly June. The meat is not salted and not smoked. It dries slowly in the cold Atlantic wind, fermenting as it goes, developing a dense grain and a powerful flavor. The resulting food is skerpikjøt, wind dried fermented lamb, and it is shaved thin onto bread with butter, eaten at dinner, eaten at breakfast, served to guests, kept for winter.
The hjallur behind the house in Funningur currently holds one leg from the previous autumn. It will be finished, cut by cut, by the end of June. The next leg will go up in October. Inside the house, in a kitchen with a Norwegian cast iron stove, the farmer’s wife shaves skerpikjøt thin onto rye bread for lunch.
The slices are translucent at the edges, dark red at the center, the fat a dense cream. She has been preparing lunch this way since she married into the farm in 1988. The shavings go onto the bread with butter. The bread goes on the table. Her husband will be in from the hillside in 10 minutes. Above the village, the mountain of Slættaratindur rises to 882 m.
On clear days in summer, 17 of the country’s 18 islands are visible from the summit. The traditional hike is at midnight on the summer solstice. The hikers reach the top at roughly 2:00 a.m. and walk down in the light. Slættaratindur is the highest point in the Faroes. It is not, by European standards, a tall mountain.
It is simply the tallest one there is. West of Eysturoy, on the island of Vágar, the lake of Sørvágsvatn sits 142 m above the sea. The cliff on which is called Trælanípa, the slave cliff in Faroese, because, according to a tradition recorded by 19th century folklorists, this is where the Viking settlers threw slaves who could no longer work.
From a photograph taken at a particular angle from the edge, the lake appears to hang above the ocean, the cliff invisible beneath it. The walk from the village of Miðvágur takes roughly an hour. Sørvágsvatn, at 3.4 sq km, is the largest lake in the country. Most Faroese swimmers have never swum in it. It is cold.
Off the western coast of Vágar, the two sea stacks of Drangarnir stand between Tindhólmur and the shore. The taller, Stóri Drangur, is 71 m. Between them is an arch worn through the rock by the Atlantic. Until 2014, the stacks were visible from land only. A chartered boat tr.i.p from Sørvágur now brings visitors within a few meters of the arch.
The boats return at 4:00. Further north, the long, thin island of Kalsoy runs for 18 km north of Klaksvík. It is less than 3 km across at its widest point. The population is 136. At the northern tip, the Kallur Lighthouse, built in 1927 and automated in 1973, stands on a ridge above the sea cliffs. The footpath to it crosses active sheep pastures and takes approximately 90 minutes.
The sheep do not move for walkers. The walkers move for the sheep. And at Viðareiði, further north still, the white painted church stands directly below the cliffs of Enniberg. Enniberg rises 754 m straight out of the sea. It is the highest vertical sea cliff in Europe. The village has 350 residents. The church was built in 1892.
These houses have stood here for a long time. The walls are older. The language that was written down to describe them was written down later than either. At the southern tip of Streymoy, 6 km west of Tórshavn, along a single track road, the village of Kirkjubøur faces south across a strait of gray water toward the island of Hestur.
Three buildings stand above the shoreline. The first is a roofless stone sh3ll, the Magnus Cathedral, beg.un around the year 1300 and never completed. The walls stand 17 m at their highest point. The nave floor, open to the sky, has been gra.ss for 600 years. The second is Ólavskirkjan, a small, whitewashed Norwegian Romanesque church consecrated around 1111, still in use, still holding services.
And the third is Kirkjubøargarður, a low, tar black, turf roofed farmhouse that has been continuously inhabited since the 11th century. It is, by most reckonings, the oldest continuously lived in timber farmhouse in northern Europe. Kirkjubøargarður has belonged to the Patursson family for 17 generations.
The kitchen on the ground floor has a wooden floor worn into grooves where the chairs slide back from the table. At the long breakfast table on a morning in April, a member of the 18th generation spreads butter on bread in a room whose outer wall was felled from drift timber, Faroese pine being essentially nonexistent, and lifted into place before Columbus was born.
The coffee is in a thermos on a painted sideboard. The radio is on, low, in Faroese. Faroese was, for nearly the entire history of the country, an oral language. Written Danish was the language of church, of court, of the few schools that existed. Faroese was what people spoke to their sheep. It survived because people kept speaking it.
And because a 19th century Lutheran pastor named V. U. Hammershaimb, Wenceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb, born 1819, d1ed 1909, decided that a language without a written form was a language on its way out. In 1846, Hammershaimb published an orthography, a rulebook for spelling Faroese, modeled on Old Norse, deliberately archaic, legible across all the regional dialects.
It was not the simplest orthography. It was the one that held. Faroese schools today teach the language that Hammershaimb wrote down. The children at Kirkjubøargarður, when they learn to read, learn it from the letters he set down. East, in the working heart of Tórshavn, the peninsula of Tinganes runs out into the harbor for roughly 100 m.
The name means the Parliament Point. The buildings on it are tar painted, turf roofed timber, identical in silhouette to the warehouses around them. A visitor unfamiliar with the country can walk past the Prime Minister’s office without registering what it The Løgting has met on this peninsula for approximately 1,200 years, traditionally dated to around the year 825.
It is, on most counts, one of the three oldest continuously sitting parliaments in the world. The language of debate is Føroyskt, Faroese. The Seyðabrævið of 1298 was issued from these rocks. Faroese is, at any recent count, spoken by somewhere around 75,000 people in the world.
50,000 in the Faroes, the rest scattered through Denmark, Iceland, and further. It has two daily newspapers, a university since 1960, a national broadcaster, a literature that includes Heðin Brú’s 1940 novel, Feðgar á Ferð, translated as The Old Man and His Sons, which won more international attention than any Faroese book before or since.
The first complete translation of the Bible into Faroese was not published until 1949. 103 years between the orthography and the Bible. At Saksun, in the black tarred timber church built in 1858 above the tidal lagoon, the hymnbook on the pew is in Faroese. The congregation on a Sunday in spring is 14. They sing the hymns they’ve sung since their grandparents sang them.
The pastor preaches in Faroese. The book is open. At Vágar Airport, the country’s only international airport, built as a British military airstr.i.p in 1942, the departure board lists destinations in Faroese first, English below. In winter, roughly 30% of the scheduled flights are delayed by weather. The arrivals hall is small.
The signage is unmistakably a language. And at Klaksvík, on the island of Borðoy, the second town, population 5,400, home to Føroya Bjór, the country’s only brewery, founded in 1888, the language on the shop signs, in the bar conversations, on the radio in the taxi, is the language Hammershaimb wrote down. But not every part of Faroese life is admired from the outside.
In the harbor of Tórshavn, a morning in late July, the boats have been out since 6:00. The call comes at 9:15. It is not a siren in the modern sense. It is a message on a phone chain, a short notice on a local radio frequency, a ringing of an old bell at the harbor office. The Faroese word for the call is grindabøð.
The community that receives it knows what is being summoned. A pod of pilot whales has been sighted off the coast, and the men of the nearest fjord are being asked, by right and by practice, to help drive them to the beach. The grindadráp, the pilot whale h.unt, is recorded in Faroese law as far back as the Seyðabrævið of 1298.
In a typical year, between 600 and 800 whales are taken across the Faroese archipelago. In some years, the number drops to zero. In others, it rises past 1,500. When a pod is landed, the meat is distributed communally, not sold, not priced. It is weighed and divided according to a formula a thousand years old, adjusted for which village participated in the drive, which families need meat for the winter, which households have an elderly member unable to participate.
In a kitchen in Klaksvík on the afternoon of a grind, a woman wraps portions for three neighbors, including a man of 84, whose own portion she has cut slightly larger than the formula allows. She has done this on and off for 27 years. She does not call it tradition. She calls it what gets brought home. The Faroese painter Samal Joensen Mikines, born 1906 and dying in 1979, spent much of his career painting the grind a drop.
The canvases are dark, dense, often vi0lent. Men in oilskins, water red at the edge, the pod turning. They hang now in Listasavn Føroya, the National Gallery of the Faroes, in Tórshavn. They are not celebrations. They are documents. A country wishing to hide what it did would not have made the painter who painted it the national painter.
International campaigns against the h.unt began seriously in the mid 1980s. Sea Shepherd has sent vessels to Faroese waters in nearly every summer since. European newspapers run photographs of the beaches after a grind at roughly annual intervals. In 2021, a single drive at Skálabotnur landed 1,428 Atlantic white sided dolphins, not pilot whales, and not the intended target.
And the resulting outcry produced a formal review by the Faroese government. New internal guidelines, no ban. The h.unt continues. The Faroese argument, repeated in interviews over four decades, is the same. This is the single food they harvest in the quantities they need from an animal that is not endangered, using a method they have always used in a country that does not import most of what it eats.
The argument is not universally accepted. It is universally available. At Klaksvík Harbor, where roughly 30% of the country’s fish exports are processed, the boats returning from the North Atlantic carry cod, haddock, mackerel, farmed salmon. Fisheries account for approximately 95% of Faroese export value. The sea is not a recreation here.
It is the balance sheet. At the sea cliffs of Vestmanna, where Faroese islanders once harvested fulmar and puffin for winter food using ropes lowered from above, the boat tours now run daily in summer. The practice of cliff harvest has largely ended. The cliffs remain. On Nólsoy, population 220, the relationship to the sea is still the relationship to breakfast.
A man at the harbor this morning has brought in three haddock. He will fillet them on his kitchen counter. The bones go to the gulls. The boat engines in Klaksvík are idling down. The men walk back along the quay. The h.unt is what the rest of the world sees of the Faroes, sometimes first and sometimes only. It is not what the Faroes are.
It is something the Faroes do and have done for 700 years and have not yet chosen to stop doing. The country lives around it. Inland, a few streets above the harbor in Tórshavn, the parliament is in session. At Tinganes, the parliament point, where the Løgting has met since roughly the year 825, the government buildings are tar painted, turf roofed timber, as they have been since the 18th century.
The peninsula runs out into the harbor for perhaps 100 m. On the first working Tuesday of each month, the 33 members of the Løgting meet in the chamber at the northern end of the peninsula. The chamber holds 33 seats. The public gallery holds 14. The Løgting was, for centuries, an a.ssembly of free farmers. It was shut down in 1816 under Danish consolidation.
It was reest4blished in modified form in 1852. It now legislates in Faroese on Faroese matters, from fishery quotas to school curricula to the allocation of the country’s share of Nordic cultural funds. Its members are elected for four year terms. Aksel V. Johannesen of the Social Democratic Party took office as løgmaður, the head of the Faroese government, for the second time in late 2022.
His coalition has pursued further autonomy in a series of negotiations with Copenhagen. Including an updated arrangement on fisheries that was concluded in 2024. The question of full independence has been on the Faroese political calendar on and off since 1946. It has not yet been asked of the country as a whole.
The Faroes have, at time of writing, home rule, granted 1948, and the takeover act, 2005, under which matters of Faroese life are decided in Tórshavn. Denmark retains three things: defense, the currency, and foreign policy. Though in practice, the Faroes maintain their own trade offices in London, Moscow, and Brussels.
And have stayed outside the European Union, and before it the European Community, since Denmark joined in 1973. The Faroese króna is pegged to the Danish króna at one to one, and printed with Faroese landscapes on the notes. The pa.ssports in Faroese pockets are Danish. Down the peninsula from the Løgting, the capital is working.
In the harbor, the Smyril Line ferry has just come in from Hirtshals, the only pa.ssenger sea route to continental Europe. On the main commercial street, Niels Finsens gøta, the shops are opening. A hospital, a university founded in 1960, a national broadcaster, a football team that plays FIFA qualifiers and usually loses.
Atlantic Airways, the flag carrier, flies from Vágar to Copenhagen, Reykjavik, Edinburgh, and a shifting handful of summer destinations. Its pilots are all certified for the specific crosswind landings Vágar requires. On a still day, the approach is elegant. There are not many still days. On Mykines, summer population roughly 10, winter often zero, reachable only by a ferry that runs from May to August, the Atlantic puffins have been nesting on the cliffs for longer than the country has had a parliament.
There are approximately 5,000 breeding pairs on the island. The birds arrive in April. They leave in mid August. The island was nearly depopulated in the 1970s. Summer residents and bird watching tourism have sustained a village that would otherwise be a ruin. The path from the ferry landing to the lighthouse crosses one suspended bridge across a sea channel.
The bridge holds two people at a time. At Kallur, the northernmost lighthouse in the country, built in 1927 and automated in 1973, the path from the last farmhouse on Kalsoy crosses active sheep pastures and ends on a gra.ss spine that drops 700 m to the sea on either side. The lighthouse is a white painted concrete tower with a red cap.
It blinks every 5 seconds. A ship entering Faroese waters from the northwest sees its light before it sees the land. A ship from the northeast sees Enniberg first. Back in Tórshavn, the Løgting has adjourned for lunch. The members walk, most of them, to cafes a few streets away. They come back at 2:00. The kitchen on Tinghúsvegur has been open all day.
The guest is leaving. In the kitchen above the harbor in Tórshavn, the The pours the coffee for a second time. It is evening now. The thermos has been filled three times since morning. The leg of lamb on the counter is shorter by two meals. The cups have been rinsed and set back on the shelf. Her husband has been home for an hour.
The Smeral Line Ferry is leaving for Hirtshals at half past seven. The pilot whale h.unt will happen again. The parliament will sit on Tuesday. The pottery in Hoyvik is closed for the evening. The Morsø stove in Gjógv is still warm. Across 18 islands, the lighthouses have beg.un to blink. Kalsoy, Mykines, Nólsoy, Akraberg, and the rest.
Each on its own second, in no particular order. Outside the window, the harbor holds its boats.
