We had never heard of Fríðrikur Petersen until we went on a boat bound for the southern islands. The man who sat in the corner of the passenger lounge hummed quietly as the small vessel tussled with the high waves. He hummed and he hummed, then he smiled the gracious smile that comes only with great age and said “I never knew Fríðrikur myself. And more’s the pity too. He died the year before I was born.”
To the west the fierce buttresses of Stóra Dímun prodded the Faroese skies. And still the boat pushed hard against the wild sea, and still the old man hummed. And then he told of how Fríðrikur Petersen wrote the first Faroese national anthem, and hummed the tune again. Petersen’s anthem was called “Eg oyggjar veit” (‘I know the isles’) and served as the islands’ patriotic song until the nineteen thirties.
“Now let me tell you about Jóannes Patursson,” said the man, pausing to take a sip of coffee, and glancing out across the rough waters to the cliffs of Stóra Dímun, now only barely visible in the distance. “So many good men died on those cliffs,” he said in a quiet tone of reverence. Jóannes Patursson, it turned out, was not one of them. But Patursson secured a place in the annals of Faroese history by taking a tough stand against Danish rule. Or, rather, by refusing to stand when his compatriots rose to toast the Danish motherland. For Patursson, the question of móðurland was not negotiable. He was born in the Faroes, lived in the Faroes, and it was quite clear to Patursson that the Faroes were his motherland. “Eina móður vil eg eiga,” said the old man, quoting a snippet of Patursson’s poetry affirming that none of us need two mothers.
“Now look over there,” said the sage, encouraging us to follow him out onto the open deck of the boat. “You thought the cliffs on Stóra Dímun were wild beyond belief. But they are tame compared to the buttresses on Lítla Dímun. See over there.”
The 19 principal islands of the Froes are marked on this map. All but two are still inhabited.
And we looked and in the distance we saw a tiny island so inaccessible from the sea that noone has ever lived there. And yet there is no-one in the Faroes who cannot tell a tale or two about Lítla Dímun, or its big sister Stóra Dímun which, contrary to all prevailing logic, is still inhabited. No regular ferry service ever goes to either Dímun, so the single family that farms on the larger of the two islands is utterly dependent on the helicopter that on three days each week buzzes down from the skies to bring post and provisions to this lonely outpost of Faroese life. “When I was a lad, there must have been more than a dozen folk on Stóra Dímun,” explains the old man. “But they’ve gone. Just as in Mykines, they are leaving. And in Fugloy too.” And then the man was silent, and the last Dímun was swallowed up in the mist.
If you want to get to the heart of what it means to be Faroese, you have to get out of Tórshavn. The capital is a pretty enough place, to be sure. Indeed, there is probably no other European capital that comes close to matching Tórshavn for its homespun villagelike charm. Unpretentious and sleepy Tórshavn with its lovely jumble of black-tarred cottages on rocky Tinganes, the promontory that juts out into the harbour, is a wonderful introduction to the Faroes.
If you want to get to the heart of what it means to be Faroese, you have to get out of Tórshavn.
But the soul of these islands lies elsewhere. Ask the men working on the dockside in Tórshavn where they come from, and they will tell you they are from Funningur or Kirkja, from Saksun or Sumba, all wee slips of places where grass grows on the roofs of long abandoned barns, where the church is more often locked than open, and where each winter the snow drifts deep. “Of course, I’ve not been back to Kirkja for over twenty years,” admitted one man from the remote northern island of Fugloy, evidently oblivious to the fact that the remote bygd where he was born and lived the first fifteen years of his life is only half an hour from Tórshavn by helicopter.
But hope and faith in the Faroes are something of the mind, not commodities that can be measured in kilometres or governed by the dictates of ferry schedules and helicopter timetables. Faith in the purity of the Faroese experience, mediated through a thousand years of history, nurtures hope for the future. Hope that this remote island archipelago will still be making its mark in another thousand years. Loyalty to distant places, to the lonely bygd where your grandparents or even your great-grandparents lived, helps forge identity.
“We used to sit round the hearth in the roykstova and tell tales,” said the man with a smile, on that long boat-ride to the south. “That’s where I heard about the huldufólk, that’s where I learnt about the elves and that’s how I heard about the wild sheep on Lítla Dímun and about the men who fell to their deaths on Stóra Dímun.”
We said that after exploring the southern isles by boat, we might fly west to Mykines. “No, no,” said the man, now not with a the helicopter to Mykines,” he warned. “You must go by boat. Last time I went there, I was stuck for a week.”
The Faroese clearly love being stranded. When Súsanna Patursson (yes, sister of Jóannes, for everyone in the Faroes is related) wrote the firstever play in Faroese, she gave it the title “Veðurføst”, a quintessentially Faroese word which means being stranded by bad weather.
That capacity not merely to endure but to enjoy being stranded is part of the Faroese experience, a national attribute that doubtless came in handy this spring when volcanic ash from Iceland drifted endlessly over the Faroes, disrupting air traffic for far longer than anywhere on the European mainland. And Mykines, it seems, is not merely a dot on the map but more a state of mind, a place in the Faroese psyche that hovers between cartographic reality and legend, a place where the myth of inaccessibility can be cherished until next time the Atlantic Airways helicopter is heard in the far distance coming in with supplies and visitors.
We never did get to land on the southern islands on that journey, for our boat was driven back by the high seas to Tórshavn. The storyteller on the boat was delighted by this instance of nature triumphing over Faroese ingenuity. “I told you this might happen,” he said. And then he hummed and he smiled. And told us more about Fríðrikur Petersen and Jóannes Patursson. He told us of the priest who slipped to his death on Stóra Dímun, and he talked of the priest who went to Mykines in winter and had to stay for a month. He talked of poets, and of one in particular, a man called Janus Djurhuus, who went to Denmark, missed his island homeland and wrote hauntingly beautiful verse about the Faroes.
The old man recited “Ver sterk mín sál” (‘Be strong my soul’) and then he talked of the other face of the Faroes, the places far from Tórshavn, of empty churches, of the cold silence in the bygdir where life had ebbed away. And he hummed and he smiled and spoke of seeing the house where once he had lived buried in deep winter snow. “It was strange seeing it like that,” he said. But I dared not venture too close, for then I might have disturbed the huldufólk.”
Only in the Faroes. Only here, in these stormy northern isles is so much faith, so much hope, invested in every snowdrift.
***
Fríðrikur Petersen (1853–1917) was born in Saltnes on the Faroese island of Eysturoy, and devoted his working life to the Faroese national church (Fólkakirkjan) which he served as a priest and later dean. He was for twenty-five years a member of the Faroese parliamentary assembly (the Løgting). He broke new ground by offering prayers in Faroese rather than Danish. He produced modern Faroese translations of many traditional prayers, including the ‘Our Father’. Petersen also wrote the text that served for half a century as the first national anthem for the islands. He died in 1917.
Jóannes Patursson (1866–1946) was born and brought up on the Kirkjubøur estate we featured in hidden europe 2 (2005). Nowhere else in the Faroes is laden with such historical meaning, so no surprise perhaps that Patursson became one of the leaders of the nationalist movement that emerged in the Faroes in the closing years of the nineteenth century. His poem “Nú er tann stundin komin til handa” (‘Now the hour has come when we must link arms’) became a clarion call for Faroese freedom from Denmark. Through his writing and his political engagement, Patursson was a radical force in Faroese life for fifty years.
Janus Djurhuus (1881–1948) was the first poet ever to publish a book of Faroese language poetry. Inspired as a child by Jóannes Patursson’s “Nú er tann stundin komin til handa”, Djurhuus went on to write poetry that revealed to the wider world the innate stature and grace of the Faroese language. Djurhuus was an accomplished translator, and he translated many Latin and Greek classics into Faroese.
Súsanna Patursson (1864–1916) was born on the same farm at Kirkjubøur as her younger brother Jóannes. Súsanna was a pioneering feminist and activist who wrote the first ever play penned in the Faroese language and founded Oyggjarnar (‘The Islands’), a magazine for Faroese women which was for a while the sole Faroese language periodical published in the islands.
