Dizzy Rascal

WITH ITS DYED-IN-THE-WOOL WAYS, THE FAROE ISLANDS WAS DOING HOMESPUN WAY BEFORE IT BECAME HIP. THE REST OF THE WORLD MAY HAVE ITS EVERY INCH SURVEYED BY GOOGLE STREET VIEW, BUT THE MISTY ARCHIPELAGO JUST LAUNCHED ITS OWN MAPPING SYSTEM—WITH CAMERAS ATTACHED TO SOME OF ITS 80,000 SHEEP.

- Harry Pearson

When British author WG Collingwood chanced upon the Faroe Islands while sailing to Iceland in 1897, he thought them enchanted, declaring the archipelago a natural paradise. Looking out across the rocks—speckled with green, grey and rust lichen-like bells of Donegal tweed—towards the red, blue and cream houses of the village of Gjógv, the waves of Djupini Sound thrashing against the surrounding cliffs, the white-etched peaks of Kalsoy barely visible through the spray, it’s easy to see what Collingwood meant. Admittedly, it’s not the sort of paradise in which people could comfortably live while wearing an apron of fig leaves. The breezes off the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea are rarely balmy, the local rivers prefer a roar to a babble, and even in mid-May, the snow drives across the peak of Slættaratindur and forms in three-foot drifts upon which mountain hares, still in their winter coats, scamper.

No, this is the sort of ascetic paradise the early Celtic Christian monks—who preached to seals and allowed blackbirds to nest in the palms of their hands— would have recognized when they arrived here in the 17th century. Like the British islands of Iona and Lindisfarne, the Faroes are green, isolated, wild and numinous, purified by salt winds. It’s a place where you feel small in a large universe. Standing in the lashing rain by the turf-roofed church in Saksun, watching waterfalls cascade down the craggy knolls that surround it, mist swirling up from the Dalsa River and the foaming sea pounding into the tidal lagoon, you wouldn’t be at all surprised if Odin appeared before you in the form of a raven.