The Faraway Islands
By MORAY McLAREN WHEN a few years ago I returned from spending midsummer in the Faroe Islands I had to go straight down from my home in Scotland to London. There I discovered that some of my acquaintances imagined me to have emerged from lands of eternal snow and ice. Others, confusing the Faroes with Fair Isle between Shetland and Orkney, asked me if I had brought any jumpers with me; and a taxi driver, who was interested in my fishing gear and where I had been using it, got the letter " F " mixed up with " Ph " and said that he didn't know there were any islands, let alone trout fishing, off the coast of Egypt.
The main reason for the British lack of knowledge about this enchanting little Northern archipelago, halfway between the most northerly British land and Iceland, has been not its distance (the Faroes are scarcely any farther away from our own Shetland, Isles than Shetland is from Scotland) but, until the present, its fantastic .inaccessibility. If you failed to beg your way on to a trawler or commercial vessel, it took you nearly three weeks to reach the Faroes by a roundabout Journey through the Northern ports, and you had to wait another three weeks there before you started to come back again. This month the experiment of running the first passenger sailing between Lerwick in Shetland and Torshavn in the Faroes overnight has excited, in Scotland at least, the lovers of the North and, in particular, of the Northern Islands with golden prospects. It is as exciting for us as it would be for a lover of the South if someone had picked up Capri and —its weather and put it accessibly in the English Channel. 1 fell under the spell of the Faroes at first because of their difference from anything I had ekpected. As the spell grew stronger I realised that it was not the difference tliat was holding me, but the fact that the " Atlantic Islands " were offering me so much more than I had hoped for. Out of British soil due North over the rim of the world towards the Arctic Circle 1 The prospect held its fascinations for one, but those fascina- tions were, for a seasoned lover of the Hebrides and of our own Norse Islands, tinged with the feeling that one knew already something about where one was going to. The Faroes would be not unlike our own Outer Isles, our own Orkneys and Shetlands, but " only more so." The grey of the rocks would be greyer, the horizons wider, the seas apparently more limitless, the light more oblique, the colours perhaps a little bit more subtle, the inhabitants, with the added language difficulty, a little bit more reserved. On the contrary I When, with something like a gash from a huge invisible knife, the curtain of mist before Torshavn harbour was cut for us by an uprising gust of wind on the morning on which we arrived, it was like looking into a kaleidoscope. These were not subdued northern colours. The houses painted scarlet and green and yellow and purple, and any other tint that you can think of, against a background of mountains that cut off any prospect of limitless horizons, and that were themselves green or gold or black, and cliffs of purple or rose-pink, looked like a rainbow coming through a cloud. Here was luxuriance, not subtlety. Had the boat taken some wrong turning during the night we had been at sea, and landed us in the Mediterranean ? And then the clouds joined together again. The ambient grey returning, the sea birds calling through it, confirmed that we were in the North—as far North as we had been.
We had not been twenty-four hours on shore before we realised that it required no knife-like gash of wind to display to us the colours of the Faroese mind. The Faroese, as they show upon their houses, are a people who love colour where they can display and see it. They love colour in their behaviour too. They are amongst the most uninhibited and naturally gay people that I have ever met. Norse in appearance, history and language, there is said to be a faint touch of Celtic blood remotely in them. • But, from whatever cause it may spring, there is a distinct West of Ireland or Hebridean or even Spanish quality in their mentality. They are without the Norwegian melancholy or the sometimes slightly ponderous gaiety of the Danes. They are like Celts masquerading in Norse bodies in an archipelago on the rim of the Arctic Circle.
This leads to the only quality in them which can irritate the visitor whose time is not his own. This brave, industrious, independent little community has less sense of time than any other amongst whom I have spent a holiday or worked. At midsummer, time literally does seem to be suspended. The daylight never disappears, days merge into each other imperceptibly. Even the village church clocks stop working, whether because the ceaseless daylight,-mingled alternately with sunshine and mist, gets into their mechanism, or because no one remembers to wind them, I do not know. Kanska, the Faroese version of Mariana, assumes its sway.
But this is not a vicious failing. Indeed. springing as it probably does from their seasons of nearly endless days and nights, it is a small one as set against the Faroese achievements since this little archipelago has had, from the Danish govern- ment, internally at least, the right of running its own affairs. In forty years a population of just over 15,000 doubled itself. Arable land is year by year not only not allowed to recede, but is pushed up the hillsides. Faroese trade in fish and wool now extends all over Western Europe. And, incredible though it may seem, all this island vitality has succeeded in throwing up a literary revival in the Faroese language which only some 30,000 people in the whole world speak or understand. This is what I mean when I say that the spell of the Faroes gripped me first by reason of difference. For someone coming from the well-loved circumstances of his own 787 Scottish islands, what a difference it was to travel northwards to a not very distant other island group where colour, not greyness, filled the scene, where emigration had ceased, where the population was rising, where independent trade was on the increase, and where an ancient language was not only not dying, but had been revived, deliberately and consciously revived, by the scholars and the people themselves, to express upon their lips and tongues, as well as in their hearts, their own feeling for their country 1 For a Scottish island lover this may have been a difference with some sadness in it, but the longer I stayed in the Faroes the more I was heartened by the sense of finding here some- thing even more than I had hoped for. I had always loved the colours of the North. Well, here they were concentrated, glowing and laid out before me in the Faroes. I had always maintained that island life in the North was not doomed to extinction, but could revive of itself by the will of its own people, if those people willed it sufficiently to be trusted to live. Well, here was island life in the far North not only flourishing but positively efflorescing. I had always main- tained that ancient languages must not necessarily die if more than one person wanted them to live. Well, here was the most ancient Norse language in the world, which little more than a hundred years ago had been on the verge of becoming as extinct as Cortiish is now, spoken and vigorously spoken by a growing population—more naturally and more vigorously spoken than is Gaelic or Lowland Scots. Yes, I think for a Scotsman and a lover of islands, the most exciting thing about the Faroes was not the difference in them, which was so unexpected, but something much much more grateful—a sense of hope,
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