The subsequent economic collapse put a stop to imports. People began to look inwards again. There was a huge revival of Faroese knitting, which had once been a cash crop as important to the farmers as the netting of seabirds (prized by the locals like grouse and woodcock are by British foodies). Ludvig’s designs were selling all over the world even before The Killing thrust them onto TV screens, and last year the knitting festival in Fuglafjørdur attracted 400 visitors – more than 100 of them from overseas – to seminars and workshops held in the cottages of the little fishing port.
Barbara Fish HouseØivind Haug
Jón Tyril, who organises Hoyma, a music event in which 10 houses in the village of Gota host concerts over the course of a winter’s day, says the financial crisis made the Faroese reconsider their lives. ‘It sparked a change. People in the islands became more interested in their heritage: in knitting, in food and in music.’
The Faroese have a great tradition of unaccompanied singing (a shortage of wood meant it was difficult to make musical instruments and the first church organ didn’t arrive until the 1850s). They sang on fishing boats, and while mending nets in the harbour.
At Anna and Oli Rubeksen’s elegant house in Velbastadur, where the couple cooks five-course meals for small groups of visitors, the local choir files into the living room to sing a song about a maid going off to milk the cows. I listen and gaze out through the picture window. Almost every place you stand in the Faroes has an amazing view – even the islands’ only jail looks down the length of a fjord – but with the sun slowly setting, this is one of the best. Across the Hestsfjørdur, today as placid as cream, lies Hestur, an island four miles long and, from this perspective at least, apparently made up almost entirely of rock face. A tiny village of painted houses clings tenaciously to a tiny patch of barely visible flat ground between the cliffs and the sea. You feel that if you look away for a few seconds then back again, it will have fallen in and sunk. Koltur, Hestur’s near neighbour, is only a third of the size but even craggier, dominated by a massive peak that rises 1,600ft out of the water, dwarfing the one farmstead the island sustains. Beyond is the southern coast of Vágar and the mighty Traelanipa cliff, from which the Vikings used to send old or sickly slaves ‘home’ by flinging them off the edge and into the sea.