Tim Ecott has always been drawn to islands, and the seas that surround them: \u2018I once ran away from England to live in the Seychelles so that I could scuba dive obsessively in the Indian Ocean,\u2019 he writes at the beginning of Eva and the Island. \u2018The tropical humidity and seductive blue water drew me into its spell.\u2019 Gradually his love for what he calls \u2018the torrid zone\u2019 faded, and he found himself attracted to \u2018the higher latitudes\u2019. He decided to spend time on all the inhabited islands in the Faroes, including the smallest, Stora Dimun, \u2018a frayed and crumbling chunk of basalt\u2019 covering \u2018just over one square mile\u2019, which has \u2018the qualities of a secret kingdom\u2019.<\/p>\n
What better way to spend an evening in good company than eating sheep\u2019s heads and singing?<\/p>\n
Stora Dimun used to be home to 35 people, but today there are only two human inhabitants \u2013 a woman called Eva, whose family have farmed the island for eight generations, and her husband, Jogvan Jon. Even their two children, Dogg and Sproti, have left. Not surprisingly, other Faroese islanders regard it with suspicion: \u2018Naughty children were warned \u201cBehave yourself, or you will be sent to Dimun,\u201d\u2019 according to Ecott. \u2018Not everyone will feel at home here,\u2019 Jogvan Jon says, \u2018but for those that understand it, there\u2019s nowhere like it.\u2019 Ecott agrees: \u2018I have met magic here, if not wizards.\u2019 He doesn\u2019t say exactly what he means by magic, and perhaps he can\u2019t: doing so would be at odds with what drew him there in the first place.<\/p>\n
Eva and the Island is not a memoir of fleeing to the north, like The Outrun, Amy Liptrot\u2019s account of escaping addiction by returning to her childhood home in the Orkneys. Stora Dimun is not a destination on a personal journey of discovery, or a refuge. It is the kind of place that renders such ideas irrelevant. Ecott relishes the sense that \u2018the razor-thin boundary between life and eternity is visible from the kitchen window\u2019, and seeks to emulate the characteristic of the Faroese, who value \u2018understatement, modesty and a relatively low-key attitude to expressing emotions in public\u2019. Vanity is discouraged. The Nordic precept of janteloven (the Law of Jante) \u2018enforces humility, and a lack of ego\u2019. Self-abnegation, rather than self-fulfilment, seems to be the goal \u2013 though even an \u2018unemotional Englishman\u2019 like Ecott cannot help standing out in such an environment.<\/p>\n
This is partly due to his ineptitude: when he is required to wring the neck of a fulmar, he pulls so hard that he takes its head off, resulting in a \u2018small vertical fountain of blood spraying over my hands\u2019. He also plays up to the comic stereotype of the Englishman abroad. His expensive walking boots and rain gear are not only garish but dangerous \u2013 if you trip or slip on the slopes, the locally made woollen clothes might slow you down, but waterproof nylon will speed your descent to the cliffs.<\/p>\n
Yet Ecott devotes himself so patiently and wholeheartedly to the Faroes that he begins to feel like he belongs. Walking back to his hotel in the capital, Torshavn, one snowy night after the annual Sheep\u2019s Head Banquet, he has a distinctly Faroese epiphany, induced by \u2018the wintery beauty of the tiny capital, amplified by a full stomach and, possibly, the afterglow of a glass or two of schnapps. It wasn\u2019t possible to imagine a better way to spend an evening in good company than eating sheep\u2019s heads and singing.\u2019 Later, he arrives on Stora Dimun by helicopter as a storm descends. He knows he won\u2019t be able to leave. But the thought doesn\u2019t scare him: \u2018Dimun feels like the safest place in the world.\u2019<\/p>\n
Again, he doesn\u2019t say why, but by this point it doesn\u2019t matter: Ecott wanted to immerse himself in the rhythms and textures of life on the island, and having done so, he wants to make the reader do the same.\u00a0 He describes the \u2018small chores\u2019 of daily life \u2013 \u2018cutting turnips, fetching silage, sweeping the byres clean of dung and spoiled hay\u2019 \u2013 and the more demanding tasks of raising and slaughtering the animals. Otherwise, his attention is devoted to the seabirds that are the true owners of the island. Many are described in stand-alone chapters, illustrated by Ecott\u2019s wife, Jessica. He is fascinated by the \u2018piratical\u2019 skuas, who are powerful enough to chase sheep away. But he feels the greatest affinity with the less obtrusive birds \u2013 the \u2018tiny flying shadows\u2019 of the petrels, or the rock pipits, the commonest resident bird. These look as if they are \u2018using their wings to hop through the air\u2019, and land near him when he sits on the high plateau \u2013 \u2018tiny spirits dancing on the edge of the abyss\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tim Ecott has always been drawn to islands, and the seas that surround them: \u2018I once ran away…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[4985,43,69247,69248,14669,69249,43276,69250,9590],"class_list":["post-145199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-faroe-islands","tag-farming","tag-faroe-islands","tag-humility","tag-isolation","tag-loneliness","tag-memoir","tag-seabirds","tag-stora-dimun","tag-torshavn"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/117089112475205855","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}