The Faroe Islands are a group of 18 small islands located in the North Atlantic Ocean, between Scotland and Iceland. The islands are known for their rugged natural beauty, including steep cliffs, rolling hills, and expansive fjords. The islands have a population of around 50,000 people, with the majority living in the capital city of Tórshavn. Despite their small size, the Faroe Islands have a rich history and culture. The islands were first settled by the Viking people in the 9th century, and today, they maintain strong ties to their Viking heritage. The Faroe Islands are also known for their traditional fishing industry, which has been a vital part of the island's economy for centuries. Visitors to the Faroe Islands can explore ancient ruins, take part in traditional music and dance, and enjoy the stunning natural scenery that make the islands one of Europe's best-kept secrets.

Stranded in a stormy corner of the North Atlantic midway between Norway and Iceland, the Faroe Islands are part of "the unknown Western Europe"—a region of recent economic development and subnational peoples facing uncertain futures. This book tells the remarkable story of the Faroes' cultural survival since their Viking settlement in the early ninth century. At first an unruly little republic, the islands soon became tributary to Norway, dwindled into a Danish-Norwegian mercantilist fiefdom, and in 1816 were made a Danish province. Today, however, they are an internally self-governing Danish dependency, with a prosperous export fishery and a rich intellectual life carried out in the local language, Faroese. Jonathan Wylie, an anthropologist who has done extensive field work in the Faroes, creates here a vivid picture of everyday life and affairs of state over the centuries, using sources ranging from folkloric texts to parliamentary minutes and from census data to travelers' tales. He argues that the Faroes' long economic stagnation preserved an archaic way of life that was seriously threatened by their economic renaissance in the nineteenth century, especially as this was accompanied by a closer political incorporation into Denmark. The Faroese accommodated increasingly profound social change by selectively restating their literary and historical heritage. Their success depended on domesticating a Danish ideology glorifying "folkish" ways and so claiming a nationality separate from Denmark's. The book concludes by comparing the Faroes' nationality-without-nationhood to the contrasting situations of their closest neighbors, Iceland and Shetland. The Faroe Islands is an important contribution to Scandinavian as well as regional and ethnic studies and to the growing literature combining the insights and techniques of anthropology and history. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, it will also appeal to scholars in other fields and to anyone intrigued by the lands and peoples of the North.

This book presents a comprehensive, contrastive account of the phonological structures and characteristics of Icelandic and Faroese. It is written for Nordic linguists and theoretical phonologists interested in what the languages reveal about phonological structure and phonological change and the relation between morphology, phonology, and phonetics. The book is divided into five parts. In the first Professor Árnason provides the theoretical and historical context of his investigation. Icelandic and Faroese originate from the West-Scandinavian or Norse spoken in Norway, Iceland and part of the Scottish Isles at the end of the Viking Age. The modern spoken languages are barely intelligible to each other and, despite many common phonological characteristics, exhibit differences that raise questions about their historical and structural relation and about phonological change more generally. Separate parts are devoted to synchronic analysis of the sounds of the languages, their phonological oppositions, syllabic structure and phonotactics, lexical morphophonemics, rhythmic structure, intonation and postlexical variation. The book draws on the author's and others' published work and presents the results of original research in Faroese and Icelandic phonology.

Introduction: Dead man talking -- Prologue to history -- Gemini, the twins: Faroese and Icelandic -- East is East: heralding the birth of Danish and Swedish -- The ties that bind: Finnish is visited by Swedish -- The black death comes for Norwegian: Danish makes a house call -- Faroese emerges -- Sámi, language of the far North: encounters with Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish -- Epilogue: the seven sisters now and in the future.