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.

An annotated bibliography of Old Norse-Icelandic studies for the years 1981-83, offering a quick guide to recent work.

Making the Middle Ages Making the Middle Ages is series of monographs, and occasionally of collections, which aims to open up the rapidly growing and relatively newly recognised field of medievalism - the post-medieval construction of the Middle Ages in scholarship and the arts - to a readership of academics, graduate students and , in the case of some volumes, undergraduates or the general reader. The series is devoted to scholarship in the cultural influence of the Middle Ages on England, mainland Europe, and North America from the sixteenth century to the present day. It focuses on two perspectives of medievalism: (i) Mediavistik the origings and history of medieval studies, both inside and outside the academy; and (ii) Mediavismus, the creation and recreation of the Middle Ages in post-medieval art, history, literature and popular culture. Few speakers of English have ever been able to read the Icelandic sagas in the original language, and published saga translations have played a major role in shaping attitudes towards Viking-Age Scandinavia and the great literary achievements of medieval Iceland in the English-speaking world. This book is the first publication to provide an extended examination of the history and development of Icelandic saga translations into English from their beginnings in the eighteenth century to today. It explores reasons for undertaking saga translation, and the challenges confronting translators. Chapters are devoted to the pioneering saga translations, the later Victorian and Edwardian eras, the often-neglected period of the two World Wars and their aftermath, and the upsurge of saga translation in the second half of the twentieth century. The contributions of individual translators and teams are reviewed, from James Johnstone in the 1780s through major Victorians such as Samuel Laing, George Webbe Dasent, and William Morris, distinguished twentieth-century figures such as Lee M. Hollander, Gwyn Jones, Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, and George Johnston, and the great co-operative project which produced The Complete Sagas of Icelanders at the century's end. The book concludes with saga translation facing interesting new possibilities and challenges, not least those generated by information technology. Book jacket.