The Faroe Islands: Interpretations of HistoryUniversity Press of Kentucky, 2014. júl. 15. - 280 oldal 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. |
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... (Jakobsen 1907:23-24). The Løgting complied. The Seyðabraev, or “Sheep-Letter,” followed in 1298." The Seyðabraev codified earlier Faroese land laws, which the crown thus recognized as acceptable local variations from continental ...
... [Jakobsen 1898-1901:98-99) There is a final, legal aspect of Faroese society's conservatism after the Reformation, a reflection of both its perennially precarious ecological base and the increasing power of the Danish crown. Faroese law ...
... Jakobsen comments in the introduction to the great collection of legends and folktales he made in the 1890s, “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Faroese popular culture [almues kultur) and spiritual life . . . were chiefly ...
... Jakobsen collated associated and variant tales; dubious as such editing is by modern standards, it surely lends them in their written form Something of the air of collective composition they must have had when people took turns telling ...
... Jakobsen's collection is concerned, is what he called huldusagnir, or elf legends, in which the elvish huldufólk, a gray, pagan, half-magical people of the outfields play a role. In discussing the elf legends, Jakobsen notes that ...
Tartalomjegyzék
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7 | |
Toward a National Culture in an Odd Danish Province | 65 |
Specters and Illusions | 173 |
Governance and Governors | 199 |
Notes | 205 |
References | 231 |
Index | 249 |