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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1 - 5 találat összesen 27 találatból.
... ballads relating events of the Viking Age. But somehow I did find it remarkable that, when an American friend wrote to ask me about Magnús Heinason (a sixteenth-century coastguard and freebooter whom Ibsen had once contemplated writing ...
... ballads, and folktales. Chapter 3 considers several such legends, particularly one about a mid-seventeenth-century outlaw named Snaebjørn and his illegitimate son Jákup. I argue that the legend's imagery, semisupernatural elements, and ...
... ballads and wrote a Faroese-Danish-Latin dictionary, was the son of the priest on Vágar, Hans Christophersen Svabo.” A further reason the Faroes were not danicized was that the margin of survival was narrow; immigrants had to adopt the ...
... ballads, though these were more closely associated with dancing at festival times." Kvoldsetur were thus a primary institution of remembrance. They remained an established feature of Faroese life until the late nineteenth century, when ...
... ballad. When it is over, all fell silent, both the man who had led the ballad, and the men and women who took up the ... ballads at special times, of course, but the Faroese identity, insofar as it differed from that of “other Danes ...
Tartalomjegyzék
1 | |
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 |