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. |
Részletek a könyvből
1 - 5 találat összesen 43 találatból.
... Legend / 41 PART TWO: Toward a National Culture in an Odd Danish Province 4. A Great Deal of Fuss for an Omelet: A Precarious Stability, 1709– 1816 / 65 5. What Better Thing? The Copenhagen Connection, 1814-1855 / 89 6. The Transition ...
... legends and ballads it runs back a thousand years or more—not, to be sure, without thin spots and breaks and shadings off toward myth, but on the whole fairly continuously since the late sixteenth century. Oral transmission is fading ...
... legends, 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 ...
... legend, the taxes he raised proved too burdensome and provoked something like a civil war, in which he was killed. In fact he died in Bergen in 1308, though quite possibly he had been driven out of the Faroes when his attempt to ...
... legends call him “the last Catholic priest on Sandoy,” but he was almost certainly Sandoy's priest toward the end of the fourteenth century; or so it seems from a letter dated 1412, in which Bishop Jóan and Kálvur's son Harald (who was ...
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 |