How the Faroese keep a dance that has no instrument

How the Faroese chain dance works without instruments

Tjóðsavnið describes the chain dance as resting on three things at once: the epic story of the ballad, the dance itself and the tune. The dancers join hands in a ring and move with a simple side-to-side step, which Visit Tórshavn notes is simple enough to keep going for several hours. When the floor is crowded the ring does not stay round; it swings into loops and wobbles inside the room. Nobody plays anything. One person leads the song by singing the opening words of each verse and the rest follow, joining the refrain. That leader is called the skipari in one account and the kvæðamaður in another, and in both the leader controls the dancing and is expected to know the whole ballad by heart.

The ballads, kvæði, are narrative. Some run to dozens of verses and some to a couple of hundred. They are sung in Faroese, or in Danish pronounced in the Faroese way, which is called Gøtudanskt. The oral tradition sorted its material into sagnir, historical tales, ævintýr, stories, and the kvæði sung to the dance. V. U. Hammershaimb, who published collections of them in 1851 and 1855, described the room in 1891:

The storyline of the ballad is attended by everybody with great interest.

A pleasant or moving turn in the story showed in the dancers' faces and steps, he wrote; they clenched their hands when a battle was sung and made cheering movements when it was won.

Where the dance came from is recorded differently depending on who is asked. Tjóðsavnið traces it to the medieval ring dance of Central Europe and says the Faroese form developed characteristics of its own. Visit Tórshavn gives its origin as Southern Europe. The Wikipedia article on Faroese culture adds that the ring dance was banned by the church elsewhere in Europe for its pagan origin and survived in the islands. None of the three gives a date for its arrival.

Before the nineteenth century, according to Tjóðsavnið, the dance and the ballads made up most of the secular entertainment in the islands. Few people could read, books were scarce, villages had little contact with each other and there were almost no instruments. Ballads were sung at indoor and outdoor work, at evening sittings in the smoke room and at every celebration, and they carried stories from abroad, local events and satire. Their part in giving Faroese a written form belongs to the history of the islands. Tjóðsavnið also traces the melodies forward: the tunes of the Faroese ballads and of the Danish ballads sung in the islands became material for Faroese choir and classical music and later for folk, pop, rock and metal.

Why the chain dance is losing its dancers

The heritage inventory entry, filed by the national chain dance association Sláið Ring on 5 November 2020 and updated on 22 March 2022, lists five places the dance is still done. Dancing associations meet through a season running from October to Shrovetide. Public dances are held around the islands a few nights a year. The dance appears at receptions and festivities, especially where visitors from abroad are present, and on those occasions the ballads chosen are short and easy. It turns up at weddings, birthdays and anniversaries. And it is on the curriculum of the public schools, where teachers are meant to teach the steps and a ballad or two, mostly between New Year and Shrovetide.

The same entry records the decline.

The school obligation is met unevenly. Tjóðsavnið writes that some schools do very little and others teach the basics, and that a teacher who belongs to a dancing association and draws pupils into one is rare. Children's dances at the associations are sometimes well attended, but children tend to stop coming in their teens and do not return as adults. Membership and attendance at the associations have fallen for decades and the median age of members is high.

The way the ballads are learned has changed with the numbers. Singing while working has gone, and so have the evening sittings. Ballads are now memorised from books or recordings, and the dancing organisations publish recordings for radio and television. Tjóðsavnið's own phrase for the result is that the dance now has "the status of a cultural treasure that must be preserved".

The version put on for visitors has its own listing. Visit Tórshavn lists a summer programme at Hotel Føroyar in Tórshavn, on Wednesday evenings from late June to mid-August, of a buffet of Faroese food with Faroese music, the chain dance and a saga. It is the setting the inventory describes as short and easy ballads for guests.

How Faroese became the language of school and church

After the Reformation Danish became the language of administration, the church and the schools, and Faroese stopped being written. It went on being spoken, and for about three hundred years its poems and stories passed on orally. According to nordics.info, the first Faroese texts of any substance were three ballads recorded by J. C. Svabo around 1770. Svabo designed a spelling for them based on his own dialect, and it did not last. V. U. Hammershaimb designed another in 1846, one that showed the language's Old Norse origins more clearly. The Wikipedia article on the language dates the written standard to 1854, published by Hammershaimb with the Icelandic grammarian Jón Sigurðsson. That standard is still in use, and it spells words by their history, so the letter ð is written and has no sound of its own.

The move into public life took most of the next century, and the dates depend on the source.

The clergyman Jákup Dahl, who lived from 1878 to 1944, is credited with getting Faroese spoken in church in place of Danish, and completed the 1961 Bible translation with Kristian Osvald Viderø.

What the Home Rule Act says about Danish

Section 11 of the Home Rule Act of 1948 reads that "Faroese is acknowledged as the principal language, but Danish shall be taught well and carefully, and Danish may be used as well as Faroese in public affairs." In cases of appeal every Faroese document must be accompanied by a Danish translation. Nordics.info records that Danish kept a status equal to Faroese in public affairs and that this remains controversial.

Broadcasting moved later than the schools. Until the 1980s public radio was mostly in Norwegian and Danish, which is why older Faroese often speak Norwegian as well, and now all radio and every local newspaper is in Faroese. About 5% of residents learn Danish as their first language. Danish and English are both compulsory at school, and films and television are often shown in English with Danish subtitles.

English has become a working language of its own in the villages tourists reach. Hanna Birkelund Nilsson of the University of Copenhagen found that residents of Saksun, a settlement of 13 inhabitants when the university reported the study in 2025, put up sharply worded signs in English in 2023 after tourists trampled the grass their sheep needed, and that the village has since changed course and promotes itself as a heritage site.

How the dialects divide the islands

Faroese has no official spoken standard. It is spoken across about 120 communities, and the Tórshavn dialect, although it is the capital's, has little evidence of prestige. Lucas Debes noted a north and south difference as early as 1673. The most detailed classification, by Hjalmar P. Petersen, divides the language into North-Western, Central, Northern and Southern varieties. The southern variety is the most distinct, and the Wikipedia article on the language links that, possibly, to distance and to the absence of the undersea tunnels that join most of the islands north of Sandur.

Which churches the Faroese belong to

The Færeyinga saga has Sigmundur Brestisson bringing Christianity to the islands in 999. Archaeology points earlier: a prayer-house ruin at Toftanes in Leirvík, called Bønhústoftin, and more than a dozen cross-carved slabs from Skúvoy suggest that Celtic Christianity may have arrived at least 150 years before. The Reformation in the islands was completed on 1 January 1540.

Most Faroese belong to the Lutheran state church, the Fólkakirkjan, which counted 79.7% of the population as members in official statistics for 2019. It was a diocese of the Church of Denmark until it became independent in 2007, in July of that year by Britannica's date. At the 2011 census 33,018 people, or 95.44% of those counted for the question, gave a Christian affiliation and 1,397, or 4.04%, gave none.

The second body arrived by way of Shetland. William Gibson Sloan, a member of the Plymouth Brethren, came to the Faroes from Shetland in 1865. The Brethren numbered thirty at the turn of the twentieth century, and around 10% of the population now belongs to the Open Brethren, Brøðrasamkoman. About 3% belong to the Charismatic Movement, whose largest church, Keldan, has 200 to 300 members. The Roman Catholic congregation has about 270 members and is part of the Diocese of Copenhagen. The islands have no organised Heathen community, which sets them apart from Denmark, Sweden and Iceland.

Why the pilot whale hunt is argued over

Records of whale drives in the Faroes go back to 1584, and the annual records of drives and strandings of pilot whales and other small cetaceans now cover more than 400 years. The hunt is called the grindadráp. It is non-commercial and organised at community level, and anyone may take part. When a pod is spotted near land, boats form a wide semicircle behind it and drive the whales slowly and quietly towards an authorised bay, where the stranded whales are killed. Faroese animal welfare law requires a quick kill, and the spinal lance now used as standard cuts the spinal cord and the main blood supply to the brain, which has reduced killing time to one or two seconds.

The hunt is regulated by the Faroese authorities and not by the International Whaling Commission, over a disagreement about the commission's legal authority to regulate cetacean hunts. The long-term average catch is around 800 pilot whales a year, and the Faroese government regards that as a sustainable catch. Animal rights groups, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society among them, describe the hunt as cruel and unnecessary on the ground that the Faroese no longer need it for food.

The meat carries a warning at home as well. Pilot whale meat and blubber are contaminated with mercury, and the advice recorded in the Wikipedia account is that adults eat no more than one or two meals a month, that women who are pregnant, nursing or planning a pregnancy within three months abstain, and that the liver and kidneys are not eaten at all.

On 12 September 2021 more than 1,420 white-sided dolphins were killed in a single drive. It caused controversy in the islands as well as abroad, and the government then set an annual quota for white-sided dolphins. Conservationists called on the United Kingdom to suspend its free trade agreement with the Faroes over it, and the UK government declined. An earlier boycott of Faroese produce over the hunt, in the years of the 1990s crash, is part of the history of the islands.

What Faroese food is dried and matured from

Traditional Faroese food is built on meat, seafood and potatoes, with few fresh vegetables. Mutton from Faroe sheep is the base of many meals. Skerpikjøt is mutton aged and dried in the wind until it is chewy, and the shed it hangs in, the hjallur, is a standard feature of many Faroese homes, above all in the villages. Ræst kjøt is mutton only partly dried, and ræstur fiskur is fish matured the same way. Dried fish is eaten widely.

The whale has its own dish. Tvøst og spik is pilot whale meat and blubber, eaten because a single kill feeds many meals, and garnatálg is the equivalent made with offal. Fresh fish is part of the ordinary diet, and so are seabirds, puffins among them, and their eggs.

How Faroese wool turned into national dress

Faroese handicraft was made from what the villages had, and that was mainly wool. Jumpers, scarves and gloves carry Nordic patterns, and each village has variations of its own that were handed down from mother to daughter. The Wikipedia account records a strong revival of Faroese knitting among young people, who knit updated versions of the old patterns in strong colours, and reads it as a way of keeping a tradition while many of them study and live abroad.

Lace knitting is the other strand. A Faroese lace shawl is shaped at the centre back by a gusset: two triangular side panels, a trapezoid back gusset, an edging and usually shaping at the shoulders. Women of every generation wear them, most often over the national costume.

The national dress uses the same materials. A man's waistcoat is made up by hand in bright blue, red or black wool, and its front is embroidered in coloured silk, often by a female relative, with Faroese flowers or herbs, before a row of solid silver buttons made in the islands is sewn on. Women wear embroidered shawls and pinafores that can take months to weave or embroider, an ankle-length skirt handwoven in black and red, a knitted black and red jumper and silver buttons, chains, brooches and buckles. A full outfit can take many years to assemble, and the women of a family often make it together.

How Faroese literature and music grew from the ballads

What Faroese writers wrote and in which language

Written Faroese literature is young because the written language is. The first Faroese novel, Bábelstornið by Regin í Líð, was published in 1909, and the second followed eighteen years later. In the 1930s Heðin Brú, from Skálavík on Sandoy, published three novels, among them Feðgar á ferð in 1940, translated into English as The Old Man and His Sons. The brothers Janus and Hans Andrias Djurhuus, born in Tórshavn in 1881 and 1883, wrote poems still printed in Faroese songbooks and school books.

Two of the best-known Faroese writers wrote in Danish. William Heinesen, who lived from 1900 to 1991, and Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen, who lived from 1900 to 1938 and wrote a single novel, Barbara, both published in Danish. Heinesen received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize. The poet Rói Patursson received it in 1986 for Líkasum, and he is the one Faroese-language writer to have done so. Guðrið Helmsdal's Lýtt lot of 1963 was the first collection of modernist Faroese poems, and the first by a woman.

Painting started late as well. The first Faroese art exhibition was held in Tórshavn in 1927, and painters such as Sámuel Joensen-Mikines and Ingálvur av Reyni came out of the twentieth century. The Nordic House in Tórshavn, which opened in 1983 after a Nordic competition in 1977 that drew 158 architects, is run by a steering committee of eight, three of them Faroese and five from the other Nordic countries.

How music moved from the ring to the stage

Traditional Faroese music was vocal. Fiddles and other instruments were found in Tórshavn in older days, and most imported instruments stayed popular there while the villages kept to the ballads and the dance. The islands have a classical ensemble, Aldubáran, and many choirs, Havnarkórið among them. The first Faroese opera, Sunleif Rasmussen's Í Óðamansgarði, based on a story by William Heinesen, had its premiere at the Nordic House on 12 October 2006. Havnar Jazzfelag was founded on 21 November 1975.

Two open-air festivals carry popular music through the summer, G! in Norðragøta in July and Summarfestivalurin in Klaksvík in August, and Summartónar programmes classical and contemporary music. Faroese singers have entered Eurovision for Denmark: Reiley in 2023, and Sissal in 2025, the first Faroese entrant to reach the final. In film, Katrin Ottarsdóttir made her debut in 1989 with Rhapsody of the Atlantic, and the Geytin awards for Faroese film have been presented at the Nordic House each December since 2012.

Why Faroese athletes compete under two flags

The Faroes belong to UEFA and FIFA and field their own football team, which won its first competitive match 1 to 0 against Austria in qualifying for the 1992 European Championship and beat Greece 1 to 0 in 2014. The islands also compete under their own flag at world and European swimming championships and at the Paralympics, where Faroese swimmers have competed since 1984 and Christina Næss won a gold medal in 1988. The Olympic movement admits only independent states. The islands applied to the IOC for membership in 1984, and the two Faroese Olympians so far, the rower Katrin Olsen in 2008 and the swimmer Pál Joensen in 2012, competed for Denmark.

The national sport is kappróður, the rowing race, with competitions held since at least the 1930s. The regattas run on weekends in June and July at seven places, each part of a regional festival called a stevna. The first is always at Klaksvík, at Norðoyastevna, on the first Saturday of June or sometimes the last Saturday of May. Jóansøka, around 24 June, alternates between Vágur and Tvøroyri on Suðuroy, the one venue that cannot be reached by car from Tórshavn and needs a two-hour ferry crossing.

The last race is always rowed in Tórshavn on 28 July, whatever the day of the week, on the eve of Ólavsøka. The national day falls on 29 July and marks the death of Saint Olaf, and the celebrations in the capital run from the evening of the 28th to the 31st. The day before is a half working day for members of some unions, and the day itself is a full holiday for most of them.