The Faroe Islands' history: the vote that became a list of powers

Who reached the Faroe Islands before the Norse

The first people on the islands left no names. Archaeological studies published in 2021 found burnt grains of domesticated barley and peat ash laid down in two phases, the first between the mid-fourth and mid-sixth centuries and the second between the late sixth and late eighth, and sheep DNA in lake-bed sediments dated to around the year 500. Barley and sheep do not cross the North Atlantic by themselves. Scandinavians began using sails only around 750, so the study concluded that the settlers more probably came from Scotland or Ireland.

The written record starts with an Irish monk. Around 825 Dicuil described, in De mensura orbis terrae, a group of small islands two days and a night's sail north of Britain, separated by narrow channels, where hermits from Ireland had lived for nearly a hundred years until Norse pirates drove them out and left the islands full of sheep and sea-birds. The place names keep the same order of arrival: Paparøkur near Vestmanna refers to the Papar, and Vestmanna itself is short for Vestmannahøvn, the harbour of the Westmen, the Norse word for men from Ireland and Scotland.

Many of the Norse settlers came by way of the communities around the Irish Sea, the Northern Isles and the Hebrides, and brought Gaelic thralls with them. Færeyinga saga names Grímr Kamban as the first settler. His first name is Norse and his second Gaelic, and the two surviving versions of the saga disagree on whether he arrived in the reign of Harald Fairhair, between 872 and 930, or long before it. Faroese kept Middle Irish words for buttermilk, for a bull and for outfield pasture.

A runestone found at Sandavágur on Vágoy records the other stream. It says that Thorkil Onundsson, an eastman from Rogaland, settled first in that place.

How the assembly on Tinganes lost its lawmaking power

The earliest sources put the islands' assembly on Tinganes, a headland in what is now Tórshavn. Nobody lived there at the time, and the custom was to hold a ting on neutral, uninhabited ground so that no family met with an advantage. Its founding is undocumented. Færeyinga saga treats it as long established by the middle of the 10th century, when it recounts in detail a dispute there between the chieftains Havgrímur and Einar Suðuroyingur that ended in the exile of Eldjárn Kambhøttur.

The assembly made law and judged cases, and there was no executive to carry out what it decided: the families did that themselves. The Løgting's own history describes a free assembly of the wealthier farmers presiding over a society of about 4,000 people and 60,000 sheep in the Viking Age, with a president, the løgsøgumaður, who had no vote.

Christianity arrived as an instrument of annexation. Sigmundur Brestisson, baptised as an adult by King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway, was sent back to take possession of the islands for the Norwegian crown and to convert them. His rival, Tróndur í Gøtu, was converted under threat of decapitation, and Sigmundur was later murdered. When Tróndur died in 1035 the Viking Age in the Faroes ended and Leivur Øssursson, Sigmundur's son-in-law, became liege lord under King Magnus I. The islands remained a kind of self-governing society for roughly another 150 years. A diocese was set up at Kirkjubøur on southern Streymoy and had 33 Catholic bishops, and the Gothic cathedral begun there in the 13th century was never completed.

The change in the assembly came from Norway's kings. Magnus VI introduced the Norwegian Land's Law in 1274, and from then on the ting was a gathering of representatives from six local vártings with judicial authority only. Its president, now called the løgmaður, became a judge appointed by the king. On 24 June 1298 the islands received the Seyðabrævið, the Sheep Letter, a statute on sheep breeding and the earliest constitutional document they hold.

Around 1380 the Faroes passed with Norway under the Danish crown, keeping a status of their own as former Norwegian territory, and the assembly took the name Løgting. It kept some influence over legislation and administration until Frederick III introduced absolute monarchy in 1660, and in 1816 it was abolished. Its archives survive from 1615 to 1816, and with the Sheep Letter they give the Løgting a documented record running from 1298.

Why a royal trade monopoly ran the islands

From the 14th century all Faroese commerce had to pass through Bergen so that the crown could collect customs. The Reformation tightened the arrangement. In 1537 Christian III gave the German trader Thomas Köppen exclusive rights to trade with the islands, on conditions that goods be bought at their market value and that the traders deal fairly with the Faroese, and the conditions were often ignored. Christian III also brought in Lutheranism, which took five years to complete: Danish replaced Latin in the church, church property passed to the state and the bishopric at Kirkjubøur was abolished. The nordics.info account of the language draws the consequence. Danish became the language of administration and of the church, and Faroese essentially died out as a written language.

The monopoly changed hands and the supply of goods worsened. Most Faroese wool, fish and meat went to the Netherlands at fixed prices, shortages followed, and smuggling and piracy spread. The crown then gave the islands to the courtier Christoffer Gabel, and after him to his son Frederik, as a personal feudal estate, and Gabel rule was harsh enough that in 1708 the islands and the monopoly were returned to the central government. Britannica dates the administrative separation from Norway to 1709, when the islands were attached to the diocese of Zealand and became a Danish royal trade monopoly, which it says inhibited economic development.

Raiders came by sea as well. English adventurers raided the islands in the 16th century, and Magnus Heinason of Streymoy, sent by Frederick II to clear the seas, is still the subject of songs and stories. Barbary corsairs raided for slaves between the 16th and 18th centuries, among them a raid on Suðuroy in the summer of 1629.

The monopoly was abolished on 1 January 1856. Large-scale fishing followed in the second half of the century, the Faroese were given access to Danish waters in the North Atlantic, living standards improved and the population grew.

What the Treaty of Kiel decided without the islanders

The union of Denmark and Norway ended with the Treaty of Kiel in 1814. Norway went to the King of Sweden, and the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, which had come to the Danish crown as Norwegian possessions, stayed Danish. In 1816 Copenhagen abolished the Løgting together with the office of løgmaður, gave its judicial work to a new Court of the Faroes and governed the islands as an ordinary Danish amt, a county under an amtmand. Danish was made the main language and Faroese was discouraged.

The Danish constitution of 1849, promulgated in the Faroes in 1850, gave the islands two seats in the Rigsdag and ended the special status they had held within the kingdom. It was enacted without consulting the Faroese. Many of them wanted the Løgting back, in part because the amtmand was by then the only advisory authority on Faroese legislation, and Niels Winther was among those who campaigned for it. The Act of 23 March 1852 restored it as an advisory county council of 18 members, and it met for the first time on Ólavsøka that year. One Wikipedia account dates the reinstatement to 1851; the Løgting's own history and Britannica give 1852.

The restored body had the amtmand as its president ex officio. It won the right to elect its own president in 1923 and to levy taxes in 1935, and over the same decades it became the platform of the national movement, whose central demand was that the Løgting should legislate.

How ballads became a written national language

The Faroese movement began as an argument about language, and the language had survived in a dance. Tjóðsavnið describes the chain dance as a medieval ring dance from Central Europe, danced without instruments and led by one dancer, which carried the ballads that made up most of the islands' secular entertainment. People sang them at outdoor and indoor work, at evening sittings in the smoke room and at festivities. Tjóðsavnið counts the ballads among the main reasons that written Faroese took its present form in the middle of the 19th century, and in some cases as historical sources where almost nothing else was written down.

J. C. Svabo recorded three ballads around 1770, the first Faroese texts of any substance, and designed a spelling based on his own dialect. H. C. Lyngbye published ballads about Sigurd Fofnersbane in 1822. In 1846 the Lutheran minister V. U. Hammershaimb produced an orthography that showed the Old Norse origins of the language much more clearly, and it is the one still in use. He went on to publish Faroese ballads in 1851 and 1855. Britannica's account draws the line directly from this oral literature to modern nationalism.

The political movement dates its start to the Christmas Meeting held in the Løgting in Tórshavn on 22 December 1888, where Rasmus Effersøe read aloud a poem by Jóannes Patursson about keeping the Faroese language. A Home Rule Party formed in 1906, and the Union Party formed around the opposite position. In 1919 Faroese students in Copenhagen designed the Merkið, the flag with a red cross edged in blue on white. The language reached public life in stages, and a law of 1912 still required Danish in teaching older pupils.

Under the Home Rule Act Danish kept equal standing with Faroese in public affairs and had to be taught well and carefully, and nordics.info records in 2019 that the question remains controversial.

What British occupation taught the Løgting

Germany invaded Denmark on 9 April 1940. British troops landed in the Faroes on 12 April in Operation Valentine, to forestall a German landing on islands that could have served Germany in the Battle of the Atlantic, and the islands were cut off from Copenhagen until 1945. The Løgting acted as a legislature for the length of the war. The islands had a government of their own, made up of the amtmand, Carl Aage Hilbert, who kept executive power, and ministers appointed by the Løgting.

British authorities recognised the Merkið so that Faroese fishing boats could be told apart from hostile vessels, and the Faroese flag record dates that recognition to 25 April 1940. Royal Engineers under Lieutenant Colonel William Law built an airfield on Vágar in 1942 and 1943, which is still the islands' airport, and about 150 British soldiers married Faroese women.

Britain kept out of internal affairs. It had undertaken not to interfere in them and not to act without the permission of a liberated Denmark, and that undertaking stopped the attempts made during the war to declare full independence. The last British troops left in September 1945. By then the islands had governed themselves for five years and Iceland had declared itself a republic in 1944, and none of the Faroese parties would accept a return to the pre-war status of a Danish county.

Why the Faroese independence vote is still argued over

Long negotiations between Copenhagen and the Løgting produced a Danish proposal for home rule, and on 14 September 1946 the electorate chose between that proposal and secession. The vote was consultative, and the Løgting was not bound by it. Every account agrees that secession won narrowly. They disagree on the figures.

The majority in the Løgting read the result as a mandate, and its chairman declared the Faroe Islands independent on 18 September 1946. The minority left in protest and called the process illegal. Denmark annulled the declaration on 20 September, arguing that the 481 invalid ballots outnumbered the margin, and the king dissolved the Løgting, a step the accounts date to 24 or 25 September. The election of 8 November 1946 gave the parties favouring union with Denmark a majority of about 2,000 votes, and they chose to reject secession. Jákup í Jákupsstovu, a Social Democrat who had joined the majority, was shunned by his own party.

Britannica compresses the sequence into one clause, the Løgting elections of 1946 reversing the majority vote for independence in the plebiscite. Two readings of the plebiscite persist on the islands. One holds that a majority is a majority, however small. The other holds that 161 votes could not carry a decision of that weight and that only a qualified majority should. This catalogue records both and adjudicates neither.

What the Home Rule Act granted

The compromise was Act no. 137 of 23 March 1948, which came into force on 1 April 1948. It carries the same calendar date as the act of 1852 that had restored the Løgting. Its preamble acknowledges the islands' special position within the kingdom "in national, historical and geographical respects", and Section 1 makes the Faroes a self-governing community within the Danish Kingdom.

The Act works by lists. List A named the fields the Faroese could take over at once or later, from local administration and municipal affairs to building, health and welfare, and each one transferred its costs to the Faroese treasury with it. List B named fields whose transfer was left to further negotiation. Relations with foreign countries stayed with the state.

Faroese became the principal language, a Faroese flag was recognised, and passports issued in the islands carried the Faroese words for a Faroe Islander and the Faroes after the Danish ones. The post of amtmand was abolished and replaced by a state commissioner, the rigsombudsmand, with a seat in the Løgting and no vote. Republic, Tjóðveldi, was founded in protest against the Act.

How the Faroes took their powers field by field

In 1973 the islands declined to follow Denmark into the European Economic Community, mainly over fishing limits, and they remain outside the European Union.

What the fisheries and banking crash cost

The 1980s brought very low unemployment and more support for independence, on an economy almost entirely reliant on fishing. In the early 1990s the fish stocks slumped after years of overfishing with new equipment, while the government had been overspending heavily and the national debt had reached 9.4 billion Danish kroner. In October 1992 Sjóvinnurbankin called in receivers and had to ask Denmark for a bailout of 500 million kroner, a sum that grew to 1.8 billion, on top of an annual grant of 1 billion. Public spending was cut, taxes and VAT rose and public employees took a 10% pay cut.

Unemployment reached 20% in Tórshavn and peaked across the islands at 26% in January 1994. About 6% of the population emigrated, mainly to Denmark, by one account, and 15% by another. A growing boycott of Faroese produce over the grindadráp, the pilot whale hunt, arrived in the same years. The independence movement fell apart, and unemployment came down to 10% by mid-1996 and 5% by April 2000.

The Løgting meanwhile rewrote its own rules. Parliamentary Act no. 103 of 26 July 1994 shares legislative power in Faroese matters between the Løgting and the løgmaður, leaves judicial power with the Danish courts, caps the Løgting at 33 members and opens each session on Ólavsøka, 29 July, with a procession from the Løgting to the cathedral and back.

Why independence kept being postponed

In 1999 the Faroese government opened negotiations with Copenhagen on the conditions for full independence, and Britannica names the yearly Danish payment of one billion kroner as a central point in the talks. A referendum on first steps was planned for 2001 and called off after the Danish prime minister of the day, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, said the grants would be phased out within four years of a yes vote. The block grant was cut in 2001 from 982 million kroner to 616 million. Danmarks Nationalbank gives it as 642 million in 2017, and the Faroese government put it at 11.2% of GDP and 28.7% of the national budget in 2000.

The Takeover Act, no. 578 of 24 June 2005, came into force on Ólavsøka, 29 July 2005. Its preamble describes it as an agreement between the Faroese and Danish governments "as equal partners", and it lets the Faroese authorities take over every remaining field except the constitution, nationality, the Supreme Court, foreign, defence and security policy, and exchange rate and monetary policy. A field taken over brings its costs, and no grant can follow it. The Authorisation Act of the same date lets the Faroese government conclude international agreements on behalf of the realm in fields it has taken over, and the Fámjin Declaration of 29 March 2005 gave it a seat at negotiations touching Faroese interests. The Danish Prime Minister's Office lists the courts, the police, the prison and probation service, immigration and border control, financial regulation and aviation among the fields still held in Copenhagen.

A Faroese constitution has twice run into the Danish one. In 2011 the Danish prime minister of the day, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, called a draft incompatible with the Danish constitution and said that the islands would have to declare independence to adopt it. A draft agreed between the governing and opposition parties in February 2017 would have allowed a referendum on independence by simple majority, and it was due to go to a popular vote in April 2018. Its committee could not agree the wording on marriage equality and family law before the election of 2019, and the vote was not held.