Scattered in the North Atlantic, 300 miles off Iceland and 400 miles off Norway, lies the Faroe Islands archipelago. Despite centuries of foreign control, the Faroese have preserved their own distinctive identity. At present an internally self-governing dependency of Denmark, the Faroese have kept their culture alive in part by elaborating certain elements of that culture as badges of self-consciousness. The Ring of Dancers is composed a series of studies of aspects of Faroese life, language, and folk ways. A recurrent theme is the continuing reformulation of Faroese culture since the islands' Viking settlement in the ninth century. The Faroes are introduced as the Faroese themselves conceive them-as islands both joined and separated by the waterways around about them. The archipelago visualized in terms of such waterways as fjords, the points of the compass, "home" villages, and natural and political districts. The authors also discuss Faroese society as the Faroese conceived it around 1890, by an analysis of a folktale popular at the time about the Ashlad. Placed in its social context, the tale appears as a kind of folk editorial on changing values and changing times. Perhaps the most important symbol of Faroese identity is the Faroese language. Although it was not made a written language until the 1840s, and was not widely written or read until the 1890s, Faroese has replaced Danish as the islands' official language. In gaining its formal register, it has come to express a modern sense of what it means to be Faroese. The most spectacular Faroese custom, the grindadrap-the slaughter of schools of pilot whales and the celebration that follows the catch-typifies the continuity of the Faroes' anciently rooted identity. The image of the dansiringur, the "ring" of dancers singing ballads of wars and loves of heroic times-lingers throughout the book. The dansiringur, the authors contend, represents the Faroese adaptation of large forms to a land of closely known neighbors and landscapes, the complex inward turnings of Faroese culture, its tortuous sense of wholeness. The book ends by recounting interviews in Torshavn, the Faroese capital, with an artist, a journalist, a politician, and others. The Ring of Dancers vividly portrays the Faroese and makes clear why they are actively involved in preserving their culture as well as shaping it for the future.

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.