Meaning "Sheep Islands", the Faroe Islands owe much of their unique identity to these hardy, tangle-haired creatures. Standing in the Faroe Islands National Archives in the capital, Tórshavn, I opened a small cardboard box and stared at an ancient book bound in leather and burnished by hundreds of years of handling. Known as Seyðabrævið (the Sheep Letter), it's a collection of laws enacted by the Faroes' then-Norwegian ruler Earl Hákon Magnússon in 1298 and is the nation's oldest surviving document.
Among other things, it details the level of compensation to be paid if a man lets his dog chase another man's sheep; takes grazing land away from a neighbour's flock; or drives a wild sheep into another shepherd's herd, thus disturbing the "calmer" animals. I spent a year living in these sparsely populated islands, and I never felt lonely when wandering by myself through the dark green mountains, since there were almost always sheep within view. For more than a millennium, these hardy, tangle-haired creatures have grazed the slopes clear of most vegetation apart from grass, physically sculpting the dramatic landscape of this remote, windswept nation and shaping the country's identity.
Marooned in the North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, the Faroes' 18 volcanic islands are effectively a far-flung, supercharged slice of Scandinavia. They're home to traditional wood-built houses topped with turf and the kind of lightning-fast, near-universal wi-fi you might expect fr.