Norse Faroe Islands: Sources and Corrections

Faroe is Old Norse Færeyjar, sheep islands. Someone brought sheep there around AD 500, before the Norse. Færeyinga saga puts the islanders' assembly at Þórshöfn, Thor's harbour, today's Tórshavn, and has Sigmundur offer Tróndur of Gøta baptism, or the axe. This page gives the source for every slide.

Every factual claim in our carousel on the Norse Faroe Islands and in its caption, with its source. It is the sixth in our place-name series, after the Norse names of the Isle of Man. Section numbers 01 to 05 match the number at the top of each slide; 07 to 10 are the later slides' places in the carousel. The photographs on the cover and 01 to 07 are real, credited below.

How we cite. The saga we read in the normalised Icelandic text of Færeyinga saga on sagadb.org, cited by chapter, and in English in F. York Powell's translation, The Tale of Thrond of Gate (1896), cited by page; English quotes from the saga are his. The monk is Dicuil, Liber de mensura orbis terrae (825), in G. Parthey's Latin edition (1870), chapter VII; translations from the Latin are ours. Word meanings come from Cleasby and Vigfusson's Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874). The early sheep are L. Curtin and others, "Sedimentary DNA and molecular evidence for early human occupation of the Faroe Islands" (2021). For the islands we use Trap Faroe Islands, the national reference work, with signed articles by Faroese archaeologists and scholars, and the Norwegian and Danish national encyclopedias, Store norske leksikon and Den Store Danske; translations from Norwegian, Danish and Faroese are ours. Where we quote the Løgting's own history page or the Faroese government's page on it, we label them as their own claims. We did not read Church and others (2013) in full, Tierney's 1967 Dicuil, Brøgger's 1937 study of the name, or the Sheep Letter's own text.

Slide by slide

Cover. "Every time you say 'Faroe', you speak Old Norse."

Faroe is Old Norse Færeyjar; see 01.

Photo: EileenSanda, "Ólavsøka 2016 - People", Tórshavn harbour, 28 July 2016, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped by us, with text added. It shows a crowd, many in Faroese national dress, gathered round red wooden rowing boats on the slipway at Ólavsøka, the national festival held in Tórshavn on 28 and 29 July (Den Store Danske, Tórshavn).

01. Faroe means 'sheep islands'

Cleasby and Vigfusson, under FÆR: "a sheep; in Swed.-Dan. faar and får are the usual words for sheep; but in Icel. it is almost unknown ... from fær is also derived the name Fær-eyjar, f. pl. the Faroe Islands (Sheep-islands)". Store norske leksikon, Færøyene: the first part of the name "has been disputed, but it is now generally accepted" to be a West Norse form fær, "the same word as Danish får, sheep. So the name means 'the sheep islands'."

"Around 825 an Irish monk described northern islands, probably these, as full of sheep." Dicuil, VII 3: the islands are now plenae innumerabilibus ovibus ac diversis generibus multis nimis marinarum avium, full of countless sheep and very many kinds of sea-birds. He gives them no name; see 02 for why we say "probably".

"The islands' oldest document, from 1298, is the Sheep Letter." Store norske leksikon, færøysk: "The oldest of these documents is Seyðabrævið ('the Sheep Letter'), which Duke Håkon issued in 1298 as a special law amendment for the Faroes." The Faroese National Archives, Seyðabrævið 1298, describe it as a law amendment on farming in the Faroes, put in force by Duke Hákon Magnusson on 28 June.

Sources: Cleasby-Vigfusson, under fær; Store norske leksikon, Færøyene and færøysk; Dicuil VII 3; Faroese National Archives. Photo: kallerna, "Faroese sheep Sumba 1", above Sumba, Suðuroy, May 2019, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped by us, with text added. These are today's sheep, not the Viking Age breed: Trap, "Agriculture on the Faroe Islands": "The sheep breed from the Landnam period no longer exists. A new breed was imported in the 17th century."

02. Someone got here before the Vikings

"... islands two days' and nights' sail past Britain's northern isles." Dicuil, VII 2 to 3: many islands can be reached from Britain's northern islands duorum dierum ac noctium recta navigatione, in two days and nights of straight sailing. On these in centum ferme annis heremitae ex nostra Scottia navigantes habitaverunt, for nearly a hundred years hermits sailing from our Ireland lived (Scottia is Dicuil's Latin for Ireland), but nunc causa latronum Nortmannorum vacuae anachoritis, now, because of Northman pirates, they are empty of anchorites. He says nearly, not at least.

"He never names them." He gives no name, and adds numquam eas insulas in libris auctorum memoratas invenimus, we have never found those islands mentioned in the books of the authors. The identification is the scholars'. Trap, "Ancient times on the Faroe Islands": Dicuil "described an archipelago in the North Atlantic that matches with the Faroe Islands", but "no archaeological traces have been found that can be linked to the hermits' presence on the islands."

"Faroese lake mud holds sheep DNA from around AD 500." Curtin and others found in the mud of Eiðisvatn the "first appearance of sheep DNA at 500 CE (95% confidence interval 370-610 CE), pre-dating Norse settlements by 300 years". But "our evidence cannot directly speak to who these early settlers were". Earlier, burnt barley at Sandur on Sandoy pointed the same way; the University of Glasgow's release on Church and others (2013) quotes the team: "we don't yet know who these people were or where they came from".

Sources: Dicuil VII 2 to 3 (Parthey p. 44); Trap, Ancient times; Curtin and others (2021); University of Glasgow (2013). Photo: Mike Maguire, "Gásadalur", Vágar, June 2021, Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0. Cropped by us, with text added. It shows the cliffs at Gásadalur, a place not linked to Dicuil or the hermits.

03. Baptism or the axe

"The saga, written in Iceland around 1200 ..." Den Store Danske, Færingesaga (Jonna Louis-Jensen): the saga "must have been written around 1200"; Store norske leksikon says Iceland, about 1220. It survives only in pieces inside the kings' sagas, most fully in Flateyjarbók. Trap, "The viking age on the Faroe Islands", warns that it is partly "oral tradition from the Faroe Islands ca. year 1200, partly ... a literary creation with anachronisms."

"Tróndur of Gøta turned the assembly against him." Chapter 30: Sigmundur put King Olaf's errand to the assembly, "to turn all folk in the island to the true faith"; Tróndur by "his fair speeches" brought the farmers to refuse, and they threatened to "slay thee, unless thou give it up".

"So Sigmundur seized Tróndur at night and gave him two choices: baptism, or the axe." Chapter 31: in spring Sigmundur crossed to Eysturoy, reached Gøta "at nightfall without being seen" and seized Tróndur. The Icelandic text calls the offer tvo kosti mjög ójafna, two very unequal choices: be baptised, "or else thou shalt be slain here on the spot". Tróndur answered, "I will not fail my old friends." A man came at him með reidda öxina, with the axe raised; Tróndur asked for his kinsman, and var Þrándur þá skírður af presti, then Tróndur was baptised by the priest. Trap gives the saga's year as 999, York Powell 998, so the slide gives none.

Sources: Færeyinga saga chs. 30 to 31; York Powell pp. 42 to 43 and xvi; Den Store Danske, Færingesaga; Store norske leksikon, Færeyinga saga; Trap, The viking age. Photo: Pjt56, "Magnus Cathedral Kirkjubøur", June 2022, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped by us, with text added. This is not a saga site. Den Store Danske, Kirkjubøur, says building of the Magnus church began around 1300, some three centuries after the conversion. We found no usable photograph of Gøta.

04. An assembly at Thor's harbour

Chapter 5: Þingstöð þeirra Færeyinga var í Straumsey, og þar er höfn sú er þeir kalla Þórshöfn; York Powell: "The Faerey people's mootstead was in Streamsey, at a haven there called Thorshaven". Þórshöfn reads Thor's harbour: Þórs, of Thor, and höfn, harbour.

"It met on a flat rock at Tinganes." The Løgting's own site: Í gamlari tíð varð tingið hildið á helluni úti í Tinganesi, in old times the assembly was held on the flat rock out on Tinganes. Trap, Tórshavn, By: "the Løgting was originally held in the open air on Tinganes".

"Its heir, the Løgting, is billed as the world's oldest parliament ..." The Faroese government's page on the Løgting is headed "Oldest Parliament in the World" and says its origin "can be traced back more than one thousand years". The Løgting's own site is more careful: the first source to mention a thing in the Faroes is the saga, "written in Iceland around 1200, but historians think the Løgting was founded soon after the Norse settlement around 800." It was also abolished in 1816 and restored in 1852 (Í 1816 varð Føroya gamla Løgting tikið av), so we do not call it the oldest.

"... and still opens each year on 29 July." Den Store Danske, Tórshavn: at Ólavsøka, 28 and 29 July, "the Løgting session also opens with a procession to and from the cathedral". Trap: every year on 29 July the whole Løgting walks in procession from its house to service in Havnar Kirkja and back.

Sources: Færeyinga saga ch. 5; York Powell p. 6; Løgting's own site; Faroese government's own site; Trap, Tórshavn; Den Store Danske, Tórshavn. Photo: Ekrem Canli, "Tinganes1 2022", July 2022, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped by us, with text added. The red, turf-roofed buildings are Tinganes today, not the Viking assembly place: Trap says the royal trade used them until 1856, and the government, not the Løgting, has sat there since 1948.

05. They still dance to the old ballads

"Faroese grammar, like Icelandic, stays close to Old Norse." Jørgen Rischel in Den Store Danske, færøsk: "Faroese morphology to this day lies far closer to Old Norse and to Icelandic than to any other modern Nordic language." Icelandic, he adds, is more conservative on several points, and the 1846 spelling gave Faroese "an archaic touch" (Trap, "Languages and dialects").

"Its ballads are sung with no instruments, while everyone holds hands in a chain dance." Trap, "Tradition and tales": the chain dance is danced "to the chanting of ballads", and "There are no musical instruments involved". The dance is medieval, not Viking: it "is believed to have developed from the medieval chain dances which were widespread in Europe", and "In 1616, an Icelandic traveller described the dance as 'Faroese'". The ballads, kvæði, are not Viking either. Store norske leksikon, Færøyenes litteratur: 236 kvæði survive, "first written down in the 1800s", and the oldest are "probably from the 1300s".

"On 29 July, thousands dance at midnight in Tórshavn." Trap: "At midnight on 29 July, thousands of people again flock to the centre of Tórshavn, Vaglið, for community singing which ends with chain dancing."

Sources: Den Store Danske, færøsk; Trap, Languages and dialects, Tradition and tales; Store norske leksikon, Færøyenes litteratur. Photo: Eileen Sandá, "Faroese Chain Dance in Sjonleikarhusid on Olavsoka 2011", Sjónleikarhúsið, Tórshavn, just after midnight on 29 July 2011, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped by us, with text added.

07. Sigmundur or Tróndur: whose side are you on? Comment below

"The saga gives both men their say." York Powell titles it The Tale of Thrond of Gate, yet notes that the new faith "forms the chief glory of Sigmund in the Saga-man's eyes". Tróndur keeps his line in 03: "I will not fail my old friends."

"Found something we got wrong? Send the source and we'll pin the correction." Corrections are listed below.

Photo: EileenSanda, "Eystanstevna 2012 boats in the harbour of Runavik", 9 June 2012, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped by us, with text added. A crew rowing in Runavík harbour.

08. The Norse named people too

A byname was what other people called you, and this saga is full of them. In York Powell's translation, Tróndur's father Thorbeorn "was nicknamed Gate-beard"; Sigmundur's killer was "Thorgrim the Wicked", Þorgrímur illi; one of Sigmundur's men was Harold Ironhead; and the first settler, in chapter 1, is Grímur kamban. Our free Viking name generator draws on given names and bynames attested in medieval sources.

09. Put a name on steel

"Early graves at Sandur on the Faroes held iron knives with handles wound in silver wire." Trap, The viking age: at Sandur on Sandoy, 11 graves found in 1989 held grave goods including "iron knives with handles wound with thin silver wire".

Any blade in our personalized Viking blades collection can carry a name, a farm or a family name, laser-engraved letter for letter, exactly as you approve it. The knife on the slide reads ERIKSSON: Old Norse Eiríksson, "son of Eiríkr". The photograph shows a forged blade with a raven's head at the pommel, a leather-wrapped grip and a stitched leather sheath. It is a modern knife, not a copy of the Sandur knives.

10. A ring worth keeping

"In the saga Sigmundur would not give up his thick gold arm-ring, not even for a king." Chapter 23: Earl Hákon gave Sigmundur a gold ring and made him promise never to part with it. Chapter 33: King Olaf Tryggvason asked for it, Sigmundur refused, and the king said þessi hringur verður þinn bani, "this ring shall be thy bane". Chapter 39: the farmer who found him on the shore killed him because gullhringur hans harðla digur, his gold ring was very thick. York Powell warns that the ring's origin in a heathen temple should not be pressed as authentic.

"Ours is twisted stainless steel with two wolf heads." It is the stainless steel Fenrir wolf arm ring: a twisted bangle of 316L steel with two facing wolf-head ends, adjustable from 18 to 26 cm. It is a modern piece and copies no find. The Faroes have yielded a finger ring too, a gilded silver ring with a cross and grapes from Velbastaður (Trap, The viking age); for the hand, see our Viking rings.

Caption. The name, the monk, the saga

"So 'the Faroe Islands' says 'islands' twice." Cleasby and Vigfusson: Fær-eyjar, "Sheep-islands"; eyjar is the plural of ey, island, so the English adds a second "islands". We did not trace the English form through Danish Færø.

"The oldest Faroese document, from 1298, is the Sheep Letter, issued by Duke Hákon, with words found nowhere else in Norse writing, like hagfastr: a sheep that keeps to its own pasture." For the date and Duke Hákon, see 01. Trap, Languages and dialects: the Sheep Letter "contains some words that are not found in any other Norse literature, e.g. hagfastr (about sheep that stay in their particular pasture), styggr (wild, untamed) and lemba (lamb)."

"A priest told him he reached one in 'two summer days and the night between' in a small boat." Dicuil VII 3: a priest told him he reached one of the islands in duobus aestivis diebus et una intercedente nocte, in two summer days and the night between, in duorum navicula transtrorum, in a little boat of two thwarts. The caption's lines that Dicuil never names the islands, that no trace of the hermits has been found, and that who brought the sheep is unknown are sourced in 02.

"Years later Sigmundur swam from Skúvoy to Suðuroy with a kinsman on his back, and was killed on the beach for his gold arm-ring." Chapter 39, York Powell pp. 51 to 52: when his kinsman Þórir tired, "Sigmund took him on his shoulders"; Þórir drowned in the surf, and Sigmundur "crawled up the shore and lay down on a heap of seaweed", where Thorgrim the Wicked found and killed him for the ring. We give no year.

"Faroese Thursday, hósdagur, comes from Old Norse þórsdagr, 'Thor's day'." Store norske leksikon, færøysk: "þ at the start of a word has partly become h: Old Norse þórsdagr", Thursday, "is in Faroese hósdagur".

"The Løgting is billed as the world's oldest parliament, though it was abolished from 1816 to 1852." See 04.

The rest of the caption repeats the cover and 01 to 05. The photo line credits EileenSanda, kallerna, Mike Maguire, Pjt56, Ekrem Canli and Eileen Sandá; each file and licence is linked above.

What we do not claim

• That Faroe certainly means sheep islands. It is the accepted reading; other derivations exist, which we read only at second hand.
• That Irish monks were the first people on the Faroes, or came in any given century. Dicuil names no islands, and the DNA cannot say who came.
• That the monks brought the sheep, or that today's Faroese sheep descend from Viking Age sheep. Trap says that breed is gone.
• That the saga is an eyewitness record.
• That the Þór in Þórshöfn is the god. The name reads Thor's harbour; no study we read settles whose Thor it was.
• That the Løgting is the oldest parliament in the world, or that it was founded in a given year. That is the claim made for it on the government's site, and it did not exist from 1816 to 1852.
• That the Løgting still meets on Tinganes. The government sits there; the Løgting has its own house in town.
• That Faroese is Old Norse, or closer to it than Icelandic.
• That the chain dance or the ballads are Viking. Both are medieval.
• That our knife or our arm ring copies any find from the Faroes.

Corrections

None yet. If you find an error, tell us, with a citation.

Frequently asked questions

What does Faroe mean?

Faroe comes from Old Norse Færeyjar, sheep islands: fær, sheep, plus eyjar, islands. This is the reading most scholars now accept. The oldest Faroese document, from 1298, is the Sheep Letter.

Who lived on the Faroe Islands before the Vikings?

Someone did, but who is unknown. Sheep DNA in Faroese lake mud dates from around AD 500, about 300 years before the Norse settlement. Around 825 Dicuil wrote of Irish hermits on islands two days' and nights' sail north of Britain, driven out by Northmen, but he never names the islands and no trace of the hermits has been found.

Is the Løgting the oldest parliament in the world?

The Faroese government calls the Løgting the oldest parliament in the world, but that is the government's own claim. The first source to mention an assembly in the Faroes is Færeyinga saga, written in Iceland around 1200, and the Løgting was abolished from 1816 to 1852. Its session still opens with a procession on 29 July.

What does Tórshavn mean?

Tórshavn is Old Norse Þórshöfn, Thor's harbour. Færeyinga saga puts the islanders' assembly at a harbour of that name on Streymoy, and the Løgting says it once met on the flat rock at Tinganes.

Is the Faroese chain dance a Viking dance?

No. The chain dance is believed to come from the medieval chain dances once common across Europe, and it was first described as Faroese in 1616. The ballads sung to it, with no instruments, are probably from the 1300s at the oldest. On 29 July thousands still dance it at midnight in Tórshavn.