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123 L anding in the Faroe Islands is not very comfortable for people prone to airsickness. Of the eighteen islands that make up the Faroes, only one of them, the westernmost of the larger islands, Vágar, has enough flat ground to build runways. The airport at Vágar was built by the British during their occupation of the Faroes during World War II, since all of the other islands were judged too mountainous for the construction project. Even at Vágar, the descent is like being dropped out of the sky between cliffs. The sensation is somewhat similar to a helicopter landing, climbing down levels of the atmosphere stage by stage, especially at night when it is windy. Although the pilots are skilled and the safety record at the airport is in general good, accidents do occur, as in August 1996, when 5 | reading BaCkWard language and the sagas in the Faroe islands Gudfinna: We need only think of the sagas. Where have we men now like Skarphjedinn and Grettir Asmundsson? There are none such in these days. . . . Arnes: He must have been a great man, but that brings to my mind what the leper said the other day, when the talk turned to the old sagas. Halla: And what did he say? Arnes: Distance makes the mountains blue and mortals great. —Jóhann Sigurjónsson (1916) 124 reading BaCkWard the Danish chief of defense, Jørgen Hans Garde, his wife, and seven others were killed when their plane slammed into one of the cliffs near the Vágar airport. Since Vágar was chosen for the international airport because of its geographical suitability and not for social reasons, like proximity to a large city, most travelers arrive and get in a bus immediately at the airport for an hour’s drive to Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroes. Tórshavn, which is the smallest capital city in the world, is located on the neighboring island of Streymoy.1 Until Vágatunnilin, the underwater tunnel between Leynar and Fútaklett, was completed in 2002, travelers had to get off the bus, board a ferry, and then get on another bus on the other side in order to get to the capital (map 4). This slight inconvenience for the traveler at the end of the journey is actually an inconvenience that has been imposed by the modern technology of travel. For most of the history of the Faroes, travelers landed exactly where they usually wanted to be: at the port at Tórshavn, getting off a boat from Denmark or from the British Isles. Even if their real interest was in birdwatching or other nature-oriented travel, Tórshavn was still, like Reykjavík in Iceland, the first logical stop to equip themselves. Ferry lines still run, but—unless you want to take a car to the islands—most people now arrive in the Faroes by air. The result is that Denmark is no longer the dominant intermediary, the necessary passage point to the Faroes. Rather, the Faroe Islands are now much more connected to Scandinavia, and even to Europe as a whole, by air. They are not yet really connected to the North American continent in the way that Iceland is, but that time may be coming. This development is a modern one. Much of Faroese history, from the thirteenth century on, can be understood in terms of its relationship with Denmark and a relationship with Europe that was largely mediated through Danish interpretations of the Faroes. The story of Faroese language politics is the story of how some Faroese intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century tried to break this tradition but, in their efforts to do so, ended up mediating Faroese identity through its North Atlantic neighbor, Iceland . Although this might seem in retrospect like a strange decision in the atmosphere of nineteenth-century European nationalism, for one people to attempt to establish their own identity by arguing how similar their language was to that of others, by the late nineteenth century, the cultural status of Iceland within the Danish kingdom was such that this approach seemed a reasonable strategy to a group of Faroese intellectuals. Therefore, ...

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