Denmark/ Faroe Is

The Faroe Islands or simply Faroes (Faroese: Føroyar, meaning "Sheep Islands", Danish: Færøerne) are a group of islands in Northern Europe, between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, about one-half of the way from Iceland to Norway. more...

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They have been an autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark since 1948 and have, over the years, taken control of most matters, except defence (they have a small organized native military in Mjørkadalur, including a small Police force and Coast Guard) and foreign affairs which is the responsibility of Denmark.

The Faroes have close traditional ties to Iceland, Shetland, Orkney, the Outer Hebrides and Greenland. The archipelago was detached from Norway in 1814. The Faroes are represented in the Nordic Council as a part of the Danish Delegation.

History

The early history of the Faroe Islands is not very clear. The earliest text which is believed to include a description of the Faroe Islands, was written by an Irish monk named Dicuil. Dicuil had met a "man worthy of trust" who related to his master, the abbot Sweeney (Suibhne), how he had landed on the Faroe Islands after having navigated "two days and a summer night in a little vessel of two banks of oars." Around A.D. 825, Dicuil wrote a book, Liber de Mensura Orbis Terrae, (Measure/description of the sphere of the earth) in which he states:

"Many other islands lie in the northerly British Ocean. One reaches them from the northerly British islands, by sailing directly for two days and two nights with a full sail in a favou­rable wind the whole time.... Most of these islands are small, they are separated by narrow channels, and for nearly a hund­red years hermits lived there, coming from our Scotland (i.e. Ireland) by boat. But just as these islands have been uninhabi­ted from the beginning of the world, so now the Norwegian pirates have driven away the monks; but countless sheep and many different species of sea-fowl are to be found there..."

The physical description of these islands and the travel time described, fits the Faroe Islands, and the name Faeroe is thought to mean Sheep Islands. According to this, the first settlers in the Faroe Islands were Irish monks, who introduced sheep and oats to Faroe. Proving this theory, recent pollen analysis show that oats were grown in the Faroes about the year 650 A.D.

Later the Vikings replaced the Irish settlers, bringing the Old Norse language to the islands, which locally evolved into the modern Faroese language spoken today. Although the settlers were Norwegians, most of them probably didn't come from Norway, but rather from the Norwegian settlements in Shetland, Orkney and around the Irish Sea, so-called Norse-Gaels. The first Norwegian settler in Faroes mentioned in the "Landnama Bók" was called Grímr Camban. While his fist name "Grímr" is obvious Norwegian, his surname "Cambán" is Gaelic. Thus he most likely was a so-called Norse-Gael from the British Isles. These Norse-Gaels had intermarried with the local Gaelic speaking people in Britain, a feature that is still visible in the Faroese genes today, which prove to be mixed Scandinavian-British.

Read more at Wikipedia.org