Fit for the Faroe Islands

THE FAROE ISLANDS — From the mountaintop road above Kvivik, green slopes fell steeply away to the sea, drawing my eyes outward, over the village, to the soft shapes of other islands drifting in the pale blue distance. More than a thousand years of Faroe Islands history lay in that view. It was like looking at a map of time itself.

Kvivik is a Viking village -- the real thing, not a restoration -- perched exactly where its ancient founders wanted it, deep in a narrow fiord where the sea was calm. On a beach, where boats could be drawn up and driftwood gathered. At the mouth of a stream, for fresh water. Among grassy hillsides, where sheep and a cow or two might graze.

The town is bigger now, of course, but not much, and it boasts electricity, television and a few e-mail addresses. All the same, if its original settlers were to pull their longboats up on this beach in the ultra-north Atlantic, they would feel right at home. They could even stay with relatives.

Two friends and I were doing almost that in September, though we couldn't claim longboats or Faroese blood. We were renting a farmhouse in a seaside village over the mountain from Kvivik. Our landlord was a fisherman who raised sheep when he wasn't at sea -- just as his ancestors did.

I'd have come to the Faroes for the light alone -- the clear light and those sweeping views. But I had trouble explaining it to folks back home. Why the Faroes? Because they were so far away. Because I knew almost nothing about them. Because, thanks to an old travel book I'd come across, they sounded interesting.

The author was a Victorian lady adventurer named Elizabeth Taylor, a Minnesota writer who hated cold weather but loved the far north and spent years in the Faroes, including all of World War I. She's virtually unknown in the States but famous here for, among other things, documenting village life and giving art lessons to the islands' first painters.

Art would have been inevitable, I think, even without her. The Faroes are a painter's landscape, ready-made for abstraction. Wind and weather keep details at bay, reducing geography to its essence. Land. Sea. Sky. Nothing more.

There is no softness here, no luxury except the intense color of the grass that covers the islands' harsh bones like an apple-green pelt. When it rains, the mountains look enameled.