Fit for the Faroe Islands

But by mid-September, the puffins were gone, and so were the tourists. Museums had switched to winter hours, and even then we were sometimes the only visitors. Tour boats weren't running -- bad weather, too few passengers. The dancing societies were taking a break, and the whole place seemed to be exhaling. Even the manager of the Torshavn tourist office was about to go to England with her hiking club to walk Hadrian's Wall.

Taylor would have approved: "To really get the best out of a place," she wrote, "you should see it out of the so-called proper season." I agreed.

I hadn't intended to follow in her footsteps, but I couldn't help it: She'd been everywhere, reporting on evil spirits (the huldufolk), the first songs babies learn ("The puffin says Ur-r, Ur-r.") and the details of the traditional Faroese whale hunt (the grindadrap, still carried out periodically on local beaches).

Although many things had changed -- the population had tripled, the standard of living had skyrocketed -- much of the culture Taylor knew was still alive.

Language, for one thing: Faroese is an offshoot of Old Norse, related to Icelandic and Norwegian. But it wasn't written down until the middle of the 19th century, and I had trouble matching the spellings with the sounds.

Kollafjordur, for example, our temporary hometown, was pronounced more like "KUT-la-fyor-rur." And when we drove south on Streymoy to see what may be the oldest inhabited farmstead in Europe, we weren't going to Kirkjubour, we were going to "Chi-chi-ber."

The big farmhouse there was made of blackened logs floated in from Norway, and it's still in the hands of its original family, the tourist office manager told me. How far back does it go, I wondered. "Seventeen generations," she said, counting off the names on her fingers to be sure.

Sticking together

All the towns, big and small, followed the old Viking pattern, with houses clustered tightly at the foot of a mountain just where it met the sea. Any vista held at least one community, and when there were several, they looked like trim on the hems of long green skirts.

A network of paved roads, bridges, undersea tunnels and ferryboats now links all 17 inhabited islands. This makes Faroese society so cohesive, I learned, that the island communities shouldn't be thought of as separate entities but more like neighborhoods of a single dispersed city.