Returning to the Faroe Islands this January, for the first time since 2017, was a stimulating experience. I wrote about that first visit in The Northern Silence: about the country’s extraordinary music scene, first and foremost, but also of its topography – the leering mountainous heights, black-sand beaches, candle-smoke waterfalls and breathtaking spring moonlight. It remains, in fact, the most extraordinary, luminous moonlight I have ever encountered; almost dazzling as it skims off the North Atlantic and its snaking inland fjords (water is everywhere you look here).
This time was different. Heavy snowfall on the evening of 4 January made the already dramatic approach to Vágar Airport more viscerally thrilling, as the sheer rock that veers up alongside the plane windows was rendered all the more fearsome, in the dark of night, by its whiteness. On the taxi journey from the airport, this time to Klaksvík, not Tórshavn, the snowfall became progressively more intense and the vehicle’s back wheels slid out more and more, lurching towards the steep drops into black water that edge many of the roads as they cling to edges of these mountainous islands.
For some of the two-hour journey, that science fiction-like moonlight was back. The image that will remain with me was probably (I can’t say for sure) from the island of Eysturoy – maybe the bottom of the inlet at Skálabotnur – as the snow really started to pile down from the sky. I glanced out of the taxi’s right hand rear window during a blizzard; all was white except for the black-sand beach of a cove and the sea, still unfrozen, throwing huge foaming rollers onto it (all illuminated by the moon and the snow). I wrote in The Northern Silence of ‘the overbearing impression of the Faroe Islands is of a place that really doesn’t want you around…just being there feels like an incursion onto terrain that could, at any moment, react angrily to your presence.’ Turns out I hadn’t seen the half of it.
I’d visited Klaksvík in 2017, but remembered it as little more than a single stretch of street between the artist Edward Fuglø’s studio and a barn-like civic building on the west side of the fjord (just where a bus dropped us off, and picked us up again, either side of lunch). On that visit, at a function laid on by Klaksvík Kommune (the town council), an elected official recounted some colourful local tales, adding with a completely straight face that a community of spirits lives on these islands alongside humans, and even ‘have their own sheep.’ Some Faroese can see them, others not, he explained, and told us how one of them once knocked his cup of coffee over by way of a salute.
This time I arrived at around 10pm local time, and the snow was so deep that sidewalks were more-or-less inaccessible. You had to walk on the road, and then through often waste-deep snow to access any building off it.
I was dropped at Varpið, Klaskvík’s newest attraction: a smart hybrid of theatre and concert hall, like a version of Reykjavík’s Harpa in miniature (it had the same architect), that sits at an angle over Klaksvík’s main street, like part of a satellite freshly fallen from space and left lodged in position. Inside is what the composer Sunleif Rasmussen believes is now the Faroe Islands’s finest acoustic. The auditorium is smart, cosy and atmospheric; a balcony lined in sculpturally slatted wood curves up and around it from the stage. The business of my trip was here: to see Rasmussen’s new opera – only the second written in the Faroe Islands – Regin smiður (here is a link to my review of it for Seismograf; another will follow, in print only, for the British magazine Opera).
These days I don’t get to travel as frequently; my baby and toddler take priority. One positive: I’ve learned to savour the very idea of being away, far more than I did when I was away numerous times every month. Just being back on the Faroe Islands, having been in both Copenhagen and London within the previous 48 hours earlier and in the afterglow of a family Christmas in rural England, felt pinch-me remarkable. That feeling was exacerbated by the wildness and extremity of the place and the counterintuitive fact of travelling there to see an opera.
The snow was my biggest obstacle. Every time I re-opened the front door of my Air BnB in downtown Klaksvík from within, the snow outside would be deeper: knee-deep immediately, but thigh-deep in the ridge that separated the sidewalk from the street, the latter being the only viable thoroughfare for a pedestrian. With it came quietness, brightness, and a strange new imposition to the U-bend of mountainous ridges – and the southerly tip of Kunoy – that closes Klaksvík in and harbours its fishing fleet.
I ventured out on Sunday morning in search of something to eat, but immediately headed the wrong way (my nose suggested as much, but I’d been told about a bakery that turned out not to exist). Hopping into the snow banks from the flat white road when a car appeared, I first took the street up past Varpið but couldn’t find anywhere open. From here, across the water – back on my side – I glimpsed some neon among the grey-white-out. It denoted petrol stations and one of them had decent coffee, some bread and sandwiches, and copies of ELLIVU – the perfect-bound, glossed-out Faroese answer to the UK football magazine FourFourTwo. I bought a copy.
ELLIVU, like so much on the Faroe Islands, baffles you by its very existence. As on my previous visit, I spent a great deal of time just wondering how things get here. Being at a bijoux little theatre in Klaksvík (population 5,000), watching an avant-garde opera that had sold out four previous evenings, raises plenty of quite fantastic questions.
The Faroese take their music just as seriously than their sport – perhaps even more so. Music here is about something far more important than industry, economics, social engineering, personal fame – all the things it has come to mean elsewhere (all this is discussed in The Northern Silence, though Rasmussen’s opera spoke of it too). After the show, I ate some really good pizza (Molly’s) and drank a beer to savour: Regin smiður, named after the opera and brewed for the occasion by Föroya Bjór, the national brewery based just yards away (in the summer, some friends from California, in Copenhagen fresh from the Faroe Islands, bought us a crate of Slupp – surely Föroya Bjór’s most delicious brew, tasting not unlike Carlsberg’s 1883 but with the sense of something more distinguished and cared for). Sometimes, you have to go a long way to experience simple things, done really well.
At 05.30 on the morning of 6 January, a taxi arrived to ferry me to the airport (it also collected the opera’s conductor, whose Air BnB was in the same building). I’d been speaking Danish to some of the Faroese I encountered, but was never quite sure it wouldn’t be interpreted as patronisingly colonial. And besides, I struggled to understand much of the Faroese-accented Danish that came back at me. I am sure the Faroese – and Danes, for that matter – have a similar problem with my English-accented Danish.
So I spoke English with this taxi driver. ‘We have one more to collect,’ he told me and the Czech conductor. He took a side road off Klaksvíksvegur – Varpið’s street – and the vehicle was soon impounded by the steel of heavy industry. ‘It is a fisherman who’s joining us,’ he added. A dozen yards or so down to the open dockside, and he pulled up by the sheer steel hull of a large deep-sea trawler, and hooted his horn. The silhouette of a fisherman appeared on the gangplank, bag over its shoulder, and we began the careful, weaving journey back through the snowy mountains from Bordoy through Eysturoy and Streymoy to Vágar.