By the time Messer Nicolò’s ship was storm driven into the region three and a half centuries later, the overextended Noregsveldi was losing influence. The Faroes, like other sea dominions of the realm, were in turmoil. The tax-collecting system had broken down. Trade had dwindled to a trickle. Pirates raided the farmsteads and the churches. And the ruthless sea merchants of the Hanseatic League lurked in Faroese waters looking to take over the profitable cod market. When young Queen Margaret succeeded her husband King Haakon in 1380 she faced the daunting task of preserving the Crown’s authority not only in the Faroes, but in Orkney and in Shetland, in distant Iceland and in the remotest dominions of all, the half-forgotten colonies in Greenland.
This was the world Messer Nicolò and his men drifted into, in the summer of 1383: a legendary sea empire in rapid decline.
I KNEW very little about the Faroes apart from what I had gleaned from a few books I had taken out from the library in Venice. The temptation to visit those remote islands in my quest to find further traces of the Zen saga proved irresistible. I booked an airplane ticket from London Gatwick to the Faroes on Atlantic Airways, the Faroese national carrier.
Landing in the Faroes can be a hair-raising affair. The airstrip, originally built by the British during World War II, lies in a meadow atop Vágar, the third largest island of the archipelago. The weather conditions are often hazardous and the aircraft can be forced to turn back. I was lucky to arrive on a clear evening. The plane circled over the crest of the mountain like a wide-winged seabird looking for a perch in the middle of the ocean; it landed quickly and gracefully, and came to a halt just before reaching the cliffs.
A sleek bus took me down to sea-level and then through a long tunnel that connected Vágar to Streymoy, the main island. As I soon discovered, the larger islands, although separated by deep fjords, were linked by an integrated, high-tech transportation system: fast ferries, helicopters and, impressively, a series of deep sea tunnels—engineering marvels paid for by the Danish government. The integration of this futuristic infrastructure with the pristine Faroese environment appeared seamless. I half expected to see James Bond’s Aston Martin zoom by and disappear into the landscape.
Tórshavn (population 17,500), the capital of the Faroes, is named after the Norse thunder god, Thor. It is a small harbor town set in the bay where, in Viking days, the Faroese chiefs used to meet for their yearly assembly. The waterfront is lined with brightly colored buildings; behind them a knot of winding streets untangles itself in front of small detached houses, their roofs covered with rich, grassy turf that keeps out the dampness.
I quickly settled into a pleasant routine. Every morning I walked the length of the harbor from my hotel over to the National Library and worked there until lunchtime, pulling out books from the shelves and sifting through old texts on the medieval history of the Faroes. The National Archives and the University of the Faroe Islands were housed in a small cluster of buildings nearby, so it was easy to walk from one to the other and arrange meetings with local historians and archivists over a cup of coffee. The few who had heard about the Zen story invariably dismissed it as the handiwork of a two-bit Venetian swindler.
In the afternoons, I drove along the fjords and up the mountains and disappeared into sea tunnels that went down to the bottom of the ocean. After dinner, I stopped by the Café Natur, a favorite hangout, to watch the local scene and sip Faroese beer before returning to my hotel. The young people wore funky, fashionable clothes. They rode their motorbikes without helmets and sprinkled their Faroese sentences with English words like “yeah,” “thanks” and “good-bye.”
The first thing I learned was how much the Faroese yearned to regain the independence they lost way back in early medieval times, when they were absorbed into the Norse realm. Denmark granted the Faroes self-government in 1948 but most Faroese I spoke to said it was not enough. “We will soon become a sovereign nation within the European Union,” Magni Arge, the visionary boss of Atlantic Airways, confidently predicted to me late one night over beers at Café Natur.
I asked Arge how he thought such a tiny country lost in the ocean could possibly survive on its own. He sketched the plan of a vibrant island economy based on the fishing industry, sheep farming and tourism. Besides, he said, the Faroese already possessed many of the trappings of a sovereign nation. They had a language, which was very similar to the old language of the Vikings because the remoteness of the islands had limited its contamination. They had a stable currency, the Faroese króna. They had a flag (a red Scandinavian cross with a blue edge against a white background). They had a national university and a national library and a small national museum, housed in a refitted farm by the sea just a short walk out of Tórshavn.
“We also have a national soccer team,” Arge said with a grin, and went on to describe an epic battle during the qualifying rounds for the 1992 European Championship, during which a band of plucky Faroese upstarts managed to hold the mighty Danish team to a tie until the end of the first half. “I remember feeling for the first time that we had truly come together as one nation,” he added with unexpected gravitas.
That year Denmark had the strongest team in Europe. It went on to trounce the Faroese side during the second half with a final score of 4 to 1, and eventually took the championship.
I knew something about the Faroese team. Years later Italy, then the reigning world champion, was scheduled to play against the Faroes in a qualifying game for the European Championship. I remembered reading in the newspaper at the time about the Italians’ harrowing attempts to land on the airstrip at Vágar. They finally made it, but, still shaken from the trip, they barely managed to edge out the Faroese on the wet soccer field just outside Tórshavn.
It seemed to me that despite the great strides the Faroes had made on the road to independence, the sheer remoteness of these islands would continue to be a serious handicap. “At this point,” the ever-buoyant Arge insisted, “all we really need to make it on our own is a successful national air carrier. Running the airline on a daily basis can sometimes turn into a scheduling nightmare because of the weather conditions, but my goal is to put the Faroes at the center of air traffic in the North Atlantic.” And with that, he pulled out from his briefcase a map of the North Atlantic that stretched from Newfoundland to Scandinavia. The Faroes were indeed at the very center of the map—a tiny speck in the middle of the ocean out of which surged a busy fountain of airline trajectories to London, Copenhagen, Reykjavik and even faraway Nuuk, the capital of Greenland.
ARGE WAS enthusiastic about the Zen voyages. He liked the connection it established between Venice and the Faroes. “You should go see my friend Jóannes Patursson over in Kirkjubur [Arge pronounced it Cheech-bahr]. It’s at the tip of the Sutheroy Fjord, where your Venetians did battle. You’ll like it there. Jóannes’s farmhouse is the oldest in the Faroes.”
I had read that Kirkjubur, meaning “Church-farm,” was once the largest community in the Faroes. The first bishop arrived there around AD 1100, a hundred years after the islands converted to Christianity. He built a sturdy little church of dark volcanic stone in a meadow by the edge of the water. His house, next to the church, was made with heavy logs brought over from Norway. The township prospered thanks to its rich pastures and fishing grounds. By the end of the twelfth century there were as many as seventy to eighty homesteads—more than a thousand people. Among them was an ambitious young priest by the name of Sverre Sigurdsson. One day he sailed to Norway and seized power at the head of the Birkebeiners, rebels who were so named for their rough shoes of birch bark.
King Sverre ruled Norway from 1184 to 1202 and went down in history as one of the great Norse kings—which I thought was not entirely surprising since Sverre’s Saga was written under his supervision. The decline of Kirkjubur in the fourteenth century coincided with the decline of the Norse kingdom. At the time of Messer Nicolò’s forced landing in 1383, the township had probably lost some of its importance. Still, I was a little sur
prised not to find any mention at all of Kirkjubur in Nicolò the Younger’s narrative, or at least of a place-name vaguely resembling it.
It was when I heard Arge pronounce it Cheech-bahr that it suddenly occurred to me that Kirkjubur was probably the town of Ocibar (oh-chee-bahr), which Nicolò the Younger had placed on the southern coast of Frislanda on the Zen map. Next to the name was a decorative marker: a steeple surrounded by several buildings, indicating this was a township of some standing as well as a religious center.
I had been intrigued from the start by Ocibar because that place-name did not appear on any other existing map, including the Prunes map, and I had concluded that Nicolò the Younger could only have found it on a chart of the Faroese coastline sent by Messer Nicolò to his brothers in Venice.
I took Arge’s advice and drove out to Kirkjubur to pay Jóannes a visit. The road wound its way up into the mountains behind Tórshavn. On the uplands, the mist dissolved and I had a sweeping view of the Sutheroy Fjord: Koltur and Hestur rising high to my right; Sandoy straight ahead across the fjord and Sutheroy, the last of the Faroes, on the southern horizon.
If Sutheroy Fjord was indeed the Gulf of Sudero of the Zen narrative, then it followed that the seascape spread out before me was the theater of those naval operations in which Messer Nicolò and the Venetians participated after their rough landing. I knew it made little sense to try to trace the course of action described in the book. But as I stood on the edge of the road taking in the view, I could not help wondering whether the small port of Sandur on the island of Sandoy, which I could see straight ahead of me, might not be the village of Sanestol, where Messer Nicolò came upon those fishing boats laden with cod—boats, I now realized, that must surely have belonged to Hanseatic merchants, the only ones licensed by the Norwegian Crown to trade with the Faroes. And turning my gaze toward the west end of the fjord, where the old port of Norðadalur glimmered in the pale sunshine, it occurred to me that it might once have been the port of Bondendon (bodden, I knew, meant “the head of the bay”), where, “following the advice of Messer Nicolò, the captain anchored the fleet and waited for news of Zichmni’s overland campaign.”
From a military point of view, that campaign could not have amounted to much. Nicolò the Younger claimed that Zichmni “conquered the enemy after a great battle and seized all the land and all the fortified cities.” But at the time, the Faroese population probably did not amount to five thousand souls in the entire archipelago. They had primitive weapons made of sticks and stones, and according to local historians there was very little by way of fortifications to be stormed. What Nicolò the Younger called “Zichmni’s war” was more likely a large-scale police operation—a display of force intended to intimidate the Faroese, bring them to pay their taxes and accept the rule of the new queen Margaret.
I continued on to Kirkjubur, driving down to the sea and then along the coastline, until I came to the end of the road. It was late afternoon. The Sutheroy Fjord was calm as a lake. The light had sharpened. Strands of golden kelp shimmered near the shore. It was a beautiful spot, and very peaceful.
The village of Kirkjubur turned out to be no more than a cluster of farmhouses, all part of the same homestead—solid buildings made of good Norwegian timber, painted black with red trim and, as always, thick grass growing on the roof. Near the farmhouses, overlooking the fjord, stood the remains of an old church, its roof missing but all four walls still standing.
Jóannes Patursson, a sheep farmer in his early forties, greeted me with a friendly nod when I caught up with him at his farmhouse at the end of his work day. He had four hundred Faroese sheep grazing on the uplands. “Enough to get by,” he said laconically.
Faroese sheep, this much I knew, hadn’t changed much since Viking days: they were a frugal, tough-going breed and could stay out to pasture year-round because a thick layer of coarse dark hair protected them from the sleet and the rain and the snow.
“But underneath, the wool is soft and good for weaving,” Jóannes said, lighting a cigarette and turning his gaze out to the sea. “It has a lot of lanolin.”
Like his father, his grandfather and all his forefathers going back seventeen generations, Jóannes was born and raised in Kirkjubur, and had lived there all his life—except for a brief stint in Australia, where he had gone as a young man to learn the little he didn’t already know about sheep farming.
The Patursson clan came to the Faroes from Denmark right after the Reformation and took over all the land around Kirkjubur. Jóannes still owned a small portion of that land and the few remaining farmhouses.
The main house on the homestead, where Jóannes lived with his family, was said to be a thousand years old. But he and his wife Guðrið had fixed up the interior like a New York loft, with waxed wooden floors, large windows, wide spaces and an open kitchen. Jóannes showed me around while two-year-old Ròkur, the youngest of their four sons, played on the floor and Guðrið prepared meat sauce for the lasagne she planned to serve for their family dinner.
The old bishop’s house was, literally, attached to the Paturssons’ farmhouse. Jóannes explained to me that the original bishop’s house had been built farther down the slope, on the edge of the water. But in the seventeenth century a tidal wave ripped across Sutheroy Fjord and tore up half the village of Kirkjubur. All the houses closest to the sea were destroyed, including the bishop’s. Of course by then Kirkjubur had long ceased to be a diocese of the Church and there hadn’t been a bishop in residence for many years. But the Patursson family rebuilt the house anyway, higher up, on dry land, close to their main farmhouse. So close, in fact, that the two houses now seemed part of the same building.
“Come with me,” Jóannes said, leading me through a back door directly into the old bishop’s house. It was dark and cavernous. The ceiling, very low, was supported by huge Norwegian logs that were at least three feet in diameter. Jóannes had transformed the main room into a rudimentary museum. A collection of objects he had dug up in the fields over the years, or fished out of the sea, was displayed haphazardly on several dusty shelves. I noticed a number of medieval fishing implements, as well as several combs made of whalebone, old pieces of cloth, a corroded knife and other domestic utensils, and a rusty cannonball the size of a clenched fist.
As he led me along, carefully pointing out each object, Jóannes took on a bemused expression, as if he were showing me pieces of a puzzle he had never been able to work out.
We left the bishop’s house through the back door and walked over to the ruins of the church of Saint Magnus. A series of tie-rods had been placed on one side to prevent one of the walls from collapsing. “I cannot afford to restore it but I do what I can to preserve what is still standing,” Jóannes said.
It was a large rectangular structure, standing against the sea like a shoebox without a lid. According to the old chronicles, around AD 1300 a bishop by the name of Erlend imposed an extra round of taxes on the overburdened Faroese to build this big church. This touched off a wave of popular protests across the archipelago. At the time of the uprising, Bishop Erlend was traveling in Norway and, fearing for his life, never returned to the Faroes. The church was therefore left unfinished. A hundred years later, Erik of Pomerania, king of Denmark, financed its completion. It must have been an impressive sight—such a grand church standing sentinel on the southern tip of Streymoy.
After the Reformation, the church was closed down. The rich wall-hangings, the finely carved pews, the gold goblets, the silver calices and reliquaries—everything of value was shipped to Denmark, which had succeeded Norway as the Faroes’ mother country as a result of dynastic changes in the fifteenth century.
“They stripped the place down,” Jóannes observed. “Eventually the roof caved in and came crashing down. But the walls are very sturdy and have resisted well during the last six hundred years.”
An evening breeze had picked up and was now blowing gently through the portal of the roofless church, the brackish air from the sea mi
xing with the smell of damp grass. We walked back to the farmhouse. The lasagne was sizzling in the baking pan and looked very crisp on the surface.
“Stay for dinner,” Jóannes offered kindly, on his way to fetch a few cold bottles of beer.
During the meal, I explained to Jóannes and Guðrið what had brought me to the Faroes and expressed the view that, according to the place-names in the narrative by Nicolò the Younger, the naval operations he described in the book could well have occurred in the stretch of sea that was right before us.
Although he knew nothing of the Zen story, Jóannes did not react with surprise. “There was considerable activity in this area. I can feel it very strongly. But no one really knows what happened during most of the fourteenth century,” he said. “At times,” he said wistfully, “I feel someone came here and shut off all the lights.”
An expert diver, Jóannes said he often searched for clues about the past in the dark and murky waters of Sutheroy Fjord, only to reemerge with some mysterious fragment or other that usually ended up gathering dust on a shelf in the old bishop’s house.
But vestiges come in many different forms, and they will sometimes surface in the most unexpected ways.
THE DAY after my drive out to Kirkjubur I stopped by Jacobsens Bookstore, in downtown Tórshavn, where I’d made a habit of dropping by. Most books were in Faroese and therefore incomprehensible to me. But I was drawn there by the intriguing notion that a tiny country with a population of 50,000 could sustain a thriving book industry, with a notable range—thrillers, historical novels, essays, poetry. One obvious reason was that the Faroese read a lot of Faroese books. Another was that local publishers had no distribution costs. There was only one outlet in all the Faroes: Jacobsens Bookstore.
I was browsing in the store when I chanced upon a book with an intriguing title in Latin, Adventus Domini (The Advent of the Lord). It was by a local author, Jógvan Isaksen, who taught Faroese literature at the University of Copenhagen. I leafed casually through the book until I was startled to find, among the illustrations, a full replica of the Zen map.
Irresistible North Page 6
