Færeyjar (the Faroe Islands)

The Faroes are the wind-bound North Atlantic archipelago between Norway and Iceland — a small, storm-lashed world of steep green islands that is the whole setting of Færeyinga saga. Here the bright Christian champion Sigmund Brestisson, the king's man, contends across a lifetime with the cunning, long-lived pagan chief Thrond of Gata, the islands' stubborn resistance to Norwegian rule and the new faith embodied in one wily survivor. The Faroes are the corpus's image of the isolated island-world — remote, self-contained, ruled by a handful of chiefs whose feuds and faith are the whole of its history, where the coming of king and Christ meets the patient cunning of the old order, and a founding tragedy plays out among the wind and the cliffs.