WHEN I ARRIVED, Súsanna Holm was sitting in the sunshine outside her front door, knitting and taking in the view of sea and sky that has been delighting her since she and her husband built their house nearly 40 years ago. I’d walked through Kvívík, a fishing village on the western edge of Streymoy, the largest of the 18 Faroe Islands, where brightly painted houses cluster around the ruins of a Viking farmstead and a medieval church. A river fell steeply from the mountains to the harbour. Children played where a dam made a swimming spot, while in the meadow above the village, adults harvested hay by hand.
Súsanna showed me upstairs to a warm kitchen-dining-crafting space with the same view the Vikings had a thousand years ago, down the fjord and out to the open sea. She had prepared a brunch of fruit, salad, waffles, and homemade carrot cake, and as we ate, she told me about life in Kvívík, how she’d moved from Tórshavn, the capital, and raised her kids in a place where, if it takes a village, that village was right there.
But I had come to learn about Faroese knitting. Almost all Faroese families keep sheep. Even those who live in Tórshavn return to family farms on weekends, and almost all the women learn to knit in childhood. The traditional wool sweaters are practical in the cool, damp climate and are still chosen over modern technical fabrics by farmers in the fields, children playing outside, and
