I have a novel ¼ written and this is not the setting but it’s a foreign country in the world.
Concept
North Atlantic island cultures are actually small and limited.
What if there were 7× as many islands, packed closer together? That would mean more trade, more cultural interaction, a stronger power. The sea becomes less of a barrier and more of a highway.
Stats
Real life: Faroes+Hebrides+Shetlands+Orkneys+Iceland have about 1400 islands, of which about 10% are inhabited, about 550,000 population, about 115,000km² area, so 4.8 people per km²
Multiply by seven: 9800 islands of which 980 are inhabited, population of 3.85 million, area of 805,000km² (comparable in size to Turkey), population density remains 4.8/km²
Landscape
Rugged and rocky with cliffs. Formed by volcanoes 50-60 million years ago and then eroded by glaciers and sea to form dramatic landscapes.
The Faroes have five mountains over 800m which are snow-covered a large part of the year. This proves that pretty big mountains can exist in this geography, and for fiction, we can push this up to 1000m.
Freshwater streams and lakes are rare, most islands do not have them. If you go from an island without freshwater to one with freshwater, it’s a different kettle of fish, including trout.
Weather
Generally harsh, windy, cloudy, cold. Excellent wind and tidal power if you’re talking about 21st-century tech level. Wind-power can also be harnessed centuries earlier, of course.
If you want to write micro-climates (like Summerisle in The Wicker Man) that is very realistic because of the way currents, mountains, and winds interact.
Un-sunny. The capital of the Faroes, Tórshavn, has 840 hours of sunshine per year (lowest of any city in the world). Reykjavík has 1368.
Turf houses
The blackhouse is a traditional house with double wall dry-stone walls packed with earth, roofed with wooden rafters covered with a turf weighted with stones.
Inside is a central hearth for the fire, largely fed by turf rather than wood, though it depends on which island. No chimney: the smoke blackens the thatch and preserves it.
The turf houses shelter livestock as well as men; the body-heat helps warm the place.
Icelandic turf houses (torfbæir) are made of timber with the walls and roof covered in turf. Similar æsthetically to the blackhouse, but using less stone; it depends on whether wood or stone is more available on the particular island. (The Faroe islands are treeless; Iceland was 30% forested when discovered.)
Means of production
Fishing and whaling are obviously the main ones. A “Faroese speciality is tvøst og removed, made from pilot whale meat and blubber”
Fresh and dried fish are both important. The drying shed, known as a hjallur, is a standard feature in many Faroese homes. Seabirds (puffins, auks, etc.) are caught in nets and eaten, and their eggs are harvested from their nests.
Edible crab and oyster, horse mussel and brittle star.
Seals are eaten and feature in the folklore and heraldry. Grey seal and harbour seal.
Land agriculture
It’s not all fish: geese, ponies, sheep (and sheepdogs), cattle, duck, and pig are important.
The Shetlands are of course famous for their small strong Shetland Pony. There’s a Shetland sheep and a Faroe sheep. There was a boar-like landrace of pig in the Shetlands until 1930. Here’s some Faroese geese –
Hardy sheep are basically the best way to turn a yield from marginal rocky land. The islands have heather moors dominated by shrubby heathers (especially calluna vulgaris), with ling, bell-heather, cross-leaved heath, bog myrtle, arctic-alpine plants including alpine pearlwort and mossy cyphal.
Crofting is an agricultural practice in Scottish islands that avoids open-field agriculture and focuses on small (2-5 acre) holdings for vegetables and animal fodder. (Off-topic for worldbuilding: the crofters have applied to the U.N. for indigenous status, so far unsuccessfully. Donald Trump’s maternal grandfather was a crofter.)
Sheep + cold means woollen clothes are a key visual signifier of the culture. Look at this beautiful picture of indigenous Greenlandic women:
I like this! I’m gonna throw out my ideas in no particular order:
I think the few islands with groundwater would naturally form into economic, and then political, hubs. Everyone else is reliant on catching rain or evaporative purification of salt water, but you could potentially get dense settlements on an island large enough to sustain fish. Depending on era, one or more of these might be a formerly fish-bearing island, and the others might adopt environmental regimes of varying harshness and stratification to protect what they have.
Fishing rights are probably the chief source of inter-Island conflict. Everybody is reliant on the sea for food, whether that’s from fish or kelp or whatever else, and everybody knows where the best spots are and where the schools of fish migrate. If a fisher from another island is “poaching” your school, you’re likely to get mad - and if some island discovers and introduces trawling, the entire island food economy could be put in jeopardy. Whatever governing body forms to keep the peace among the islands, it will almost certainly be formed around fishing rights treaties, and possibly evolve into a web of privileges and obligations that would make the Holy Roman Empire seem simplistic in comparison.
Dried fish could well be the working currency for the average islander. Everything else is valued in terms of how many pounds of haddock it is considered equivalent to.
Eggs from island birds could also be a staple. Islanders could turn cliff faces into productive agricultural land by placing bird houses on them, dotting the cliffsides with dozens of little wooden structures, and then climb down the cliff face with a rope tied around their waist to harvest the eggs. The birds don’t appreciate this, but the fowlers have specialized protection, like beekeepers but for pecking and wing beating.
What I generally failed to consider (was posting at a very early stage of the process) was the diversity of island-types –
- With or without trees. Timber is important for fuel and ships, but it’s hard to grow trees here, especially on small islands. Big islands are likely to have trees in addition to other advantages.
- For geological reasons, the biggest islands are likely to have the deepest natural harbors, and therefore support foreign trade. Massive glaciers that left big deep fjords when they retreated.
- Treeless heath islands specialise in sheep (sheep eat plants, not trees)
- Islands with warm microclimates export vegetables (Summerisle in The Wicker Man… and for those of you who haven’t seen it it’s about a fictional Herbridean island with a warm microclimate and the economy specialises in apples and fruit&veg)
- ‘Productive rocks’ (skerries that accumulate seaweed) ship seaweeds to neighbouring islands/to market
- Islands with cliffs (as you said) export seabirds and eggs
- Islands with sea lochs give crab and oyster, horse mussel and brittlestar
Among these islands are generations-long trading partnerships formalized by marriage and gift-exchange.
Harsh winters or storms mean people migrate internally from the harshest parts. This could lead to rural depopulation.
I’m gonna worldbuild two islands with small cities (100-200k). Islands comparable in size to Zeeland or Bali. These cities have dry-stone warehouses, markets, taverns, fun. They have that snooty big-city-boy vibe where they invariably feel more sophisticated than more rural people.
If a fisher from another island is “poaching” your school, you’re likely to get mad
https://d-place.org/parameters/WNAI360
if some island discovers and introduces trawling, the entire island food economy could be put in jeopardy.
Fishing quotas are a major source of conflict in modern politics. And they’re very hard to enforce (cops at sea? an inspector on a vessel of hostile fishermen?)
heep + cold means woollen clothes are a key visual signifier of the culture. Look at this beautiful picture of indigenous Greenlandic women:
Those outfits are not precolonial. They are explicitly a product of colonialism. Greenland does not have access to the resources necessary for the production of that garment which made the the inclusion of certain motifs and materials a status symbol, further many of the patterns and symbols involved were based on colonial exchange (And sadly most of the symbolism is dying out)
BUT ALSO, CRUCIALLY. THAT THING ISN’T WOOL. The undershirt tends to be cotton or similar, but the actual shirt is traditionally seal skin. Treated seal skin is the basis for a lot of Inuit clothing, and the traditional treatment process is also dying out because of global warming making it so that the period in which it gets cold enough is shorter and shorter. The skin is coloured in this process and these coloured patches are stitched together to form patterns. The whole thing is then topped off with a bead collar which was originally a status thing where the larger the collar was the higher you were in the social hierarchy but now they all just reach down to the chest. That’s the part you’re mistaking for a knitting pattern.
If you want to see what being a sheep based economy does to your clothes, look not to the people who only introduced sheep ranching at any scale in 1915, look to England. England was for like hundreds of years a petrostate but for sheep.
Edit: Here is a picture of the “traditional dress” of a north Atlantic Danish colony with sheep.
What colonisation incident are you talking about? Of Greenland by Denmark?
Brendan in the 6th century called the Faroes an ‘Island of Sheep’, and sheep DNA was found there dating to the year 500.
Dicuil, writing around 825, so well before the 1380 colonisation of the Faroes, said it had innumerabilibus ovibus: “countless sheep”.
Sheep were so iconic of the early Faroes (a word meaning ‘sheep island’) that the stamp commemorating Brendan protrayed the island like this –
If you want to see what being a sheep based economy does to your clothes… look to England.
Bad idea, IMO. If you bypass the sheep islands that are the focus of my post, and instead look to England, you wind up with a totally different æsthetic, and a rather boring one. The standard fantasy setting does what you advocate – looks to England – and I think worldbuilders should remember that other cultures do in fact exist.
What colonisation incident are you talking about? Of Greenland by Denmark?
Of Greenland yes. As evidenced by saying “Greenland” and “Inuit”, being in response to a post about Greenland and contrasting it with Faroese traditional dress.
Incidentally the “Faroe islands” word is silly, because the oe means island. It should be Far islands, Faroe Islands mean Far island islands. But that’s not your fault, that’s just English being odd.
being in response to a post about Greenland
reading comprehension issue: the post is not about Greenland. The post is called “What if the Faroes+Hebrides+Shetlands+Orkneys+Iceland had the geography of Polynesia?”
Faroe Islands mean Far island islands.
No it means Sheep Islands Islands
reading comprehension issue: the
On your part, yes. You gave an example of what you believed was a woolen outfit, posting a picture of Greenlandic dress, saying “look at the Greenlanders” which I quoted and responded to.
Edit: I am genuinely not seeing how you can take a look at my post about Inuit dress, mentioning Greenland, in response to a quoted bit of text using the term Greenland referencing a picture of Greenlanders and be in doubt about whether I am talking about Greenland.
I am telling you that the picture you posted as an example of knitting being a cultural signifier of Greenland because of their access to wool is a picture of women from a country that only introduced anything approaching real wool production in 1915 not wearing a knit outfitNo it means Sheep Islands Islands
If you want to get more granular, yes.
Look at this beautiful picture of indigenous Greenlandic women:
reading comprehension issue:you have a choice on how to talk to others, even when they send your back up about the implications their accusations make to your character. you sounding like a smug debatelord was the choice you made
Those outfits are not precolonial. They are explicitly a product of colonialism. Greenland does not have access to the resources necessary for the production of that garment which made the the inclusion of certain motifs and materials a status symbol, further many of the patterns and symbols involved were based on colonial exchange (And sadly most of the symbolism is dying out)
But it obviously wasn’t meant to be about precolonial Greenland…
The claim was that wool producing cultures will use knitwear as a cultural signifier. The picture used as an example was of the (West)Greenlandic national dress.
The culture it is depicting were not native producers of wool until 1915. It is also crucially not a picture of people wearing anything knitted. Not a single person in that picture is visibly wearing anything that is knitted. Not a single visible garment of theirs has wool in it at any stage in the production cycle.
Those pieces of clothing did not develop as a result of a indigenous production of wool, which largely did not exist at the time it came to be, it developed as a result of the influx of exogenously produced goods and still doesn’t have any wool in it.Edit: I am highlighting that not only is this confusing traditional indigenous art forms such as avittat and inuit beadwork for knitting patterns, it is misunderstanding the history of the garment and of Greenland in general.
Edit 2: Incidentally traditional Inuit craftspeople have asked white people to stop mixing up avittat and beadwork and knitting patterns for about a century with no success. I blame no one here for this, I am not saying you are doing anything wrong. I am noting a coincidence about the fact that people just assume based on what they are familiar with (Knit work) rather than what things are (A very unique kind of embroidery)
I am not saying you are doing anything wrong
Not me but k.
I read the post as having almost nothing to do with Greenland. Obviously Greenland has a very different culture (Inuit) to the one described (Norse/Celt/Germanic)
Do you think the words " Look at this beautiful picture of indigenous Greenlandic women:" has no relation to Greenland or Inuit. I am becoming jokerfied
seems like a rather woolly issue
You’re focusing on one tiny mention rather than the post in its totalitarianism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BABL1y5xNxQ&t=49
i agree with the other critiques in this thread re: wool and indigenous clothing, but anyway;
i enjoyed reading this, though it’s more world-expanding than worldbuilding, since there aren’t really any new elements added, just a “what if this thing was bigger”. also, in my opinion, a world power based on north germanic people living on cold humid windswept islands, living in turf houses and eating nothing but fermented puffin and massacred dolphins sounds very dystopian, and i would hate to live there. but that’s fine, worldbuilding is not about making utopias or even nice-but-ultimately-problematic solarpunk.
also reminded me of the part in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt where (mild spoilers for a good alt-history novel)
spoiler
The main characters of one chapter (from a France of Levantine/North African ancestry and culture) visit a small north atlantic island, which is the last place on earth with surviving european culture. The main characters see quaint little villages and ancient technology still in use, villagers fishing and weaving wool and so on. It’s framed like, and mirrors, european romantics visiting Tahiti or other pacific islands in the 1800s in our reality.
i agree with the other critiques in this thread re: wool and indigenous clothing
To be clear, I agree with Keld’s critique that my FaroeHebridesShetlandOrkneyIceland world diverges from precolonial Greenland (and, for that matter, from 4¾ century Borneo), but where I disagree with Keld is that Anglocentrism is the only solution. The reason for both these opinions is because of what I said in the bulk of the post, i.e. that it’s a FaroeHebridesShetlandOrkneyIceland world.
i enjoyed reading this, though it’s more world-expanding than worldbuilding, since there aren’t really any new elements added, just a “what if this thing was bigger”
This is a good criticism. I should work on that. I will have to think about the qualitative differences caused greater scale and less isolation. I have a bunch of heating technologies I can add, e.g. walipini and indoor compost heating (Jean Pain’s technology). I should add rope-bridges canonically like Inca ones or Carrick-a-Rede.
north germanic people living on cold humid windswept islands, living in turf houses and eating nothing but fermented puffin and massacred dolphins sounds very dystopian, and i would hate to live there.
People always hate cold places. The same thing in the tropics would sound so nice. If it helps, imagine being indoors by the fire in your turf home, with a blanket wrapped around you, your feet warming by the fire, and the storyteller starting up.
If it helps, imagine being indoors by the fire in your turf home, with a blanket wrapped around you, your feet warming by the fire, and the storyteller starting up.
the cold weather is fine (occasionally), but can i at least have a vegetable please? I’m not going to eat rotten shark with a side of sheep yogurt
in seriousness, food wise they should have a lot of oats, barley and rye as staples, probably turnips/swedes, and kale. i get that there’s not going to be a lot of :im-vegan: s but they’re probably not going to rely 100% or even 60% on animal calories either
the word “vegetables” is in the top post
skirret (sium sisarum) is one of the more interesting ones.
Lazy bed cultivation is relevant.
Then you’ve all your sea-vegetables, edible wracks and kelps and whatnot. A rock off the shore of your inhabited island might look useless, but it’s actually productive, growing vegetables at a good pace –
