The Norse Treescaper sagas

Long before the turn of the century, the younger Treescaper spent a couple of summers sailing among the islands of the North Atlantic , two of which served to make Denmark the largest nation in the emerging European Community.

The answer to this geographical riddle can be found in words which used to be part of the ritual brainwashing of all good primary school children in England in the fifties:

“From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;

Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand:

From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,

They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.”

The fact that the message in the lyrics was lost on most of us post-war children is probably viewed by most of Treescaper Senior's generation as the root cause of the collapse of the British Empire and the rise of the dreaded Europe.

This particular schoolboy used to stop singing midway through the first line, mumbling the rest of the words distracted by the concept of Greenland's icy mountains. Ignoring the subjects of religion and empire for now, let's stick with geography which at that tender age was all the song meant to me. When I first saw these mountains a few years later, my life changed. I grew up. I lost my geographical virginity and set foot on what seemed like an alien continent, steeped in Viking history and almost completely unpolluted by the rest of Europe.

The Treescaper Greenland sagas are likely to figure in these pages from time to time given the influence those months had on my life, but for now I will turn to a smaller outpost of the 'Danish Empire', the Faroe Islands.

Half way between Scotland and Iceland, this archipelago populated by puffins and frequented by pilot whales left an even stronger mark on my life. A tiny community in European terms, made up of people who really understood what the word community actually meant. Over the course of five days in 1971, I learned to love this tiny land of contradictions and its people. A land that had more sheep than humans and yet, inexplicably, imported sheep's heads from Aberdeen as some kind of delicacy. A land where alcohol was illegal and yet where, after 8:00pm, a sober adult islander seemed a rare sight indeed. A land financially dependent on Denmark, yet one free from the influence of state television. An emerging nation with a distinctive flag and a new national newspaper reintroducing the old Norse language of their forebears, an act of intellectual aggression frowned on by the Danish government. Above all a land where the young people of my age looked to university in the bright lights of the Danish cities simply as an educational diversion in their island existence rather than the start of some longer term migration.

Thirty six years later, much has changed and yet nothing has changed. A friendship forged in those five days all those years ago resulted in an e-mail received last night containing a link to an Australian broadcasting company's website showing a documentary program about the islands.

Watch it, learn from it, understand why I'm an active supporter of Greenpeace and yet am proud to have eaten whale meat, but above all realise that there's more to life than the rut you and I are both in!