Heðin Brú (1901–87) – pronounced (approximately) as Hay-in Broo – was a native of the tiny village of Skálavík, near the eastern extremity of Sandoy. As a boy he grew up in a community of peasant-fishermen whose way of life had changed little since the Faroe Islands were first settled in Viking times and Christianised in the eleventh century. The little cluster of grass-rooted farmhouses was surrounded by the cultivated infield – mostly under hay for winter fodder for the cows – and beyond its boundary wall lay the moorland pasture, the outfield, where twice a year all the men of the village would round up the sheep, first for shearing, then for the autumn slaughter. It was a community where money was seldom in use, and not easy to come by. However, a thrifty man would have plenty of fish and lamb carcasses hanging up in his slatted wind-house to dry; and the potatoes from his infield, milk from his cows, and sea-birds caught on the sea-cliffs would ensure that in most years he would not go hungry, even if he had to scrape and struggle to pay his taxes. Heðin Brú’s boyhood world, then, was one in which people were producing for their own consumption, instead of what other people might be prepared to give money for.
Then as a young man, Heðin Brú entered a quite different world, as a fisherman on one of the old wooden cutters. The fisherman’s year used to be divided into seven or eight months of the most harrowing activity, and then four or five months of idleness, when the weather made it impossible for the cutters to operate, though the open village boats might still carry on an inshore fishery on fine winter days, locating the tiny, but very rich fishing-banks with the help of bearings on the land, which had been passed down from father to son as a most precious fund of knowledge. Heðin Brú’s first novel, Lognbrá (Mirage), published in 1930, gave an account of the development of a boy in a Faroese village. Its sequel, Fastatøkur (Firm Grip), which appeared five years later, recounted the experiences of the hero as a young man on board the cutters.
Feðgar á Ferð (literally Father and Son on the Move), or The Old Man and His Sons, was first published in the original Faroese in 1940. In a light-hearted and witty way, Feðgar á Ferð illustrates the contrast in economic and moral values between the subsistence economy of the world’s past, and the market economy of the world’s future. The contrast is perhaps more telling in a Faroese setting than anywhere else in the world, but the theme is a universal one.
Extracted from translator John F. West’s introduction to the original edition.