The Old Man and His Sons

The old fisherman Ketil, of the self-sufficient traditional generation, gets carried away at a whale auction and buys more meat than he can pay for, and the debt sends him and his wife back to the hard old ways to make it good, against the grain of a Faroe Islands sliding into a modern money economy. Heðin Brú roots it in the real islands: the turf-roofed village, the fjord and the whale drive on its shore, the fishing boats, and the mountain outfield of the old subsistence life.

Ketil

The village

Chapter 1

In the small village of turf-roofed houses, the old fisherman Ketil belongs to a generation that still lives by its own hands, growing, fishing and gathering what it needs. His stubborn, dignified attachment to the old self-sufficient ways is the ground of the whole book's gentle comedy of a world in transition.

Chapter 1

inspired by Ketil and his wife live in a turf-roofed house in a small Faroese village; the village is invented and sited in the real islands, whose settlements the book portrays.

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