lwood

This day's class was another model shawl, this one from the Faroe Islands, which sit exactly between Iceland, Scotland, and Norway.

So, obviously, it's now part of Denmark, except not really because the Danes are allowing the Faroese a lot of home rule. Also, they have their very own Disturbing Local Delicacy--except instead of air-dried, lye-soaked whitefish or shark buried for a season on a rocky beach before being hung to dry for another season or sheep organs boiled interminably in the stomach whereof, the Faroese have wind-dried lamb.

Not jerky as such--that implies having sliced meat into bits, soaking the bits in some useful cure, then hanging the bits. Noooo, them (and, to be fair, the Shelanders also), hung rather larger pieces up to dry in sheds.

We know this because during the Icelandic shawl class, I got this same to talk about weird food. Hákarl, as all men know, comes with hefty shots of Black Death, and really, with enough strong liquor, even rotted shark can be Not So Bad (dpaxson asserts that it's not so bad even before the brennivín comes around).

Marilyn van Keppel, who stepped off the plane onto the Faroe Islands her first time feeling she'd been there somehow before--and has eaten each of those delights listed above--turned down seconds on the wind-dried lamb.

But, as we discovered today, the Faroes are the real home of her heart.

Also, they are the home of something I, in my infinite something-or-other, have dubbed the Shawl of Existential Angst.

But wouldn't that make a good D&D item?

Whatever did a simple garter-stitch shawl do to earn such a daunting name? ( Come behind the cut and see. )( Social Whirlygigs )