Note 921 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

It is chiefly on islands of harsh climatic conditions, like Sakhalin, or of peculiarly restricted resources and area, like the Andaman, or of remote, side-tracked location, like Iceland, Sardinia and Cape Breton, that the stamp of the primitive or antiquated is strongest. Even when not apparent in race stock, owing to the ubiquitous colonization of maritime peoples, it marks the language and customs of even these late-coming occupants, because an island environment asserts always some power to isolate. This is due not only to the encircling moat of sea, but also to the restricted insular area, too small to attract to itself the great currents of human activity which infuse cosmopolitan ideas and innovations, and too poor to buy the material improvements which progress offers. If the tourist in Sicily finds the women of Taormina or Girgenti spinning with a hand spindle, and the express trains moving only twelve miles an hour, he can take these two facts as the product of a small, detached area, although this island lies at the crossroads of the Mediterranean. Corsica and Sardinia, lying off the main routes of travel in this basin, are two of the most primitive and isolated spots of Europe. Here the old wooden plow of Roman days is still in common use as it is in Crete, and feudal institutions of the Middle Ages still prevail to some extent921 ,—a fact which recalls the long survival of feudalism in Japan. The little Isle of Man, almost in sight of the English coast, has retained an old Norse form of government. Here survives the primitive custom of orally proclaiming every new law from the Tynwald Hill before it can take effect,922 and the other ancient usage of holding the court of justice on the same hill under the open sky. The Faroe Islands and Iceland are museums of Norse antiquities. The stamp of isolation and therefore conservatism is most marked in the remoter, northern islands. Surnames are rare in Iceland, and such as exist are mostly of foreign origin. In their place, Christian names followed by the patronymic prevail; but in the Faroes, these patronymics have in a great many cases become recognized as surnames. So again, while the Faroese women still use a rude spinning-wheel introduced from Scotland in 1671, in Iceland this spinning-wheel was still an innovation in 1800, and even to-day competes with spindles. Hand-querns for grinding wheat, stone hammers for pounding fish and roots, the wooden weighing-beam of the ancient Northmen, and quaint marriage customs give the final touch of aloofness and antiquity to life on these remote islands.923