5 ATLASES

History of the Faroe Islands in maps

The Faroe Islands as it appears in 5 interactive history atlases, from 790 to 2015: the Faroe Islands, Faroe Islands. Each era below lists who ruled the land and when control changed, linked to the dated map that shows it.

Open this map in the interactive atlas →

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Map of women’s rights in January 1972, showing the Faroe Islands — MAP OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN JANUARY 1972

These maps are reconstructed from published sources · Cliopatria v0.2.1 historical polities · Natural Earth 1:10m countries and physical geography · Natural Earth 1:10m administrative references (US states and Berlin) · Roe v. Wade (1973), opinion and footnotes

Source details

Cliopatria contributors / Seshat Global History Databank. CC BY 4.0 · Selected source records; component selection, documented unions and date proxies; projected for display.
Natural Earth. Public domain · Property selection and semantic ID normalization; full coordinates retained. An upstream Egyptian ring self-intersection is repaired with area change below 1e-9 square degrees; see natural-earth-admin0-review.json.
Natural Earth. Public domain
US Supreme Court; Cornell Legal Information Institute. Factual historical evidence; no source prose reproduced

Modern reference outlines locate the historical thematic data. The underlying rights/protest classifications remain unchanged.

Germany uses dated East/West source extents together with a Berlin reference; Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union use reviewed historical extents. For Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, the 1953–68 references are retained where later Cliopatria records show military occupation rather than treaty-party territory.

reconstruction: 1953–1968 · reconstruction: 1958–1989; 1953–1972 · reconstruction: Cartographic device · vector: 1949–1990 · vector: 1953–1968 · vector: 1963–1975

Layer records and reconstruction methods

What was the Faroe Islands before it was Faroe Islands? The sections below follow this land through every era covered by the Maps of History atlases: who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed. Each line links to the dated map. Modern borders serve as an approximation, as each atlas says on the map itself.

The Faroe Islands · Norse and Aztecs

The small, windswept Faroe Islands lie between Norway and Iceland. Norse farmers settled them in the ninth century, after Irish hermits had left. They became the first stepping stone on the sea road west: sailing directions for Greenland told mariners to pass south of them.