FIRST THERE ARE THE HUGE moss-green landscapes of the Faroe Islands, which are so strange and harshly beautiful that they stall the brain. Then there’s the cool, briny North Atlantic air, so clean it’s nearly nostril-stinging, and the gentle psychic vertigo induced by being in a place this remote, wild and, aside from the wind and calls of the sea birds, quiet.

Located midway between Iceland and Scotland, the Faroe Islands, a cluster of dramatic basalt crags soaring out of the sea, were created some 55 million years ago by volcanic eruptions and are a sort of spectacular Nordic version of Hawaii. Settled by Vikings during the ninth century, the Faroes were probably first visited around A.D. 565 by the Irish abbot monk St. Brendan, who referred to them as ‘‘the islands of the sheep and the paradise of the birds.’’ This description is still accurate, since there are twice as many sheep as people (population 48,300), and the bird life is as rich and varied as any place in the world.

The possibility one of these wild birds might end up on your dinner plate says a lot about what’s happening in the Faroes these days. One might assume that life would be drab and austere in a place that may sound almost ghoulishly isolated (like something out of ‘‘Babette’s Feast,’’ the film about the scrupulously pleasure-killing Lutheran religiosity of a remote Danish village in the 19th century) but the Faroes, which are a self-governing country within the Kingdom of Denmark, are instead surprisingly, un-self-consciously, lively — hip, even.

Image Quaint houses in Torshavn, the islands’ capital city. Credit... Laerke Posselt

Earlier this year, a Faroese restaurant, Koks, in Torshavn, the islands’ largest city, on the main island of Streymoy, won the prestigious 2014 Nordic Prize as the best restaurant in the gastronomically avant-garde Scandinavian countries. Its young chef, Poul Andrias Ziska, serves a seasonal dish of filet of gannet, a wild sea-diving, fish-eating bird that tastes like anchovies but resembles rare beef. Etika, another restaurant in the heart of Torshavn’s Old Town, where the roofs of the houses are covered with shaggy green sod, is regularly ranked as one of the world’s best sushi restaurants (no surprise, since the Faroes catch some of the world’s highest-quality seafood). And Gudrun & Gudrun, a Faroese knitwear label produced on the islands, is carried by the trend-setting Isetan department store in Tokyo.