The last posting to this little website discussed the importance of 1930s era travel artwork, which in a round-about way reminded me of the unsung hero of great Norse postage art, Anker Eli Petersen. The guy hails from the Faroes and was commissioned to adorn the official stamps there with Thor, Odin, Loki, Frejya, and other deities and various scenes from Norse mythology, which is pretty badass. Personally, I’d much rather have a letter show up in my mailbox affixed with a stamp illustrating the death of Balder than a graphic of an apple or fireworks or something.
The Faroes have a population of less than 50,000 people, and Petersen’s stamps have probably not been seen by very many people in person beyond the borders of the North Atlantic archipelago, but that doesn’t mean his efforts are any less worthy of glory and a mighty skål. He used to have his own website, which sadly seems to have been born under the sign of a bad norn because it no longer rides its electronic steed through the bottomless cesspool of this digital world. In lieu of that, here are a couple of online galleries that illustrate many of his works:
Germanic Mythology: Faroe Island Stamps Völuspá Series
Wikimedia: Stamps by Anker Eli Petersen
And since we’re on the topic of people from the Faroes, here’s a little something-something from some of Petersen’s fellow countrymen:
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