My Voyage to Fårö (a.k.a. Bergman Island)

I just got back from an almost six-week trip around Scandinavia. Though I was participating in a summer school in Viking studies, I was really drawn to Scandinavia not for its famed warriors of the ninth through eleventh centuries but for its incredible film artists of the twentieth century—Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Thomas Vinterberg, Lars von Trier (and many more I have yet to fully discover).

The program I was on, as luck would have it, included over a week-long stay on Gotland, a historic island off the east coast of Sweden that is annexed at its northern tip by Fårö. As seemingly off-the-beaten-track as it...