Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Page 410
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Michael Chesnutt
opening statement at face value. It would be a different matter if the
first line had read F'rødid er komid av Noregi, as is the case in FK 109
A, a version of Mirmants kvædi from the manuscript anthology com-
piled by Jens Christian Svabo in the early 1780s.4
It is nevertheless quite clear that the Icelandic affiliations of some
Faroese poetry are not just a matter of literary convention. Svabo began
his anthology with a fragmentary Faroese version of the late medieval
Icelandic religious poem Ljomur, about whose origins he wrote that it
was ‘a very old song, undoubtedly composed in Iceland or by an Icelan-
der’. In a later and more detailed discussion of the same poem he added
that it was ‘much older in the Faroese memory than the heroic ballads
or kvædir which that memory also preserves’ - a surprising statement
because it would seem to imply that the heroic ballads all postdate the
Reformation.5 But this was hardly what Svabo meant to say. In the pre-
face to his anthology he emphasises that some ballads are older and
others younger (the passage is at the same time a meta-commentary on
the opening stanza of Trøllini i Hornalondum):
It would be very difficult to determine how old these songs are. Certainly
they are not all equally old. A very doubtful Faroese tradition relates that a
large vellum manuscript came thither from Iceland, and that it was so big that
a horse could carry nothing else on the one side. It came from Frodarstejn, the
story adds, and this is where these ballads and rhymes were taken from.6
The leamed Rev. J. H. Schrøter on SuSuroy, who began collecting
Faroese ballads in 1818, perhaps had something similar in mind when
he drew up the long list of ‘ancient’ poems that was reproduced in the
pioneering edition of Sjurdar kvædi in 1822: alongside a group of six
consecutive titles he wrote the comment disse troes komme [sic] fra Is-
land (‘these are thought to come from Iceland’).7 However, the only
Icelandic source that Schrøter actually mentions by name is Bårdar
4 Chr. Matras (ed.), Svabos færøske visehaandskrifter, Samfund til udgivelse af gammel
nordisk litteratur 59 (Copenhagen 1937-39), 296, from MS GKS 2894 4to in the Royal
Library, Copenhagen (“Svabos Kvart”).
5 Second quotation here from my translation in FK VII 101. Cf. Svabos færøske vise-
haandskrifter, lxxii, 7; Jon Helgason, “Færøiske studier II. Ljomur på Færøiene,” Maal
og minne 1924, 37-48; FK 220.
6 My translation in FK VII96; cf. Svabos færøske visehaandskrifter, 4.
7 Royal Library, Copenhagen, MS UB Add. 170 8vo [1], ff. 29-30; “Fortegnelse paa de
Færoiske Qvæder som man vist veed ere Oldtids Værker,” printed in Kaj Larsen (ed.),