Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Blaðsíða 418
408
Michael Chesnutt
themes, but there is little or no evidence that they knew them. The
heroic genre in Faroese balladry was on Svabo’s testimony breathing its
last in the eighteenth century; by the middle of the nineteenth it was
certainly moribund on Streymoy, where the impact of Danish culture
was ubiquitous. Had Jon GuSmundsson tried his matrimonial luck
some thirty years earlier not on Streymoy but on the remoter island of
Sandoy,27 the outcome might have been quite different: at that very time
and on that very island Johannes demensen was engaged in the collec-
tion of ballads ‘as a service for the information of the Old Norse Soci-
ety’,28 and one of his sources was Joen Danielsen of Skålavik (Jogvan å
Oyri, 1758-1850) from whom he recorded FK 27 Tormadur skald in
1824. This item was, as it happens, only the tip of a folkloric iceberg:
when visited by the geologist J. G. Forchhammer just three years previ-
ously - to be quite precise on 9 July 1821 - Joen Danielsen had sung
parts of Sjurdar kvædi and the whole of FK 53 Grimur å Bretlandi, in
addition to supplying his visitor with a list of more than twenty other
poems that he knew. These ballads belonged overwhelmingly to the
older indigenous repertoire, including two items based on Old Norse-
Icelandic romances, disguised in Forchhammer’s orthography as Merre-
mans Queai (i.e. Mirmants kvædi) and Bernadis queai (i.e. Bevusar
tættir, to be discussed below). They were recognised as archaic, and were
indeed not wholly intelligible, in the informant’s immediate environ-
ment. The diarist repeats a telling comment by Joen Danielsen’s wife:
he was, she said, ein curidser Mann, er spricht eine Sprache die wir
kaum vers te hen.29
With these contrasting situations in mind we may sketch a relative
chronology for the Faroese ballad that is a little less confusing than
Svabo’s statement in the preface to his anthology (p. 400 above). A sub-
stantial number of poems draw upon Old Norse-Icelandic material that
27 As did his commercial accomplice James Savignac, who had also been involved in the
Icelandic escapade of 1809 but who, unlike Jon GuQmundsson, was already married: for
the unmasking of his bigamous ambitions see Heilesen (as n. 23) 44.
28 Clemensen’s ballad manuscripts of 1819 (“The Hentze Collection,” MS NKS 1954 4to)
and 1821-31 (“Sandoyarbok,” MS DFS 68) are described at FK VII99-101 and 88-92 re-
spectively. The quotation here translated is from his autobiography in Torshavn, Føroya
Landsbokasavn MS B I, cf. FK VII 89-90.
29 Ad. Clément (ed.), J. G. Forchhammer: Rejse til Færøerne. Dagbog 28. April til 21.
August 1821 (Copenhagen 1927), 47-48. On this report see also Mortan Nolsøe, “The
Heroic Ballad in Faroese Tradition,” in Bo Almqvist et al. (ed.), The Heroic Process.
Form, Function and Fantasy in Folk Epic (Dun Laoghaire 1987), 395-412, here 406-07.