Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Page 420
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Michael Chesnutt
a prompt book, but maybe discarded it when the cycle had been per-
formed a sufficient number of times.33 Something similar is likely to
have obtained in the Faroes, with the proviso that a singer could not
lead the dance until he knew the text of a ballad by heart. This require-
ment, combined with the displacement of Faroese by Danish as a written
language,34 caused ballad manuscripts (not to mention their Icelandic
sources) to drop out of sight, only to re-emerge in the wake of the folk-
loristic fieldwork that commenced in the early nineteenth century.
The Icelandic rimur do not merely present us with an analogy to the
Faroese kvædi in terms of the mechanics of recording. In some cases
they were directly translated into Faroese. This is not surprising when
we consider the coincidence in taste displayed by the two genres, both
of which exploit the themes of the legendary sagas and romances at the
expense of other Old Norse-Icelandic material. It is even possible that
the rimur, which existed by the middle of the fourteenth century,35 stim-
ulated the growth of long heroic ballads in Faroese at the end of the
Middle Ages.36 It is only natural that the Faroese texts are usually in the
ordinary ballad stanza (metrical pattem 4a3b4c3b, also called Common
Metre in English) and lack the regular alliteration and obtrusively artifi-
cial vocabulary of the rimur (heiti and kenningar): the Icelandic genre
inherited its special technical features from the tradition of skaldic po-
etry, a tradition of which the Faroese had little knowledge and which
they could imitate only superficially. Nevertheless, most previous in-
vestigators have assigned the rimur a very marginal role in the evolu-
tion of Faroese folksong. Hammershaimb wrote in general terms of
‘perhaps isolated examples of Icelandic rimur’ as sources alongside the
Icelandic sagas and Norwegian ballads.37 Bjom K. Forolfsson, drawing
on unpublished work by Olafur Marteinsson, identified FK 111 Koraids
kvædi as a probable example of a debased rima, not identical with the
extant Icelandic Konråds rimur, but betraying its origins in the richness
33 DavlS Erlingsson, “Prose and Verse in Icelandic Legendary Fiction,” in The Heroic
Process (as n. 29) 371-93, here 384-85.
34 Cf. Matras (as n. 14) 22-23.
35 The earliest documented example is Olåfs rima Haraidssonar by Einarr Gilsson,
copied into Flateyjarbok about 1390.
36 See references in Mortan Nolsøe, “Some Problems conceming the Development of the
Faroese Heroic Ballad,” Jahrhuch fiir Volksliedforschung 17 (1972), 87-93, here 89 with
n. 10.
37 Færøsk Anthologi I (as n. 9) xlix: “måske enkelte islandske rimur.”