Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Page 434
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Michael Chesnutt
5.
A was collected on SuSuroy from Peder Poulsen (1803-1867) of
Øravrk, and B was collected on Sandoy from Maren Danielsdatter
(1826-1912) of Skålavfk. Both were active tradition-bearers: Peder
Poulsen also dictated FK 71 Jatvards rima and FK 101 Trøllid i Aradal
to Hammershaimb, and in 1873 Maren Danielsdatter, who later con-
tributed half a dozen tales to Jakob Jakobsen’s Færøske folkesagn og
æventyr, dictated FK 122 Fru Dagmoy to the local schoolteacher Kri-
stian Joensen.62 Mortan Nolsøe reports the local tradition that Bevusar
tætt ir was ‘a gift to Maren Danielsdatter in her cradle’, and there can be
no doubt that she had Faroese folksong in her biood, for her patemal
grandfather was none other than Joen Danielsen, the ‘unusual man’
whom Forchhammer visited in 1821.63 According to Simon Simonsen
of Skarvanes on Sandoy, it was the grandfather who taught his grand-
daughter Bevusar tættir, which is quite credible considering that the
poem was part of his repertoire as inventoried five years before Maren
was bom (above, p. 408). Simon Simonsen also went on record as sus-
pecting that the poem was a family heirloom handed down by Clemen
Johannesen (ca. 1690-1748), grandfather of Forchhammer’s informant and
son of the crown tenant Johannes Pedersen at Kirkjubøur on Streymoy.
Sometime in the early eighteenth century Clemen married and removed
to Sandoy, the home of his matemal ancestors.64
Simon Simonsen’s notion of a poetic heirloom should not be rejected
out of hånd, but it does not take account of the possibility that Bevers
tættir made the passage between Sandoy and Streymoy more than once,
and that it was also transported from Sandoy to SuSuroy. Johannes Pe-
dersen’s wife and Clemen Johannesen’s mother was Rebekka, one of
the numerous children of the notoriously acquisitive Danish clergyman
62 Cf. FK VII 72, 81; Jakob Jakobsen (ed.), Færøske folkesagn og æventyr, Samfund til
udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur 27 (Copenhagen 1898-1901), 635-37, references
to Marjun 1 NlggjubuØ.
63 Joen’s son and Maren’s father was Daniel Joensen (1799-1886) who dictated a version
of FK 26 Finnur hin frtdi to Hammershaimb. On the same occasion her brother Joen
Danielsen the younger (1824-1903), who was also a well-known practitioner of traditional
medicine, dictated a version of FK 152 Sankta Niklas; Maren was seemingly not asked, or
not allowed, to perform.
64 See Nolsøe (as n. 51) 48, where the memorate of Maren Danielsdatter’s vøggugåva is
also reported.